SOCCER:THE REPUBLIC of Ireland squad touched down in Tallinn last night with assistant coach Marco Tardelli confident everyone who travelled had done enough yesterday in training to prove they are fit to be selected by Giovanni Trapattoni, who is expected to name his side at the A Le Coq Arena this evening.
Tardelli all but confirmed yesterday morning Stephen Kelly will start the game at right back after having filled in well on the other side of the defence against Armenia last month.
Despite the expectation this week it will go to Jonathan Walters, however, he maintained the role of partnering Robbie Keane in attack is still up for grabs between the Stoke City striker and Simon Cox. He also insisted Shay Given and Richard Dunne will be available for selection providing his fellow countryman with as strong a range of options to choose from as could have been realistically hoped for at the start of the week.
“Everybody trained,” said the 57-year-old as the players prepared to leave their Malahide base for the hotel and then the airport. “The players are fit, including Dunne and Given who played and trained well and so we have no problems. Keith Fahey’s knee is okay, he played during the training.”
Tardelli said the mood within the group is positive but not excessively so as they prepare to meet a side that has never reached this stage of a major international championship. “Nobody thinks we are better than Estonia,” he maintained. “We are the same team, we have the same chance, 50 per cent but if our players go out on to the pitch like they did in Andorra, I think it will mean good things.”
The last few games, he said, had gone well because of the Irish players’ determination not to allow qualification to slip through their fingers after such a tough campaign. They had been rewarded with a second-place finish and what most would regard as the most favourable play-off draw possible but, he cautioned, “If we think to approach Estonia in a different way it would be wrong.”
The World Cup winner pointed to Ireland’s wide men, Damien Duff and Aiden McGeady, as having a potentially decisive role to play over the two legs, suggesting the pair could cause problems for less experienced opponents and create scoring opportunities for team-mates.
Ultimately, he said with a laugh, he does not mind whether either scores, lays one on for the strikers or is an onlooker as Dunne powers the ball home from close range again. “All that really matters,” he observed, “is that the ball ends up in the net.”
An away goal, he acknowledged, would be a major boost for the Irish as they look to secure qualification back in Dublin on Tuesday night but insisted it isn’t a necessity as long as the team can keep things tight at the back themselves.
They will be slightly inhibited in their efforts to do that by concerns about the potential to pick up bookings that could result in further suspensions for the home leg.
The team, so disciplined in their first campaign under Trapattoni, has picked up 19 yellow cards in the 10 group games and has been hit as a result with suspensions that have more than once left the Italian having to shuffle his pack.
Tomorrow he will be without Kevin Doyle, who was booked twice in the win over Armenia but a string of players including Glenn Whelan, Keith Andrews and Stephen Kelly go into the game with the threat of suspension hanging over them.
Tardelli, however, believes they should play their own game fearlessly and let the management team worry about how to cope without them if that is what must be done.
“Yes, we know about these and Ward played against Andorra with a yellow card,” he said. “We have good options to change the players and so they must play very hard and very tough during the match. We cannot say ‘don’t tackle’. For me, we must play without any regrets.”
Given, unsurprisingly, is more determined than most thanks to his long and painful history of involvement in Ireland’s play-off defeats. The goalkeeper insisted yesterday there would be no way the neck injury he sustained during training with his club last Friday would keep him out of the game and his desperation to capitalise on the advantage of getting to take the tie back to Dublin for the second leg was obvious.
“Yeah, we’ve experienced the other side of things, being away for the second leg. Even when we qualified for the World Cup in ’02 we were in Iran and there were, I dunno, 50 or a hundred Irish fans there.
“It seemed a bit surreal because there were hundred thousand Iranians booing us off the pitch. It was a bit spicy, like, really quite intimidating. Probably one of the best atmospheres from a hostility point of view that I’ve ever played in, to be honest.
“The flipside of that would be such a fantastic occasion. If we could do it on Tuesday night it would probably be the most special thing in my career; to actually qualify in Dublin. If we could do that then the country would be going a little bit crazy, I would think.”
