Mick McCarthy is ready to confirm Gary Breen as an important member of his squad when he names his team to meet Malta in Wednesday's European Championship game at Lansdowne Road.

Breen is set to resume at centre back in place of Phil Babb who, along with Denis Irwin, will miss the game because of injuries sustained on club duty last weekend.

Officially the team will not be announced until tomorrow but already the Coventry player is preparing for his first competitive game since the World Cup qualifier against Romania last October.

That was the only occasion in Ireland's last nine competitive games that he claimed a place in the starting line-up, a disappointing statistic for a player who launched his international career with some fine performances at the start of McCarthy's term of office.

Now Babb's misfortune has offered him a way back and the manager will have few reservations about restructuring his defence to fit in Breen.

"I watched Gary recently in a game against Charlton and I was impressed by what I saw," he said. "He's playing well in the Premiership and you can't ask for much more than that."

Jeff Kenna looks set to take over the right back position vacated by Irwin and all the indications are that Niall Quinn, whose depressing sequence of injury problems have caused him to miss all but two of Ireland's last 16 games, will spearhead the attack.

Significantly, Quinn partnered Robbie Keane in the front line when the senior team played an under-21 selection in a trial game last Tuesday and did enough to convince McCarthy that despite his limited match practice since returning to Sunderland's team, he is ready for international football.

"Niall wouldn't be here if he wasn't fit and he has certainly looked sharp enough in training," said McCarthy. "He tended to tire a bit in the last half hour but that was understandable given the fact that he is not long back from injury."

It means that Tony Cascarino, who played for all but five minutes of last month's game against Croatia, will be on the bench, presumably to be introduced in the second half if the attack is struggling.

After the loss of Babb and Irwin, there were no additional fitness problems when the squad trained at Clonshaugh yesterday morning. Two further sessions are planned for today before the squad makes the traditional pre-match visit to Lansdowne Road tomorrow morning.

Malta will arrive in Dublin this afternoon after losing 4-1 at home to Croatia on Saturday. The fact that they led 1-0 at half-time before collapsing in the last half hour has merely served to lend added validity to McCarthy's call for vigilance on Wednesday.

"Of course, we expect to win the game but that doesn't give us a licence to throw caution to the winds," he said. "I fully expect the Maltese to go with an extra midfield player, just as we would have done had Saturday's game gone ahead in Belgrade. It means that they are going to be difficult to break down."

On the question of his preferred choice of a date for the postponed game against Yugoslavia, he said: "At this point, the best we can hope for is that the game takes place on November 18th, the date mentioned by UEFA last week.

"If is not possible to play in Belgrade on that date, I hope that UEFA will then rule that it be taken to a neutral venue. The bottom line is that I don't want to have the game postponed for a second time, until the new year."

In that eventuality, the FAI will try to arrange a friendly fixture for November 18th, although McCarthy concedes that the time frame involved may make it difficult to do so.