Like last Saturday. Despite growing up at Manchester United, despite coming back to Old Trafford after a season on loan at Brighton in which he won two player-of-the-year awards, despite spending last season holding down the right-back spot at a decentsized club like West Brom, despite all that . . . not to mention his five Ireland caps . . .last Saturday against Tottenham was his first time kicking a ball in the Premier League.

It was also his first time keeping a clean sheet in a Premier League game, his first time being man-of-the-match there and his first time putting no less a light than Dimitar Berbatov in his pocket, causing the louche Bulgarian wizard to be substituted with 15 minutes remaining. Not a bad way to clear your throat and announce your arrival.

"Getting that clean sheet against Spurs was as satisfying for a defender as Michael Chopra's goal was to him on Saturday, " he says. "We have to set our stall out to be really hard to break down and we'll always get stuck in. It was enjoyable playing against some clever players on Saturday and preventing them from scoring."

There are miles to go before they sleep. Of course there are. But when his manager said on Monday that good characters would find nothing in the Premier League to be scared of or be nervous about, it was displays like McShane's and his centre-half partner Nyron Nosworthy's he was referring to. May is a long time away but Sunderland got the start they wanted and, you'd have to suspect, in just the manner Roy Keane wanted too.

He might just as easily have been talking about McShane's career path rather than the Tottenham game on Monday. Keane saw enough bling-laden teenagers hanging around United's Carrington training facility down the years to know how easy it would have been for McShane to bank a few years of cash, picking up the odd Carling Cup game and European qualifier here and there. Not many people walk into Alex Ferguson's office and calmly tell him they feel they'd be better off playing somewhere else where they can get a run of games. It's not hard to see how that would have floated Keane's boat.

"It was a matter of getting myself out into the football world and taking it from there, " says McShane. "To me, there was more chance of me picking up things about the game if I was playing week in, week out. I'd seen a lot of lads come back to United from being on loan and sit in the reserves and there was just no point in it. The season at Brighton was great for me and the season at West Brom was better again.

And now the Sunderland move has me in the Premiership which is where everybody wants to be. The thing all along was that I just wanted to get out and play, to prove myself and make a name for myself.

I think I've done that a little bit now. There's still a long, long way to go but this is the next step and I feel it's there for me now.

"Hopefully I can keep my place in the team, test myself and see what I'm made of. You always want to play against the best. And I think the way I've gone about it over the past few years will stand to me. I think leaving United has stood to me because I've made progress that I don't think I would have if I'd stayed. It's been a rollercoaster since then but I think what I've learned along the way is that the harder you work for it, the more you appreciate it. It definitely makes you hungrier and makes you want to go out there and make a point every time you play. I've worked very hard to get here, to make it to the Premiership and I'm not going to let it slip through my fingers now. This is just the start of it."

At West Brom, he ended up spending the season at right-back. It isn't a position he particularly has the speed for but he improvised through canny positioning and hefty early tackling. Anyone who saw them play last year could see that they weren't made of the stuff to go up, even though the list of players they could put down on club-headed notepaper was a fair-tomiddling one. It was a team made up of Premiership hadbeens like John Hartson and Chris Perry and the odd upand-comer like McShane and Paul Robinson. That they were beaten by Derby in the play-off final was almost a relief in the end, for few if any thought they'd have it in them to stay up.

McShane didn't have much of a game that day as it happens, Stephen Pearson nipping in in front of him to score the only goal of the game as he went to cut out a Giles Barnes cross, and the board going up for his substitution soon after as West Brom chased an equaliser. Still, it had been a decent season for him all in all.

He had found his feet and eased into the rhythms of being a professional. And when the end of the season came and everyone who'd ever worn a green jersey was linked with Sunderland, he knew there was only one place he wanted to be come August.

Like everybody else in the Championship, he's marvelled at Sunderland's post-Christmas run. He wanted to be part of what came next.

"Because Sunderland had such a bad start, " he says, "I think not too many people took any notice of them until it was nearly too late. We all thought that after their start they were going to struggle so you didn't really worry about them. Then they started to sneakily come up the table without anybody really noticing, even though they were going up from the bottom half to mid-table and on up. By the time we played them in the Hawthorns, you could see why they were getting gradually better. They were so solid and organised and welldrilled. To be honest, I thought we played the better football that day but by then, you could see that Sunderland knew how to win games and that's what gets you through a season."

The transfer took a while to iron free of kinks but they got there in the end, just in time for the pre-season trip to Dublin, Cork and Galway a few weeks back. He'll be in Dublin again this evening, clocking in for duty before he and the rest of Steve Staunton's squad head off to Aarhus in Denmark for Wednesday's friendly. It's another reminder of the velocity of his ascent that this time last year, he'd never even been named in a squad. Now, he and Richard Dunne pretty much have the centre of defence sown up for as long as they want it. So the big question obviously is, Paul, have you stopped hurtling into people in training? "Ha, ha. No. I think I'll always do that. That's just natural in me. I think they're used to me at this stage."

To explain. In McShane's very first Irish session under Kevin MacDonald, he is said to have absolutely emptied two of the more senior players with his first couple of tackles.

It apparently took John O'Shea's quick intervention at one stage to stop war breaking out, his former United training partner explaining that this was who McShane was and this was how he played. Anybody doubting the fact got their proof when, at half-time in his debut against the Czech Republic, he bawled the dressing-room out of it because he felt they were overly satisfied with coming in at 0-0.

He went on to take man-ofthe-match that night as well.

Like the man said, players with character have nothing to be nervous of.