CHARLES VAN COMMENEE should not despair if he forgets his bearings this weekend and starts delivering his team talk in Dutch to his British athletes. One of them will be able to tell the rest what he is saying.

Not that Van Commenee, the new head coach of UK Athletics, has an idea that his young star of the 5,000m at the European team championships has a connection with the Netherlands.

“I should probably tell him that I lived in Holland,” says Laura Kenney. “We did have Dutch lessons but, when you tried to speak to people in Dutch, they want to practise their English. I might understand a few things.”

This is a big weekend in Lieria, Portugal, for both Van Commenee and Kenney. The coach is in charge of his team for the first time at an important outdoor track event, formerly the European Cup, while his 23-year-old distance runner is making her senior British track debut late this afternoon at a time when points might be crucial in the two-day competition.

Her race is the last individual women’s track event and she cannot wait — for several reasons.

As part of athletics’ attempt to spice up its product, the longer races will be using what is known as The Devil Takes The Hindmost rule. On chosen laps, the last runner will be removed from the field to add drama and keep up the pace.

Kenney is not so sure. “It is exciting to be picked, but it will be a different kind of race. Sometimes this race can be quite tactical. If an athlete is on for a personal best, they might not want to stop. They will have to stop but I will have to make sure it is not me getting into one of those positions.”

An athlete for 10 years, Kenney is yet another of the growing crop of outstanding female distance runners heading towards London 2012. But unlike most of them, her target is not solely the Olympics.

She has switched allegiances to run for Scotland instead of England and by 2014 could be among the favourites at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. “I ran for England a couple of years ago in cross country. But I have quite a strong Scottish background and when the world cross country was in Edinburgh last year I had been approached about changing. It made sense. With the Commonwealths coming to Glasgow, it is a good time. I have quite a lot of Scottish roots.”

Not since the glory days of Liz McColgan, the 1991 world 10,000m champion and former London Marathon winner, and Yvonne Murray, the 1994 Commonwealth 10,000m champion, has Scotland had a distance woman to mix with the best on the track. Kenney has already begun gaining tips. “Years ago I went to the Ekiden Relays in Japan, Liz McColgan was the team manager and I chatted to her a bit about her marathons,” adds the Blackpool-born athlete who is now based at Loughborough where she trains at the university.

Her first taste of running came from her father, Paul, an impressive 2:17 marathoner who finished second to Steve Ovett as a youngster in the national cross country. He advised her to join their local club, Royal Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham. Then, a decade ago, her father’s job with Marks & Spencer took the family to the Netherlands, where he managed the company’s stores in The Hague and Amsterdam.

“He told me, ‘You might be good at running, go down to the track and have a try,” she says. “In Holland, we used to do sprinting one week and distance. When we came back, I trained a bit harder and it has taken off since.” And how.

In 2007 she won gold in the 5,000m at the European under-23 championships in Debrecen, Hungary, and last December she was in the British team that won silver at the European cross country championships in Brussels.

Now she faces the biggest individual test of her career over a distance Paula Radcliffe might have been running had she been fit.

“They are big shoes to fill,” Kenney says. “Paula is an inspiration for female running: how hard she trains and the successes that she has. I see her in Loughborough and she always has a little chat.”

Kenney divides her time between running and working in the department of a flooring company in Loughborough. When she arrived at Heathrow on Thursday, it was the first time she had met Van Commenee and been in the same team as Christine Ohuruogu, Britain’s 400m Olympic champion, who runs the 200m and 400m relay today.

“At first you think, ‘That is the Olympic champion’,” she says. “But they are just normal people. You think. ‘If I train hard, I can try to be like them’. I spoke to her. She was really nice. I am not sure she knew my name.”

Ohuruogu might by 6.30pm today but, whatever the outcome, Kenney’s career is in no rush.

“I would love to make London 2012,” she says. “I want to try to qualify for the 5,000m at the world championships but I am looking at this year as a stepping stone to next, when it’s Commonwealth year (in Delhi). Hopefully I can qualify for Scotland.”