St Ledger remains a doubt for Ireland
However, Assistant Manager Liam Brady has expressed confidence that the player will still be fit for the fray. Speaking before the squad flew to Larnaca yesterday, Brady said: “Sean trained yesterday afternoon and trained very well and was feeling fine. But this morning it was a little bit sore in his knee where he took a bit of a bang in that collision with his own goalkeeper. So he didn’t train again – we just wanted to leave him out of it as we were doing a lot of shooting and a 10 v 10 at the end where there was going to be a lot of tackling. But we’re confident he’ll be fit for the game on Saturday.”
Brady said that tonight’s training session in the match venue would be the deciding factor in the player’s availability for selection. “If he comes through that I think he will play.”
With Kevin Foley an early withdrawal from the squad through injury, Ireland are limited in their cover at the back, with Stephen Kelly – who lacks game time at Fulham – the only other recognised right-full in the panel should John O’Shea have to revert to centre-half in the event of St Ledger not making it..
Nor does the late-call up of Paul McShane relieve the pressure, since Brady admitted that the Hull man, himself recovering from a knee injury, would not be fit enough to see action tomorrow night.
“I don’t think so,” said the Assistant Manager. “Him coming in was more a request from Hull City to see if we could get him involved with the match against South Africa. We hadn’t really factored him into our plans for this one. If Paul is to play any part in the squad this time around it will be against South Africa.”
Brady is under no illusion about the importance of tomorrow’s game to Ireland’s World Cup ambitions.
“It’s a big, big match,” he said. “If we win it, it looks like we could certainly grab a play-off position but, with the group still to play for, we’re going there to win.
“It’s a very level group and there is very little between the teams as the results have shown. There have been lots of drawn games. But we’re in a great position and we want to use that in our favour.”
As for the notion of revenge for Nicosia 2006 perhaps acting as a spur, Brady scoffed at the thought. “The motivation is going to the World Cup and you can’t have any greater motivation than that,” he declared.
Nor does the optimistic former international rule out the possibility that Georgia might do Ireland a favour when they play Italy in Tblisi tomorrow night.
“Yeah, it could be a tricky one for Italy,” he said. “Georgia are a very proud nation. They’ve got their problems with the Russians. But they’re playing the world champions and it’s a chance for them to make a statement.”
Meanwhile, Giovanni Trapattoni and his players arrived into 30 degrees of heat at close to match kick-off time (9.30pm in Nicosia) when they landed in Larnaca last night after a five-hour flight which saw some musical chairs among the Irish party.
The limited number of business class seats at the front of the plane meant that a handful of Irish players were obliged to sit with FAI officials in tourist class seats although, soon after take-off, Liam Brady and goalkeeping coach Alan Kelly were seen moving back to allow Kevin Doyle and Paul McShane take their seats up front. But that still left a few players, including Aiden McGeady and Stephen Hunt, sitting in the economy seats for the duration of the flight.
However, an FAI source later said that the players knew about the situation before boarding the charter flight, that the seats in economy had the leg-room normally found in business class on other airlines and that the squad’s smaller players were assigned the economy seats. He added that there had been no complaints from the players.
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