EURO 2004 QUALIFIER: The Newcastle goalkeeper tells Emmet Malone the bad days of play-off defeat will stand to Ireland on Saturday

Brian Kerr's motivational skills may be a key asset in advance of games like Saturday's, but as Shay Given reflected yesterday on the challenge facing the Irish in Basel this weekend, the Newcastle goalkeeper insisted the players will need no reminding in the run-up to kick-off what it is they have to do.

"I don't think he'll have to give us too much of a pep talk," laughed the 27-year-old Donegal man at the Irish team's Dublin hotel. "The lads know what has to be done and at this stage I think the general feeling is that we just want to get out there and get on with it."

Given, like most in the squad, has tasted both the bitterness of defeat and the sweetness of victory in crunch qualification matches over the last few years. But he and the rest of the squad have, he insists, come a long way since the days when they went out of major championships in play-offs against Belgium and Turkey in part because they either failed to contain their opponents or score against them away from home.

"What you have to hope is that sort of experience will stand to us," he says. "They were tough games but they're all history now. Losing in Belgium was obviously a very painful experience, but it's in the past and the important thing is just to learn the lessons from it.

"On this occasion it's not about whether we keep a clean sheet, it's about whether we win, and if the score ends up being 10-9 in our favour then I'll come off the pitch at the end a very happy man."

When it is mentioned that Ireland have not won a competitive match away to opponents of Switzerland's reasonably modest stature since 1987, when the Republic beat Scotland on the way to Euro '88, he compares the national team's situation to Newcastle's, with his club having suffered sometimes from the willingness of opponents to get hefty numbers of players behind the ball.

"The Swiss have to come at us, because some of the teams that are going to end up in those play-offs look pretty tough, they're not going to want to end up facing one of them," he says, before seeking clarification on the Group 10 table and then adding with a chuckle: "There you are, they really are going to have to come at us then.

"I think, in the circumstances, that's going to work to our advantage, it's going to give us opportunities to get forward and create chances that maybe we wouldn't get in other games."

A good deal depends, he admits, on how close the Irish players come to fulfilling their potential. "We definitely have the potential, we know that, but I suppose even in a couple of the games since Brian took over, maybe against Albania, we haven't played all that well. Over the last year, though, we've still managed the results even when we haven't been at our best, and we'd settle for that again."