No turf love as Keane sounds plastic pitch warning

ROBBIE KEANE will be hoping his experience of playing on an artificial pitch today will be a happier one than the last time he stepped out on astroturf.

In August last year Spurs found themselves 3-0 down at the break away to Young Boys Bern in the Champions League, with manager Harry Redknapp later admitting he had a “nasty feeling” going into the game having watched his players struggle on the Swiss team’s artificial turf in training.

Indeed, he revealed that one of the reasons he’d left Keane on the bench at the start — the striker came on in a second half during which Spurs managed two goals in reply — was because the Irish captain was carrying a knock to the knee and hadn’t looked comfortable on the controversial surface in training.

Ominously, perhaps, Keane is also nursing a knock — this time to his back — ahead of today’s game in the Luzhniki.

So angered was Redknapp by the conditions in Bern that, after the game, he declared the pitch should be banned from elite competitions.

“We didn’t like it yesterday and tonight the players were pulling faces and suggesting that they didn’t like the look of it,” he complained.

“We couldn’t get to grips with holding the ball; it was bouncing off us.”

Speaking ahead of today’s game in Moscow — and before the Irish squad trained on the match surface for the first time yesterday — Keane was less critical of the plastic pitch than his old gaffer but nevertheless admitted Ireland will have to be “wary of how quick it is”.

And, from a psychological point of view, he stressed it was vital that Ireland “get it out of their heads” and treat the fixture as “a normal game on a normal pitch.”