SOCCER/World Cup 2006 qualifying: Emmet Malone sees Robbie Keane handling the media with the kind of touch he reserves for goalkeepers.
Two in four would not be a surprising statistic for Robbie Keane if it referred to goals in games, but as he wanders into the room for his second press conference in less than a week, there's a distinct feeling that the 24-year-old striker from Tallaght would prefer to be confronting a goalkeeping colleague rather than the media scrum.
Keane is refusing to let the speculation surrounding his future distract him and he does a decent job of making the frenzied "come and get me" speculation that followed his praise for new Celtic boss Gordon Strachan in Glasgow on Sunday night seem a little ridiculous.
However, despite the fact a new contract has been on the table since last summer, Keane is still refusing to nail his colours to the Spurs mast as he said: "I said I would wait. It's something I've not thought about, and I'm not thinking about now because my focus is on these two games at the moment. It's there and we will see what happens.
"But just to clear things up, regardless of what people say about me and the manager (Martin Jol), we are grand. We get on very well."
Regarding the matter at hand, he knows just what is required. It's run of the mill stuff, but the message is that Ireland, having played well but only to be a little unlucky in Tel Aviv, are confident they can do better and win in Dublin.
Nuff said? It's professionalism itself and Brian Kerr is just a couple of feet away looking on approvingly as one of the youth players he used to send out to learn the ropes with the media while at underage Uefa tournaments gets through a session of gentle questioning without ever having to switch off the auto pilot.
On the pitch, needless to say, it's different for the Dubliner whose three goals in the home wins over Cyprus and the Faroe Islands provided the foundation for Ireland's currently strong position in Group Four.
In Tel Aviv, though, he must have been acutely frustrated by the Irish side's apparent inability to convert their superiority on the night into anything approaching a steady supply of goal-scoring chances or, by a fairly logical extension, victory.
"Yeah," he concedes, "the problem over there was mainly that we didn't create as many chances as we would have liked. But you can't get too hung up about it. It didn't happen for us, that's just the way the game panned out.
"Hopefully, this will be different. They'll be hard to beat; we know that from the way they played against us and from their other results in the group so far. But once we're out there, the important thing is to play our normal game. We've been playing much the same way in all the games so far and we've been getting the results. We won't be doing anything too different this time, nothing stupid. It's about winning over 90 minutes so we'll be patient, we'll do what we have to do."
It's put to him that perhaps Ireland's problem in the first game was that the goal, scored by Clinton Morrison when there were just four minutes on the clock, actually came too early. He simply shrugs at the suggestion and observes that they are neither the first team to blow an important lead nor, in the wake of the Champions League, are they the worst offenders.
Still, an early lead tomorrow, one suspects, would be a decisive one even if Keane avoids any presumptions about outcome. "Look, they're up there (in the table) for a reason so we're not expecting it it to be easy, but we're still looking forward to it. We believe we have a good team, one with a lot of young lads that has a lot of spirit, like the last one. We're aiming to make sure the similarities don't end there, that this team qualifies for major tournaments too."
A win, he knows, would certainly move Kerr's side a significant step closer to a place in Germany.
