French fearful of combative Keane

Roy Keane may not be firing on all cylinders but the French still believe he is fighting fit, writes Emmet Malone

He may have troubles in every area of the pitch but Raymond Domenech insists that Roy Keane's presence in the Irish team at the Stade de France will ensure that that is where his players will face their most telling challenge on Saturday evening.

Domenech is without Keane's old adversary, Patrick Vieira, for the game due to suspension and says that the absence of the Arsenal midfielder will perhaps be the harshest blow of all to deal with as he prepares for his side's third qualifier of the new campaign without a string of established stars.

"Maybe nobody can match Roy Keane for fight, the players fear him for that reason and nobody who is going play against him gets any sleep for a week," laughs the French coach, "but Patrick would have given everything in his attempt to do so and it would have been a battle to watch.

"Without him we will have problems. We hope to play well in attack and in defence but in midfield? We shall have to wait and see."

Asked about his view on Keane's apparent inability to reproduce his best form, Domenech admits that, "he may not be quite as good as he was but players like him are such a huge influence on the rest of the team that you can not overestimate his importance. Players like him weld the team together, they may not be spectacular themselves but they are the cement a good team needs.

"It is like Didier Deschamps for us at the European Championships four years ago," he adds. "Everybody kept saying 'he has lost it, he is no longer the player that he was' but we only saw how important he still was to France afterwards, when he left. That's when the French team exploded, it just fragmented without him to hold it together."

He concedes that Keane was not at his best in Basel but insists that he was impressed by Ireland's performance during the team's opening two games with Damien Duff, Andy Reid and Clinton Morrison all catching the eye at various times.

"Duff is spectacular. He crosses the ball well and he provokes defenders into making mistakes. Reid and Morrison impressed me too. They were all attacking players that I liked but that's not to say I found weakness in other places.

"I have spent all my time here telling people that we have to be very wary of the Irish. People here still view them as a team that plays a very physical game, that they put the ball forward and I've been saying to them, 'no, no, no, they know how to do other things and they have very good players'.

"I know Brian Kerr for his youth teams and they were not teams that played their football in the British image. It's what we are saying to people here, to look out for this Irish team because they play their football well.

"I think that on what we have seen so far," he adds, "that the Irish have been the team that has played the best football in the group. Kerr has benefited from taking over a team he knew well and I have respect for what he has done.

"While I always worked within a system that was in existence before my arrival," he says of his 11 years with the French under-21s, "Kerr created that system and I'm sure that a team that includes so many of the players that came through that system can make life difficult for us is Paris."