It's going to be a nervous night in Cyprus

Soccer analyst Mark Lawrenson finds it hard to understand the omission of Lee Carsley as he urges Robbie Keane and Damien Duff to deliver the goods

I'm nervous about this one, for several reasons. The main one is that I know just how ordinary we can be, and we've seen plenty of very ordinary performances by Ireland in the last while. We've paid for some of them, but our hope tonight is that if we fail to perform again, Cyprus won't be good enough to punish us. Based on their 6-1 defeat by Slovakia that might be the case, but it is, after all, only a year since they gave us a hell of a fright in the World Cup qualifier.

A squad that already lacked depth and quality simply couldn't afford as many withdrawals as Steve Staunton has suffered in the last week or so, and it is for that reason I cannot, for the life of me, understand why Lee Carsley wasn't called up for this game.

I know the issue has been rumbling for days, weeks even, but it just makes no sense whatsoever to me. Presumably Kevin Kilbane or, more likely, John O'Shea will have to play at full back, which probably means one from Liam Miller, Stephen Ireland and Jonathan Douglas will play in midfield.

Miller has never fulfilled his potential, he looks to me like a little boy on the pitch, playing for the second formers against the sixth formers. He's lost at the moment, his confidence is gone, he didn't even make Sunderland's starting line-up in their last game.

Ireland has, clearly, potential, but he's unproven and apart from Manchester City's last game against Everton, when by his own admission Carsley marked him out of it, he hasn't been in the team. Douglas is unproven too and is playing his football in the Championship.

Carsley has been excellent this season, and last, playing in a team that have had a superb start to the Premiership season. Can anyone honestly say that any of those three players (as well as Kilbane and O'Shea) is a better option than Carsley for this game? They're not.

I've heard some people say the fixation with wanting Carsley brought back is ludicrous, based on the fact he rarely played well for Ireland in the past. But that was when we had Roy Keane. And Carsley was always viewed as a "poor man's Roy Keane", he suffered because of that. We don't have Roy Keane now, we don't have Mark Kinsella or Matt Holland, or any of the players who were able to do a job for us in midfield.

We need a holding midfielder who will protect the back four and keep things simple, that is what Carsley has been doing so well in the Premiership for the past couple of seasons. And if Staunton opts for Aiden McGeady on the right and Damien Duff on the left, then we need a Carsley-type player even more.

Staunton has stressed in the last week he's working on a four-year plan, building for the next World Cup, and that he's putting his faith in the younger players.

That's admirable to a point, but if things go belly-up tonight, or in similar games down the line, Staunton won't be around to complete his four-year plan.

It's about getting the balance right. Yes, you want to blood young players, but you also have to use the best players at your disposal, and Carsley is our best midfielder at the moment. Are, for example, O'Shea and Stephen Reid better in that position? Come on! Staunton has one eye on the future - that's fine. But deal with Cyprus too. When France brought Zidane, Makelele and Thuram back it could hardly be viewed as a backward step - it got them to the World Cup final.

But he won't be there, so we have to look to what we have. And what we have are two players, Duff and Robbie Keane, who have to stop cruising and must, for the first time in a long time, grab a game by the scruff of the neck and raise their levels.

There was a time I would have put them in the same category as Shay Given, our best and most important players, but Given is now head and shoulders above both of them. We need them to be our most consistent performers, they're both at the stage of their careers where that's the level they should be at, but too often in the last couple of years they just haven't produced. It's time for both of them to change that. It's long overdue.

Given's absence is, of course, a worry, but I think Paddy Kenny is a more than capable goalkeeper. He didn't even look like a goalkeeper to me until the last year or two, he looked more like the kid who was stuck in goal because his shape suggested that's the only place he could play, but he's made a real effort on that front and the more I see him the more I believe he's a really good goalkeeper.

Hopefully, he won't be called upon too often, hopefully Duff and Keane will spark and Cyprus prove to be as poor as that 6-1 defeat suggested. If that's the case then we should be okay, but I'm nervous about it. We're desperately inconsistent now, that's the worrying thing. There's never a problem with application or endeavour, but the consistency is gone. To be honest, I'd take 1-0 now.