Leading members of the FAI were last night taken by surprise by reports that FIFA would this afternoon conduct a draw for the European play-off stages of the qualifying campaign for next year's world cup finals.
Both the association's general secretary, Brendan Menton, and its honorary secretary, Des Casey, who is also a vice-president of UEFA, said they were unaware of any change to the international body's original timetable under which it had been intended that the nine teams that finished second in their UEFA groups as well as the third placed team in Asia would be paired off in Prague on October 11th.
Senior officials of both UEFA and FIFA said yesterday, however, that a decision had been taken to bring the draw forward with the world body's director of communications, Keith Cooper, claiming that the move had been made for logistical reasons.
Last night Menton said that the FAI had received no notice of the alteration and described the change, if confirmed, as "nonsensical". "We haven't hear anything at all about this but we'll be doing our best to find out what has happened as soon as we can in the morning."
The move means that Ireland could be trying to beat the Dutch knowing that failure to top the group could see the possible alternative of a decider against England not to mention the likes of Yugoslavia, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Turkey, Belarus or Scotland.
