Irish team must find their wings again

It's a big day for Mick McCarthy and the Republic of Ireland team, one that will have an enormous bearing on whether we are one of the teams that goes to the European Championship finals next summer. And one, it should be added, that will go a long way towards establishing whether we deserve to or not.

To be honest, I'm still a little bit mystified by the approach McCarthy adopted on Saturday night in Zagreb. As soon as he told the players the team that night they must have known that they were being sent out to hang on by the skin of their teeth for the whole of the 90 minutes.

It's a lot to ask of players who generally like people to show a little more confidence in them. McCarthy's stated intention was to come into this game with key players like Robbie Keane, Mark Kennedy and Niall Quinn fit and rested. It seems a little disappointing that our tactics for a game like Saturday's were dictated by an upcoming clash with one of the continent's weakest sides.

You would have thought that we could have beaten Malta with a second string side but now the Ireland manager has at least got the players that he hoped to protect and so it is up to him to make the strength of his starting 11 tell.

Right now the best way to do that would appear to be to stick as closely as possible to the line up that started against Yugoslavia last week. Obviously there is no Roy Keane or Denis Irwin but apart from that it hard to imagine any serious tinkering with a team that turned in one of the Republic's most impressive performances of recent years.

Certain to return are Quinn and Robbie Keane up front while the only serious question with Kennedy is which side he will start on. That depends on whether McCarthy opts to go with Gary Kelly on the right side of midfield or Kevin Kilbane on the left. In much the same way as the line-up for the Croatian game last weekend sent out the wrong signals to the players, however, the reversion to the use of two wingers against the Maltese would be a positive sign ahead of the game that McCarthy intends his side to take complete control and dictate the tempo of the match from the very start. The additional width that Kilbane's presence would bring to the side would make it harder for the local players to cope with the amount of running that they would have to do.

Straight away their midfield would be stretched and the Irish would be in a better position to call the shots.

That's the key for Ireland. If we can take the contest by the scruff of the neck early on and get a goal on the board then it could well turn out to be a bit of a romp. If, on the other hand, the players are coming back into the dressing-room at half-time with the game still scoreless then the pressure is going to start mounting on everybody involved.

It's hard to imagine that a team which has done well in the group overall so far could allow its chances of qualification to evaporate this evening, but then stranger things have happened in the not-too-distant past.

We saw a couple of years ago in Liechtenstein what can happen when a good team starts to become frustrated by a lesser team who show no real ambition to do anything more than hold out for the draw.

Hopefully the Irish players who were involved in that game will have learned from the experience. The approach needs to be patient if things don't work out from the start and you have to stick with it because against players who are not playing full-time there should be a growing amount of space available as the game goes on.

The fact remains that the Maltese have a team that includes a number of part-time players and, except for a couple of brave performances, hasn't done anything of note in their previous seven Group Eight outings.

In every department we should be far too strong for them and the superiority must be translated into a victory. At the end of the day the scoreline or the way in which the ball is made to hit the back of the Maltese net matters little. I'm sure McCarthy would take a 94th minute Davor Suker-style winner if that's what it comes down to.

If he gets the win then qualification will come down to the last round of games next month and Ireland's trip to Macedonia. A win there would probably, as McCarthy has said himself, be enough to secure the top spot in the group. But a draw or worse tonight would probably spell the end of the Republic's involvement in the competition.

And if our European ambitions receive a setback this evening then we'll have very little cause for complaint.