Play-offs could be a dawdle after this

This morning's departure for Tallinn should be the last away trip of the current World Cup campaign. It's hard not to feel though that we won't all be bundling into a plane in a few months' time bound for the away leg of another accursed play-off. Scary isn't it?

That's as likely to be as good as it gets. Looking at the Group Two table, what strikes you is not the surprising fact that we are on top after seven games but the memory of the goal we conceded in Lansdowne Road against Andorra. That moment which induced such a shocked silence in the old ground, might yet come back to haunt us.

We have three games left to play, this week's jaunt to Estonia, which we undertake not as the Republic of Keano but merely as the Republic of Ireland, then two home games with Holland and Cyprus.

Portugal have four games left, all of them easy, they are guaranteed - as Mick McCarthy conceded on Saturday - another 12 points.

In other words even if we win all our games we are likely to finish on top tied with Portugal. In which case we go to goal difference. We have played one game more than Portugal and have an advantage in goal difference of four goals. The Portuguese are going to begin overhauling that this Wednesday when they play Cyprus.

Can we beat Holland? Can we score enough goals to keep our noses in front of Portugal? It seems less likely every time you analyse it. Mick McCarthy is rightly proud of the work rate of Niall Quinn and Robbie Keane up front but it won't have escaped his notice that neither has scored for us since Robbie's immaculate goal in Amsterdam last September. That's a long drought and a hard one for tired men to do anything about.

At the other end of the field our central defence in particular has done more than was expected of it. Not a lot was expected in fairness but even those who will accept the laurels for the heroics they have performed will admit that Portugal, in particular, could stitch together a nightmarish highlights reel of chances they missed against us.

With one away game still to come and the Dutch arriving with Ruud Van Nistelrooy back in harness, one wonders how long more the centre can hold.

On Wednesday in Tallinn we obviously need nothing less than a win. Preferably a good win. Reports coming out about the Dutch experience there suggest that such an outcome won't be easily come by.

The Dutch could rustle the last pair of their four goals on Saturday night in the final two minutes. We have to wonder if Quinn and Keane have the energy left to still be on the pitch by then.

And what about the ball we feed them? We seldom got decent crosses in on Saturday. Mick McCarthy spoke afterwards about some of the great games Roy Keane has delivered for the team over the years since the "voice of Irish yahooism" encouraged fans to boo him at Lansdowne Road.

He picked out that day in Iceland a few years ago, an assignment not dissimilar to this week's in Tallinn. That was also a day which Kevin Kilbane will have cause to remember. He was flattened by a beef-fed full-back virtually every time he went to pass him. Eventually Mark Kennedy replaced Kilbane to useful effect (despite a sending-off).

Since then Kilbane has grown in strength, got a little wilier and made it to the Premiership. He still suffers from the same tendency he had that day, however. He has an almost pathological desire to take the outside line when he runs at a defender. The sharpest full-backs seem to know this by now and they show him great tempting vistas of space inside. They practically usher him in there and Kevin makes for it gratefully and then cuts back.

On good days it works for him, on bad days it's hard to watch. You yearn for him to cut inside and fire a shot but despite a fine flourish at the end of the season for both club and country finishing hasn't been his strongest suit.

Kilbane is at his best when he sees the ball early and knocks it down the line to a position in which he can use his strength to beat the defender in the race for it. If that's not working for him perhaps we need the guile of Duff or Kennedy. On Saturday Duff was the only player we had who looked like doing something surprising when he got the ball. For the final fixtures in this adventure we need to be bold and inventive. We've had a little luck so far; it's time to start making something for ourselves. We're in a remarkable position. Only six of the top 10 teams in the world went into the European draw for these qualifiers. Two of them are in our group. On mature reflection, if we could make the playoffs maybe they'd be a dawdle after all this.

Lastly, a word about Luis Figo, derided and booed by the greatest fans in the world on Saturday afternoon. I don't know, maybe he is a diver, maybe he does come over all Swan Lake every time a tackle happens in the same city he's in but I'm pretty sure he's had his shins hacked by every butcher in the Spanish league for the entirety of the time he's been there, so he takes what he can get in terms of decisions.

I'm not sure either if you can learn a lot from a person from a couple of fleeting glimpses but I watched him outside the Stadium of Light in Lisbon and he was courtesy itself to fans and journalists alike, stopping to speak fluent and gracious words of English to a handful of us Irish hacks who were by and large shunned by our own players.

On Saturday again I saw him, this time being pushed by security men through a thicket of the very people who were booing him all afternoon. He stopped to sign every autograph and smiled for every photo. A player and a gentleman is what I thought.