SOCCER/ WORLD CUP QUALIFYING: THE SENSE from the management team last week may have been that Greece would be their preferred opponents for next month's World Cup play-offs, the draw for which will be made at lunch-time today in Zurich. But FAI chief executive John Delaney hinted yesterday he would like to see Giovanni Trapattoni's men handed one of the more glamorous of the four possible assignments.

Given the state of the association’s finances these days, Delaney might be forgiven for relishing the idea of a tie with France and the huge broadcasting and other revenues it would bring. And speaking on RTÉ radio, he said he felt the Ireland team’s performances against the world champions had suggested they could rise to the challenge of taking on the best of opposition.

“Well, we do better against the bigger teams,” he observed. “We did that against Italy over two legs, we were very good. Although there are a lot of different opinions about the four we might draw. People differ on whether France are still a top team, Domenech is a top manager or not, whether Greece are an easy draw because they haven’t any top star players like Portugal have in Ronaldo, or if Russia is too far away or Arshavin a major threat. You get all of that.

“Look, what matters is that we’re in it and we’ll take who we get tomorrow and whoever we get, we’ll give them a run for their money. We don’t win games by many goals, we don’t lose games by many goals either. So it’s going to be a tight two games, in my opinion.”

The French, as it happens, are understood to be keen to avoid the Irish, with Raymond Domenech aware both that a high percentage of the goals under Trapattoni have come from set-pieces and a large number of those conceded by his men in the past couple of years have been down to poor defending at corners and free-kicks.

Having spoken to Trapattoni, Delaney confirmed the main hope is to get drawn away from home first.

In terms of the potential for away support, a return to Paris would clearly be beneficial, with short flights and relatively easy access likely to ensure large numbers of Ireland fans would travel.

The same might be said for Lisbon, where more than 20,000 Irish supporters attended the European Championship game in 1995, although the fact the match had stood out as potentially decisive from the time the fixtures had been mapped out certainly contributed to the scale of the exodus.

Greece and Moscow, especially, would be less likely to attract large number of Irish, with significantly longer flights and, in the case of the Russian capital, the complication of having to obtain a visa from authorities with a knack for making you feel they’d really rather you didn’t come.

On the football side of things, Greece would appear to be the most promising option, having declined somewhat since becoming champions of Europe in 2004.

As it happens, though, they are the only one of the four potential opponents Ireland have never beaten, albeit the teams have met only twice, and never competitively.

The Republic’s record against the other three gives no great cause for optimism, although there have been notable wins in every instance. More dispiriting, though, the Irish have never beaten European opposition in any play-off, with only the two-legged encounter with Iran in 2001 going Ireland’s way.

Delaney, meanwhile, acknowledged again he was disappointed with the way Fifa handled the seeding of today’s draw.

“I wasn’t surprised but I was disappointed. We wrote to Fifa over 12 months ago and they told us that it probably would not be seeded, that it would be eight teams into a hat and whoever was pulled out played against each other,” he said.

“About five weeks ago we wrote to them again to get clarification on it and they told us it would most likely be seeded. I think it’s unfair, because some of the teams in there have already been seeded as top seeds or second seeds. Also, we didn’t know at the start of the tournament whether there would be seeding or not, I don’t know of any other major tournament where you don’t know the rules when you go into it.”