Having been narrowly spared a trip there with St Patrick's Athletic a couple of months back, it seems that Eircom League fans will get their day in the Four Courts this week as Longford Town attempt to squeeze some cash out of Bohemians for the loss of their manager and seek a ban on the manager taking charge for this weekend's FAI Cup tie.

The way the whole affair is unfolding may be a sad end to what has been the league's most endearing recent fairytale. For the best part of three years Stephen Kenny and the directors at Flancare Park were, in public at least, something of a mutual admiration society.

Now club officials appear genuinely torn between burying the bad feeling they say has been prompted by the manner of their manager's departure and pushing the whole thing as far as they can in order to increase his discomfort ahead of Saturday's eagerly-awaited FAI Cup game.

Those who support Kenny privately say that such was the extent of his contribution to the club prior to the arrival of the current board that if the entire saga does end up being played out in front of a High Court judge there will, at the very least, be red faces amongst both parties.

Longford, though, remain fairly determined to extract something more than a cheerio from the situation. They say they gave Kenny a contract - the terms of which they say had been agreed - to sign some time ago. Until last Friday afternoon, it is insisted, they still expected him to get around to it at some point, and they reckon they have a legal agreement worth fighting over.

Bohemians, needless to say, strongly disagree. As usual, the upshot is that the lawyers look set to do better out of the case than either of the clubs concerned.

At yesterday's press conference to unveil Kenny as the successor to Pete Mahon, Bohemians' club officials made it clear early on that they wouldn't be answering any questions regarding the contractual dispute.

Their argument was that the matter was sub judice - this despite the fact that nobody at Dalymount could say with any certainty at that point whether Longford were proceeding with the case or not.

If Kenny's former club may end up having some questions to answer, though, his new one's version of events certainly seems to require some clarification. The bones of their argument, after all, is that they were free to approach Kenny as he had no contract. They claim that they only decided to appoint him on Sunday after having actually met with him for the first time over the weekend.

Quite how they knew that Kenny didn't have a contract remains a mystery and when asked about this yesterday a club official didn't elaborate.

Bohemians insist that they tried to reach Longford chairman Adrian Duncan on Thursday evening and through the early part of Friday at home, his office and on his mobile and Duncan, to be fair, is not always the easiest man to reach.

But you would like to think that Kenny might have managed it before, as Duncan maintains happened, he was asked for his reaction to the defection by a reporter from RT╔.

Earlier on Friday afternoon the vice chairman of the club, Jim Hanley, had also been asked about what was then growing speculation regarding the position of the club's manager. "He'd never leave us!" he declared confidently.

Even if one side or the other actually manages to emerge with a clean-cut legal victory it seems there will be enough mud flung to ensure that the league looks, yet again, like an ass for the way in which clubs conduct business.

Asked whether Bohemians might agree that Longford are due some settlement even on moral grounds, one of the club's officials said yesterday that they do not feel the issue should arise. From one of the biggest clubs in the country, this is sad.

For his part, Kenny insists that he will have nothing to be ashamed of if and when he returns to Longford this weekend. Still, he may understand if many neutrals root for his former club, before moving on to wish him the best for the future.

emalone@irish-times.ie