Interview: Tom Humphries talks to Kevin Kilbane about being a hate figure at Sunderland, his move to Everton and why he has nothing to fear from Damien Duff.

Today he'll stand in the line and that old soldier's song will seduce him, the beloved green jersey will swaddle him and time will run backwards till he feels like he did as a kid when, well, when Val Doonican sang or Dev peering down from the wall, caught his eye. He'll feel like an Irishman from Preston. An Irishman at home.

His dad, Farrell, left home when he was young. He was reared on Achill Island where if you throw a stone through the air several people called Kilbane will duck. Hard times tossed Farrell into the air and he landed in the northwest of England to a traditional vocation. He worked the roads.

It wasn't all tar and tea-breaks either. In the Irish club in Preston, Farrell met Theresa Smith. She'd got there via Liverpool and via Longford. In short she'd got there via a long story. They met, they danced, they embraced every cliché that two emigrants can love.

Kevin Kilbane talks about home and realises if he gathers every note of traditionalism his parents struck he'd have an Irish symphony. Mass. Potatoes. Dev. The Pope. Morals. Music. Relatives. A granny from Cork. Full house.

You have to know these things. You have to know those emblems to understand. The Sacred Heart stuck to the wall. Kevin Barry. More potatoes. Sure you're a growing boy. . . Everywhere he has gone in English football he's felt the gentle ribbing. Heh, heh. Got on board with the Oirish then? One Guinness too many and you woke up with a brogue. And he thinks, if he could bring them to his mam and dad's house they'd understand which nation had dominion over those few square feet of Preston! You opened the front door and inside it was forty shades of green and the Mountains of Mourne were sweeping down to the sea.

There are old tales but they explain him. How Sam Allardyce called him in one day when he was a lad at Preston and, swollen with avuncular pride, Sam told him he'd been called up for an England youth team. Kilbane is sufficiently sweet and well-mannered a man as to have earned the tribute from Niall Quinn that he was the sort of person he'd like his daughter to marry. So Kilbane apologised and explained he was Irish. Allardyce detumesced. Irish! Irish. Stuttgart, 1988, is an experience he shared with the rest of us, gloriously, launching himself almost through the ceiling of his house when Ray Houghton made his deposit in the English net.

Today it begins again for the 26-year-old. Big game, big crowd, big feelings. The stuff he dreamed of long before his friends, all with Irish names, began going to Deepdale as kids, longer still before some of them got picked for trials and Youth Training Schemes. Ah, he dreamed about this stuff, these days when he was in primary and his mam, Theresa, was the dinner lady and his dad was out breathing dust and mixing concrete till his skin was tan and his boots had more cement than leather in them.

He had it all in his head still when he broke into the Preston first team at 18, when he won a division three medal in his first season and was tagged by the Argus as Preston's Teenage Wonderkid. His hunch-shouldered, helter-skelter, wing-skimming style got him written up in the London Independent as the new Chris Waddle. They meant it kindly too.

Years on and his dreams are still green but he's come to the middle ages of his career. No more learning curve, no more rise. No more allowance for youth. He plays today and will think about going home tomorrow when he figures out where home is. It's been that kind of week.

"I didn't know what was happening," he says, shaking his head as if he's just come in having seen a tornado coming down the street. "You're not in control of things at a time like this."

Last Monday when transfer deadline time was 90 minutes away and he'd tired of checking the teletext to see who was going where, he got a call. Remember. Half-past three. Go to the Sunderland training ground, said the voice at the other end of the phone, go and wait for the faxes to come through.

He hopped into the car and drove from Durham. By five o' clock he was an Everton player. By five he'd vaulted out of Division One and back into the Premiership. On Tuesday morning he was in Liverpool. He did some press, some dotting of the i's and crossing of the fingers and hopped on a plane to Dublin. Kevin Kilbane of Everton.

He knows this is it. Like the relationship that has to work before his looks are lost. The hedge bet against bankruptcy. He's not a wonderkid anymore. He transferred for a million pounds which is real value in today's market but less than he went for in his previous two moves. At Preston and at West Bromwich Albion he was almost weightless, floating onwards and upwards. He moved to Sunderland in December 1999 just in time to catch all the gravity he'd missed out on.

"Sunderland. Yeah, it affected me," he says when you ask about that period when he became one of the most unlikely hate figures in football. Of all the ego-demented, overpaid, lager-swilling, hair-preening, screw-ups in the Premiership parade, poor Kevin Kilbane was selected for the Sunderland stockades.

He knows why. He can say bits of it. He replaced crowd favourite Allan Johnson. Then when he played it was instead of crowd favourite Julio Arca. Crowds don't notice wingers who defend and track back on the bad days. They like a guy who looks good going downhill on a bike. They like a winger who'll get jiggy when you're two up and at home and it isn't raining.

Kilbane wasn't their man. He didn't hide on the days when it was going badly. He kept leaving his guts out there and it was ugly. Besides . . .

"I wasn't very good for the first six months. I suppose that didn't help. A bad start. I'd made a bigger leap than I thought. It was nearly two years ago when I was getting the worst of it. I'd be getting home and Laura would see me and she could see I'd been upset and she'd be the same. It was affecting people around me. "

On it went. Just the mindless abuse of the football ground really but when it's directed at you there's no worse place to be than loitering on the wings waiting for the ball to spill to you.

He thought it was bad enough as a kid when he'd go to play Millwall at the Den and it would start. He was wearing a Preston jersey and he expected it. But men with beer guts and the same Sunderland jersey standing up and calling him a disgrace before they got going on the really insulting stuff? Eventually, he thought he'd got to the stage where it bounced off him like raindrops.

"I believe I was strong enough to let it brush off and get on with it. I really enjoyed the last year or so there and looking back I wouldn't change any of it. I've learned from it. I wouldn't change that whole experience. You learn from the mistakes you make."

Most specifically he reckons he learned from the mistake he made in pre-season in Belgium last year. Meaningless friendly. World Cup buzz still in his blood. The names of the players are called out on the PA. Kevin Kilbane. Booooo.

They've followed him to Belgium to remind him that his name is Kevin Kilbane Boooo. Kevin Kilbane Yoowanka.

They've followed him to Belgium and they follow him through the game. Sunderland are playing badly, perhaps abysmally, this is after all pre-season for the season from hell. Every touch of Kilbane's draws the howls from the beery terraces.

Finally he flips them the finger. Something snaps and some childish reflex springloads the right muscles and swoosh! It's done. The fans are swooning in shock. Oh my Mr D'arcy, I may need to lie down. Next morning the papers are telling him he has played his last game for Sunderland.

And then football being what it is, Sunderland spend the next season being pulled towards the plug hole and Kilbane spends the same season trying to rescue them. Things change. In struggle they saw the part of him managers have been seeing for years. Kilbane is generous and gracious about it all.

"It was wrong for me to do what I did in Belgium. Silly. I let myself down. It wasn't me. I shoudn't have done it. It turned around though and a lot of credit should go to the Sunderland supporters. For the first few games I was booed when I got back in after that but they gave me a second chance and after that they were good to me, till the end.

"To be honest Belgium was just one of those things. Just happened. We weren't playing well. I was getting stick. I was getting abuse. It's over with now. People who were giving me abuse have come to me and shaken my hand and said they admired me for taking it, on the other hand I'm sure there'll be supporters there now who still don't like me."

So he leaves them behind now and begins the key stretch of his career. It's hard to avoid the thought that if he had wanted to choose a next step in life he couldn't have chosen a more sensible one.

David Moyes isn't merely a smart young manager, he's a former team-mate, former coach, a friend and an influence. He knows Kilbane and what he wants from him. Kilbane knows Moyes and what he wants from Everton.

"The big influences on my career would be, David Moyes, Steve Harrison (his father-in-law) and Sam Allardyce. People who told you how to conduct yourself off the pitch . David Moyes was always good to me. He's gone onto be a great manager. He was the captain of the club at Preston when I went there first. He'd always comes down and speaks to the young YTS guys. That meant a lot to us and it told me something about him. We played together in my first season. He was an experienced pro then and captain of the team. He knows everything about me. That was it, what swung it."

That and the impression of stability that runs through Everton these days. He admits nobody could have predicted four years ago that Sunderland would disappear down a large pothole and that conceivably Everton could do the same but he doubts it.

He estimates that he is going to a club and a manager which will have a specific need for him and will have the means to express that need. These next few years will be the ones which will define his career.

"I'd love to play at Everton for years to come. Just want to find my feet and enjoy it. I believe I can be a success there. With the right backing and coaching that I'll get from David, things can go well for me there."

As a kid up the road in Preston during the 1980s he watched Everton blossom into one of the great sides in Europe. The impression which football makes on you at that age never quite disappears. He expects as much from Everton as they expect from him.

"Everton is a massive club. In the '80s they were huge, winning everything. So the expectations are very high. I just want to enjoy playing under good management and coaching staff. I'm looking forward to playing with the players too. The players at Everton deserve a lot of credit for the way the club has turned around. Sometimes when a club goes near the edge it's hard to pull back. "

What he puts on the table now is his personality. His honesty and his maturity.

"I've grown up in the last few years. I'm stronger mentally. Stronger physically. I don't want to say that I'm this or I'm that but I feel stronger mentally. I feel like I can handle whatever is thrown. "

His experiences for Ireland have framed that growth to an extent. They run from that debut day in Reyjkavik when Larus Sigurdsson flattened him everytime he ventured near the ball, to Saipan and to the penalties in Suwon, onwards to Moscow a year ago and the Swiss at Lansdowne road a little while later.

"I don't know that anyone thought after the Swiss game it was all over. There was a strange atmosphere for those two games. Very strange. Ultimately it was the end of Mick. It all happens so quick. Brian (Kerr) has come in. You're a player. You get picked, you come in, you see new things. That's how it's turned out."

Through it all he has given the same continuity to the Irish squad as his involvement with Ireland has given him. Through the bad days at Sunderland Ireland never stopped calling. Through the turmoil with Ireland, he never stopped getting picked. Three years of starts in competitive games. These in a squad whose star is £17 million worth of left winger.

"I don't ask questions about it," he laughs "I'm always thrilled to just be in the squad. I look at Damien (Duff) and I can see 17 million worth there. I don't come to Ireland games expecting to be picked. It's always a bonus, always a thrill. I can't worry. It's up to the manager."

Spoken like a man who has spent too much time worrying about the wrong things, a man beginning to expect that it will all work out in the end anyway.