FIRST you take the A23 out of Brighton and head for Pyecombe. Then onto the M23 for a while before holding your breath and diving into the maelstrom of the M25, the eternally daisychained ring-road that surrounds London like a boa constrictor. Bail out three-quarters of an hour later when you get to junction 16 and follow the signs for the M40. If the traffic gods are on your side, you'll make Birmingham in a shade under two hours. Stock up on supplies just in case. When you're through Birmingham, head up, ever on up the M6 for another 100 miles. Past the services and Little Chefs, through the Travelodges and tolls until you reach junction 31 and the sign for Preston. Another 20 minutes and you'll be there. You'll be done in but you'll be there.

Welcome to the best day so far of Wayne Henderson's 2007. On Tuesday, he and the rest of the Brighton squad were returning to the club from a team day out when Dean White, the assistant manager, told him he should get to the training ground because something was happening. He didn't need to be told what it was and he definitely didn't need to be told twice. The transfer request he'd put in the previous day had borne fruit and now it was just a matter of him, his agent and Preston's financial and medical people beating the next day's deadline clock before his time on England's south coast was done.

They did and, by tea-time on Wednesday, it was. He made damn sure it was. "I couldn't get on the motorway quick enough, " he says.

If that sounds like he detests the place, he doesn't mean it to. It was a club he liked with players and staff he'll keep in touch with.

He always did his damndest for them in the year and a bit he was there. And for all that it turned sour in the end, they did okay out of him too - bought from Aston Villa for £20,000, sold for £150,000 with the possibility of another £100,000 in the pipeline. Real money for a club with an average attendance of below 7,000.

But it had to end. Or rather, he had to end it. Life at Brighton had become unbearable. He was competing for a place in the team against a Dutch goalkeeper called Michel Kuipers but he never felt he was in a fair fight. Not getting into the side he could just about handle. Not getting in because his face didn't fit tore him to bits.

"The reason I couldn't get in the team had nothing to do with football and in the end that's why I had to put in the transfer request. I was fighting a battle that I was never ever going to win with the other goalkeeper and if it had just been that I wasn't as good as him, then I wouldn't have minded. But that wasn't it. I was a much better goalkeeper than what he was. It was just that he had better relationships with people who were high up in the club, who should not have been a factor but who were a factor.

"By last Monday, I'd just had enough of it all to be honest. I hadn't played in the last three games and for me to be sat on the bench at a League One club after playing in a European Championship qualifier for Ireland just didn't make sense to me. So I just told the manager that I didn't respect any of the decisions that he made or the reasons that he'd given me for not playing and so that was that. I'd had enough. I knew I was leaving it late with it being Monday and the window closing on Wednesday but the time had come and I just told him I'd had enough of everything at the club. And to be fair, he agreed with me and they accepted the request fairly quickly."

The other factor was the abuse he took when he did get on the pitch. He'd let in the odd howler in his time there - one at Bournemouth on New Year's Day was especially bone-shivering - but no more and no worse than many with reputations far bigger than his. A section of the Brighton crowd habitually let him have it, though. Maybe their £23.50 a week entitled them to roar loud and lairy and maybe it didn't but when they did it in a small stadium in the midst of a smaller crowd, it never went unheard. Or unfelt.

"The worst thing about it was that at the Withdean you can hear everything because for one thing there's only 5,000 fans there and for another there's no atmosphere in the place whatsoever. But I don't want to make it more than it was - you get it at every ground in every country in the world. It was just bad for me that I was up against a goalkeeper who'd been at the club for six or seven years and so every miskick I had brought a reaction from the crowd. And you could hear every word of it. It never had any effect on how I played or on my concentration during games but it just wasn't nice to deal with."

When he decided time was up on Monday, it was his second time asking to leave. The first came in almost comical circumstances last September when, after spending the weekend in Stuttgart as Shay Given's understudy for the Germany match, he returned to find Kuipers in situ for Brighton's next game.

"There's a full League One programme on an international weekend and Brighton's game the day I was in Germany was against Bristol City. They actually got beat 1-0 but when I got back, the manager told me I wasn't going back into the side. His exact words were, 'You're a victim of your own success'. I thought he was joking but he wasn't. For that to be used as a reason to keep me out of the team was? well, it was a weird one, let's just leave it at that.

"It just indicated what I was up against at the club. It was easier for the manager at the time to put the other fella in because he was the fans' favourite. He was a new manager at the time, Dean Wilkins, and that was the decision he took but he found out my view of it quick enough. I was glad then that the other goalkeeper didn't do well when he got his chance and I was back in pretty quickly. But when it happened again for similar reasons, I'd just had enough."

Stuttgart was his first time being away with the senior squad.

A long-pencilled-in name on underage teamsheets, coming on in the second half of the Sweden game seven months previously had made him one of a small band of Irish players to be capped at every level all the way up. It's not hard to see that becoming a full international would make him even more protective of his day-today status at club level.

"Oh, definitely. The one thing about playing for Ireland is that your loyalty will never be questioned. To get into the squad and do well gives you every hope in the world that you'll stay involved and won't be forgotten about. And you'll do everything to make sure you give yourself the best chance.

Playing well for Brighton was okay like that but I have to start working my way back up to the Premiership which is a level I'm confident enough to think I can play at."

And why not? This, after all, is a player who was at his lowest point possible less than three years ago. Aston Villa sent him on loan to Tamworth for a month in March 2004 and the three matches he played there woke him up like a defibrillator. It was about as far off Broadway as it was possible to slide, a miserable time that he resolved there and then never to revisit. Further loan spells to Notts County and Wycombe came to nothing before he was sent to Brighton in late 2005.

Imagine. Right around the time he was pitching up nervous and even a little dispirited at his fifth club in 18 months, Ireland were losing to France at Lansdowne Road and the Irish manager was walking a high wire with no net.

Within a couple of months, Brian Kerr was gone. Within a couple more, Wayne Henderson was a senior international. He knows well that he owes that fact to the crossing of paths between him, Steve Staunton and Kevin MacDonald at Aston Villa.

"I had a great relationship with Stan when he was at Villa. We got along in the first place because of the Irish connection but apart from that it was a big deal for someone like me to be near someone like him who was a legend and had been for years. And Kevin was one of the people who'd had a big influence on me. He'd never spare you. He pushed me so hard back in those days and to be honest, I even thought at times that he was pushing me too hard. But he knew what he was doing. When I heard Stan got the Irish job then with Kevin coming along too, I was delighted because I knew that they wouldn't forget about me."

Well, they didn't and Wednesday in San Marino will almost certainly see him earn his fourth cap.

With a new club, with Paddy Kenny out of the picture for the foreseeable and with Shay Given a full seven years older than him and far from indestructible, Henderson can finally seen a chink of light piercing the clouds.

Not bad going for someone who started the week as a disgruntled substitute goalkeeper in the bottom half of League One. Not bad going at all.