Keane to travel on Monday

SOCCER/Euro 2004 qualifier: As the Irish players completed their preparations for this afternoon's vital European Championship qualifier in Tbilisi, the question of Robbie Keane's availability was finally resolved when Brian Kerr confirmed last night that Keane would wait until Monday before joining the squad in Tirana.

Kerr had always said that the question whether Keane, whose father died on Monday, travelled was entirely a matter for the player himself and when asked about the 22-year-old's predicament yesterday he observed that only the person involved could and would know, instinctively, what was the right thing to do.

"I remember after my own dad died when I was 15," recalled the manager, "I had a Gaelic football match the following Wednesday and I had to decide whether to go along. I did but the game wasn't in Tbilisi and, as the youngest in the family, there was a lot less pressure on me than there has been on Robbie over the past few days. He's had a lot on his shoulders."

Kerr, who will not name his team until this morning, made it clear that he had barely raised the issue with the player, mentioning only on Thursday night that, if he did wish to travel, arrangements were in place to get him here.

"It wasn't a time for discussing what position he wanted to play," said Kerr. "What I mainly did was offer my condolences and those of everybody here who couldn't be at the funeral."

In Keane's absence, meanwhile, the business of preparing for today's game continued very much as normal yesterday, albeit with the rest of the players spending even more of their time than is usual within the confines of their city-centre hotel.

"It's a little bit different in here to the rest of the town out there," observed Kerr before departing and leaving today's captain, Kenny Cunningham, to reflect further on the surroundings.

"It's not often," the Birmingham City defender joked, "that you leave Dublin and wish within a day that you were back there."

Not for the first time many of the squad had found refuge in sleep and Cunningham had an opportunity to witness at first hand one of the most legendary nappers of them all.

"Yeah, that's right," he sighed with a bemused shake of his head. "I tucked Duffer up tight last night with a few DVDs and some Mikado biscuits I brought over with me from back home." Was he, perchance, suggesting the Blackburn winger was lazy?

"Well, different players like to get different amounts of rest, some of the lads don't feel quite right unless they're happy in their own minds that they've had enough in the build-up to the game.

"But," he added with a grin, "Damien has been known to suffer from time to time from, eh, adhesive mattress syndrome."