Blow for McCarthy as Duff is ruled out

While the wait to establish whether Roy Keane will be fit for next week's first play-off game against either Iran or the UAE continues, Mick McCarthy suffered his first real blow of the build-up when he was informed by Damien Duff that the Blackburn player will miss both of the Republic's forthcoming matches.

The 22-year-old has been laid up for more than five weeks now with a hamstring problem but had hoped to return to action for his club against Southampton this weekend, a game all concerned saw as being crucial to his hopes of proving his fitness before the Lansdowne Road fixture on November 10th.

When the Dubliner attempted to train yesterday, however, he suffered a painful recurrence of the problem, and last night in Abu Dhabi McCarthy received one of the calls he has come to dread when the big days loom. It came from Duff himself who informed him that he will be sidelined for at least another 10 days to two weeks.

"It's a huge disappointment," McCarthy said. "From a starting position where we had such a glut of left-footers, we are now struggling for options."

There was only limited news regarding the manager's other injury worries, meanwhile, with Mark Kennedy still awaiting a scan on the hamstring injury he picked up on Sunday and Kevin Kilbane's ankle showing signs of some improvement. But Keane's rate of recovery from the knee problem troubling him remains a mystery to the Republic manager, who missed one call from Alex Ferguson yesterday and then failed to reach him with another call later in the day.

At yesterday's United press conference, held as part of the build-up to the Lille Champions League match, Ferguson refused to rule Keane out of Sunday's game against Liverpool and so there is still hope among the Irish management team that the Corkman will be ready for action on Saturday week.

With regard to Kennedy and Kilbane, McCarthy said that he intended to include both in the 24-man squad he names later on this week. "Kennedy is certainly struggling," he said, "but Dave Jones has already said that he will let him travel, so that is good news. And there's talk now of Kevin being involved for Sunderland at the weekend, although I hope it's only on the bench."

McCarthy feels that, given the circumstances, Steven Reid may well get the chance to show what he can do in a fiercely competitive international game, but for the moment all he would confirm is that "everybody with a chance of playing will be in the squad".

As for this evening's game, the Ireland manager remains confident that the Iranians will do enough to ensure that it is they rather than the UAE who travel to Dublin in the middle of next week.

"They're the physically stronger and more experienced of the two teams but how they will approach the game will be interesting. In Tehran they pretty much had six players up front and they put endless pressure on the other team's defence - I'll be keen to see whether they try to do that sort of thing again.

"They're got a lot of individual talent too," he added, "players like Ali Karimi, who is very skilful, very good in one-on-one positions, who has a bit of trick about him."

Asked about how his team might fare against whatever team does end up coming through, he insisted that it won't be easy. "We've gotten 24 points in this campaign but I think it'll take 28 now if we're going to finally get through."

Travelling to see the teams in action has, however, been an enormous help, he said, and this afternoon he and Ian Evans will get a second chance to measure up two teams that he might otherwise only have seen on video.