WHO would ever have said that Mick McCarthy's first couple of months in charge of the Irish team were going to turn out like this. As if the string of injuries he had to deal with and the couple of disappointing results in his two matches to date weren't bad enough, now he has to contend with Roy Keane losing the run of himself.

These next couple of weeks were always going to be fairly difficult for the Irish manager because the likes of Portugal, Croatia and the Netherlands are very difficult opponents against whom to pursue your own agenda but McCarthy is faced with a testing time.

For tonight's game he is making wholesale changes, which is understandable under the circumstances. The number of players unavailable to him, combined with the fact that he has to compensate for the last 18 months of Charlton's reign when not enough players were blooded, has made this sort of selection somewhat inevitable.

McCarthy has to look at quite a few players over the next six matches but he faces some real difficulties in terms of getting the balance right. On the one hand he must try players out in different roles and with different players around them in order to see what his best side will be for the competitive games in the Autumn but on the other he needs to score a couple of wins to help boost confidence in the side.

While there is certainly the potential to learn from this match with players like David Connolly and Gareth Farrelly, making their full debuts and Shay Given, Ken Cunningham and Curtis Fleming getting another chance to impress in the senior squad, you would have to say that the outcome of the game appears to depend entirely on how seriously the Portuguese decide to take it.

In the qualifying stages of the European Championships we saw the best and the worst of the Irish against Portugal and it seems that this evening, if they put out their strongest side and play with any sort of determination, the Irish are in for a fairly torrid time.

Perhaps waiting until the trip to America would have been a better time to take these sort of gambles. It is a bold move by McCarthy to make this sort of team selection although you would have to be concerned that he is throwing a couple of these lads in at the deep end when a steadier approach might have been more rewarding in the long term. Time will tell.

What McCarthy is certainly right about, though, is his decision to take some strong action with Keane, who has let himself, the squad and his country down through the immaturity that he has shown over the last week or so.

What has happened with the Corkman has had the effect of entirely overshadowing the preparations of the team for this game and the trip away and, in those circumstances, it does not matter how important a player is within a squad, something has to be done.

In the circumstances that McCarthy finds himself in, it is understandable that he continues to leave the door open for the 25-year-old but he has made it clear that he has a point beyond which he will not be pushed and that can only be a good thing for the team as a whole.

It's a factor of modern football which, to a certain extent, simply has to be accepted, that when clubs are paying players such enormous amounts of money that they are going to want to get priority in return and so I would not always blame Keane for what has gone on in the cast.

On this occasion, however, there can be no excuses. Over the last few weeks McCarthy has demonstrated great flexibility with many of the players and it appears that all Keane would have to do to get his holiday was to pick up the phone and explain the situation honestly to his manager.

The player is a valued member of the squad but McCarthy's comments about needing to see a display of commitment are entirely understandable and it is now down to the player to demonstrate that he really does want to be out there in a green shirt.

The two of them need to sit down and talk things out. If the player does end up going to the United States then perhaps the pair of them can really resolve things over there but I'm glad that, after what has gone on, that his seat on the plane is far from a certainty.

I'm not entirely sure that Keane himself realises how poorly he has conducted himself in the entire affair and he needs to realise that before matters move on any further.

As for McCarthy, I don't envy him. He knew when he took on the job that it was going to be tough and just about everything that has happened since would point to it being even tougher than everyone thought.