Robbie keen to produce goods

YOU have to suspect that if Robbie Keane needed any further motivation to speed up the healing process on his injured calf, it would have been not only finding himself in an ice chamber cooled to minus 120 degrees – but discovering that, for company, he had former heavyweight boxer Frank Bruno singing ‘Danny Boy’.

“It was a bit bizarre,” says Keane of the cryotherapy sessions which helped ensure that he could make his comeback to football some two weeks ahead of schedule. “You’d do two sessions a day, go in for four minutes, come out, get on the bike and then back in for another few minutes. And you don’t want to be doing any longer than that – trust me!”

Keane pulled the muscle in his first appearance for West Ham in January, a game in which he got on the score-sheet against Blackpool, but although – perhaps unwisely – he turned out for the Hammers again in their next match against Birmingham City, he was prematurely forced out of the fray and sidelined for six weeks in the course of which he also missed Ireland’s 3-0 friendly win against Wales.

Since then, he has managed just 20 minutes of first team action against Stoke and 65 minutes in the reserves – Keane notes that he wanted to play the 90 but the medical staff advised caution – but, for all that, both he and manager Giovanni Trapattoni are sufficiently convinced of his fitness that he will start for Ireland tonight and, in so doing, equal Andy Townsend’s record of 40 caps as Irish captain.

“I feel good though I obviously lack match fitness,” says Keane. “I’ve been training hard at West Ham to get my fitness up as high up as possible but there’s nothing like the match fitness you get from actually playing games. I haven’t started a game for six weeks so, in terms of whether I can last 90 minutes, we’ll just have to see tonight. At the end of the day, that decision will be up to the manager.

“All I can say is that I’m excited to be back and looking forward to this game. I’ve been very lucky not to have had too many injuries and this one came at a time when I didn’t want it to happen. That’s been the most frustrating thing. When you go to a new club you want to make an immediate impact so it was a blow to get injured so early on.”

A friendly it might have been but missing that Wales match didn’t sit too easily with the skipper either.

“Every player wants to play for their country and I’m no different,” he says. “Just because you’re captain doesn’t mean you have the right to play every game — you have to earn your spot. I’ve worked very hard to get back, the manager has shown faith in me and hopefully I can produce again like I did over the last few years.”

Keane is also at pains to clarify comments he made about his Ireland role at his first Upton Park press conference, clumsily worded remarks which led to some excitable headlines of the ‘pick-me-or-I’ll-walk’ variety.

“I’ve said on numerous occasions that if someone young took my place, I’d be happy enough to walk away because I’ve had a tremendous career. But what I said that day just got picked up completely wrong. I’m certainly not considering retirement. It’s just that I was asked the question and I said that if someone young, fitter and better able to do the job came along, and the manager felt it was time for me to be pushed aside, then I’d be happy enough to go.

“But I want to play as long as I can. I think everyone has seen over the years that I’ve always been committed, always wanted to play for my country, and that’s never going to change.”

That said, when Brian O’Driscoll’s recent observation that the older you get, the more the games mean, is put to Keane, the 31-year-old implicitly acknowledges that time is running out for him as an international player.

“I understand what Brian is saying,” he reflects. “This could potentially be my last campaign, though I hope not, but to play at the finals of another big tournament would be fantastic. As you get older you see the end coming and you really want to get to these competitions and be involved.”

As a senior member of the panel, Keane looks at tonight’s three competitive debutants through the prism of his own memories of being a rookie back in the late 90s.

“When I came through as a young lad, I was very nervous, very excited, bursting with energy and running all over place, so to have someone like Niall Quinn to guide you through a game was fantastic,” he says. “But don’t forget that people like Keiren Westwood, Kevin Foley and Darren O’Dea have played the game for a while. It’s not like they’re young kids. They’ve played football in the Championship and the Premiership for a long time. So they have plenty of experience, just not at international level.”

He is also quick to remind you that Ireland have plenty of that in tonight’s side too. “Macedonia is going to be (a) tough game and a player like Pandev is going to be a massive threat. But we have players in our squad who are a massive threat too, like Aiden McGeady and Damien Duff who is in flying form. We had a great performance in the last game against Wales and that should give us confidence but we need to get back to winning ways in qualifying.”