Visitors unlikely to rise above their station

Emmet Malone sees Cyprus as a team of some potential but no immediate threat.

Reliance on FIFA's rather erratic world ranking ladder to gauge the strength of opponents is a risky business but for all its flaws it can be safely taken that when a side ranked 16th takes on one rated just outside the top 100 there really should be only one winner.

The numbers may not have been mentioned at Lansdowne Road yesterday as the Cypriot players went through their paces and the team's Serbian coach, Momcilo Vukotic, spent much of his time debating tactics with journalists. On both sides, though, there was a general acceptance that having failed to take a major scalp on the international stage since 1998 when they beat Spain at home, the visitors will do very well to avoid defeat this afternoon.

There is, as it happens, considerable optimism in the camp about longer-term prospects as players drawn from what is perceived to be a talented new generation begin to graduate into the senior ranks.

During this campaign, however, even the leading players admit they don't expect to beat the bigger sides, particularly outside Cyprus.

"We remember last time that Ireland beat us 4-0 both here and in our country," says Olympiakos striker Ioannis Okkas. "Roy Keane was very important for Ireland in those games but even without him it is a team with a lot of well-known players playing at well-known clubs in England.

"This Cyprus team is a new team with a great many new players and we are optimistic about the future," he says. "We hope we can do well here but it is very difficult for us because our leagues have not started and most of the players have not played yet other than in a few pre-season games."

Okkas is one of the established stars, a striker who is one of five squad members to have established himself in the much stronger Greek league. The rest of the squad play in Cyprus; few are full-time professionals.

Things do appear to be looking up, however, for a team that has become increasingly difficult to beat at home even if it has rarely managed much more than a goal against the run of play while on its travels. In the last European Championships the Cypriot under-21s finished second to France in their group, 15 points from eight games leaving them comfortably above Slovenia, Israel and Malta.

Vukotic has started integrating these younger players into his senior panel and while a point from either today's match or next Wednesday's visit to Tel Aviv would be regarded as an achievement there is a strong belief that the side, and its prospects, will improve as the campaign wears on.

The coach spoke recently about the need to have more players earning their living overseas, something he hopes the country's newly acquired EU membership will help bring about.

Any real breakthrough is quite some way off, however, and Vukotic cannot realistically aspire to much more than exerting an influence over the race for qualification by springing a couple of surprises, most likely on home turf, during the coming year.

The odds of managing one today, he concedes, are long but even the very anonymity of his players, he argues, could provide them with some small advantage ahead of this opening game.

"Of course Ireland has a team full of stars but the one thing that is good for us in that is that we know all of the players we will face well whereas the Irish do not know us."

With the likes of Elias Charalambous, Konstantinos Charalampidis and Loizos Kakoyiannis all still very much new to the senior international game, he has a point. Whether he can take one, though, is an altogether different matter.