LIAM MACKEY: Dynamic duo bring undoubted ‘wow’ factor

A ball wasn’t even kicked but the face of Irish football underwent a dramatic makeover in the last couple of days — first jaws were dropped and then, once they’d been retrieved from the floor, the eyebrow-raising began in earnest.

The appointment of either Martin O’Neill or Roy Keane as the next manager of the Republic of Ireland would always have been the stuff of major headlines, but getting two of football’s best-known personalities in the same package has transformed the hitherto frustrating saga of the Giovanni Trapattoni succession stakes into the one of the biggest sensations in Irish sports history.

Which, again before a ball has even been kicked, has got to be welcome news for supporters who’d grown disenchanted with the Italian’s reign and, on the back of Ireland’s Brazil 2014 hopes fizzling out so disappointingly, were hoping for something, anything, to bring a bit of excitement back to the international set-up.