Keane knows it's still all to play for

Places at World Cups may not be won against teams like Andorra but they can certainly be lost. Last night, as they filed out of Barcelona's reserve team stadium and prepared to make the journey back home that thought was uppermost in the minds of Mick McCarthy's men.

The 3-0 win secured in the face of a 90-minute rearguard action by their hosts may not have been stylish but at least a trip to the Far East next summer still looks certain to be won or lost when Portugal and Holland come to Dublin.

"The crunch games still look like being those against Holland and Portugal and so I'm looking forward to those," said the team's skipper Roy Keane, a man who appears to have embarked on a one-man mission to raise our nation's footballing expectations.

"No offence to them," the Corkman tells us after each game, "but you've got to remember who we were playing out there tonight." If you're wondering whether he's getting tired of repeating the mantra then consider the fact that, when asked for his views on last night's victory, he prefaced his remarks with the words, "the usual".

For some of the others who played a part in the action last night even the mundane wins are a little out of the ordinary, though. Matt Holland wasn't making any grand claims regarding the Irish performance but notching up another goal in another World Cup tie had left the 26-year-old feeling reasonably contented with his lot.

"Yeah, obviously we're all pleased. We got six points from the trip, scored seven and didn't concede any, I mean you couldn't be too disappointed with that, could you?

"For them it just seemed to be a damage limitation exercise for the full 90 minutes and it's difficult to play any sort of penetrating football when you're up against a side that is determined to keep 11 men behind the ball from beginning to end.

"Even in the face of that, though, we had a lot of chances in the first half and should have been a few more up by the break. When we went in Mick just said to keep doing the same thing but try to do it a little better; that's what we tried to do and it worked."

Damien Duff, too, headed for the team bus feeling fairly happy. His return to Mick McCarthy's starting line-up might have yielded more given the effort he had put in over the course of the game but when it got to the stage where the Blackburn winger was having to beat the same man more than once on the same run he probably realised it was going to be a long night.

"It was a little frustrating because there always seemed to be so many of them there defending but we were always confident that we'd win and after the first went in we felt it was only really a question of how many.

"You could see that a couple of them were a bit out of shape; we're a fit bunch of lads and that told during the closing stages when we got the couple of goals. In the end it was a good win and I enjoyed it a lot."

Robbie Keane seemed to enjoy it a good deal more after Gary Doherty arrived in the 26th minute, with the Leeds striker observing that "it was a good tactical decision by Mick. It was good to link up with Gary when he came on, to get a big man beside me because myself and David are both small and we weren't winning anything in the air before that at all."

Doherty, meanwhile, was too preoccupied with the Andorran tactics to ponder the change in approach. "If that's the way that they defend when they're at home," marvelled the big Spurs defender, "I'd hate to see what they'll do when they come to Dublin . . . they'll probably start with four keepers.