Profile David Connolly: Emmet Malone looks at the career of David Connolly who, despite his petulance, possesses a genuine touch of international class

The posters on the walls of Basel advertising a three-day festival of Irish music that starts a week today show there will always be people who find the importance of timing an impossible concept to grasp.

To others it comes a little more instinctively, of course, and if David Connolly gets to start for the Republic of Ireland tomorrow afternoon the West Ham striker won't need to have the potential of the occasion explained.

Some seven years after his international career began so brightly with a run of seven goals in 10 games the 26-year-old could reinvent himself tomorrow as the hero in Ireland's most difficult hour. It has long been clear he himself feels he is made for the role. Whether Brian Kerr agrees is something we will only discover when he names his starting XI.

Though the Ireland manager remains as tight-lipped as ever regarding his team and tactics ahead of tomorrow night's vital European Championship qualifier against Switzerland, Connolly's recent club form, combined with the goal he scored against Turkey last month, appear to have made him the front-runner to partner Robbie Keane in the Irish attack.

The seven goals he has managed in 13 games for West Ham come as no great surprise from a player who found scored 42 in 63 league appearances for Wimbledon and 42 in 48 with Excelsior in Holland, where Connolly also passed the bulk of his time in the second division.

But the goal against Turkey and the outstanding spell around it, during which he might well have had a hat-trick, provided an overdue reminder the striker, whose early games in green promised so much, still possesses a genuine touch of international class.

A performance like the one he managed in the first half against the World Cup bronze medallists and Connolly would do a great deal to enhance international credentials that have been looking increasingly dubious since a rash challenge and red card in Ireland's ill-fated 1997 World Cup play-off game against Belgium in Brussels marked the end of his golden-boy status.

Connolly was angered by the reaction to that sending-off six years ago and while he has relentlessly found the net for a variety of clubs since that night his public profile has owed almost as much to his regular displays of petulance towards journalists and, more significantly, his managers.

Only a few weeks ago Connolly was openly scathing with regard to the decision to leave him on the bench for West Ham's first league game of the season and he subsequently backed up his criticism of Glen Roeder with goals when the opportunity presented itself.

Last November, however, he became embroiled in a more undignified altercation with Don Givens, who had initially omitted him from the senior Ireland squad for the game against Greece. After a string of other established internationals withdrew from the trip Connolly declined a call-up. Givens subsequently recounted in great detail a telephone conversation in which he said that the player behaved repugnantly and claimed he should be considered Ireland's leading striker.

In one of his many bizarre moments Connolly later observed that Givens should not have phoned him directly. "It's the same way a teacher and pupil should never be left in a classroom together," he said. "If there's an allegation of abuse afterwards, it's just one person's word against the other."

On another occasion the player described a single phone call regarding a promised interview as "bordering on harassment", while news of his demands for fees when doing interviews immediately after his lucrative move to Holland in 1997 surprised even his close adviser, Michael Kennedy.

The solicitor, who famously also represents Roy Keane, has done especially well for Connolly, negotiating a succession of moves in which the player pockets huge sums in wages. His willingness to see out his contract at Feyenoord, where he got few chances but ultimately failed to prove himself in top-flight football, put him in a strong position when returning to England and the £285,000 West Ham paid Wimbledon for him over the summer is the first fee that has ever changed hands for his services.

That Connolly is bright seems beyond question. While in Holland, where it is hardly necessary, he learned the language while only a couple of weeks ago he revealed that he had started studying at university - though he then made a point of announcing that he could not, for some strange reason, reveal the college or the subjects.

On Wednesday Robbie Keane spoke highly of his qualities as a strike partner but the pair seemed rather cool towards each other a couple of years back when they appeared together at a press conference while, when another squad member said at last year's World Cup that he would prefer to spend the rest of his life sharing with Roy Keane than pass half an hour in a room with Connolly, it wasn't exactly intended as a glowing tribute to the Manchester United man.

It seems unlikely, however, that Connolly cares too much whether he is loved.

And the question for the rest of us is whether he can really create and score goals against defences of a higher quality to the ones he is used to embarrassing at club level in the English first division.

After tomorrow's game we may be a little wiser as to the answer.