UEFA officials were unable to say yesterday if the draw for the four European Championship play-offs, due to be made at Aachen tomorrow, will be seeded.
There is no provision in the championship rules for introducing seedings at this stage of the competition but an UEFA spokesman said it was possible that the omission will be discussed before the draw is made.
"It is premature to speculate on what may or may not happen," he said. "I'm not aware of any moves to have the teams seeded for the playoffs, but that is not to say it will not be discussed." The first leg of the play-offs is set for November 13th-14th with the second leg scheduled for November 17th.
Most of the nations involved - England, Scotland, Denmark, Ukraine, Turkey, Slovenia, Israel and the Republic of Ireland - will be represented at a meeting at Aachen today when UEFA will rule on applications from Spain, Portugal and a joint bid by Austria and Hungary to host the finals of the European Championship in 2004.
The feeling in Merrion Square is that it will be an open draw and that view is shared by Mick McCarthy who said that he saw no valid reason why the teams should be segregated.
"Obviously people will have preferences, but in a level-field situation in which all the teams earned the right to contest the play-offs, it is difficult to justify seedings," he said.
"As regards security and the risk of crowd trouble at games, all I'll say is that if UEFA didn't segregate Yugoslavia, Croatia and Macedonia in the original draw, they're unlikely to be over-apprehensive now."
Preferred opposition for the Irish is a different matter, and one gets the impression that the team McCarthy most wants to avoid is Ukraine. They failed by only a point to oust France at the top of the Group Four table and are now rightly regarded as one of the emerging powers of European football.
There is also some apprehension at the prospect of meeting Turkey in Istanbul, one of the more inhospitable cities in Europe for visiting teams. Yet having been to Istanbul and captained the team which silenced the crowd with a 3-1 win in an European game in 1991, McCarthy, one suspects, would rather go there than to Kiev.
Bernard O'Byrne, the FAI's chief executive, will be in Aachen today monitoring events. He believes that in the event of Ireland being paired with England, there will be no undue security risks to prevent the home leg of the tie taking place in Dublin.
Others are less convinced about either the desirability or the feasibility of hosting such a game. Judged solely from a football perspective, an Ireland-England draw would not be regarded as a lost cause for while the resources available to Kevin Keegan are, in theory, vastly superior to those on offer to McCarthy, there are many who would fancy Ireland's prospects in such an eventuality.
On the last occasion Ireland met Scotland in a competitive situation, in the preliminaries for the 1988 European Championship, Jack Charlton led his team to a 1-0 win away from home. Here again, however, security problems would be attached to a game against Scotland in Dublin, although they scarcely extend to the point where the fixture would be in danger of cancellation by the authorities.
Meanwhile, McCarthy must wait and hope that by mid-November his midfield general Roy Keane will have distanced himself from his injuries which have put him out of four of Ireland's last five games.
The Ireland captain is due to resume light training with Manchester United this week and while dark scenarios are being painted about his future in some quarters, the hope is that his knee problem will respond to treatment.
The Ireland manager, optimistic as ever, believes that Keane will come right. In the interim, however, he is making plans to watch Bradford defender Andy O'Brien against Wimbledon on Saturday.
