Robbie at the ready

There were so many injury scare stories coming out of the Ireland camp this week that it was easy to forget that Robbie Keane had, briefly, provided the daddy of them all when the word came through from America that Ireland’s skipper and all-time record goal-scorer had suffered a hamstring injury playing for LA Galaxy on Montreal Impact’s artificial pitch.

“We’d played on astroturf and the same thing happened last year when I did my glut on astro and was out for three weeks,” he explained. “I’m still not used to playing on it and probably the body reacts differently when you’re used to playing on grass for so long. It tightened up after the game and I found I couldn’t sprint, even at three-quarter pace. It was then I went for a scan and, luckily, it showed there wasn’t a tear. But the physios decided to keep me out of the Chivas game the next Saturday because I could easily have pulled it.”

Still, Keane admitted that, before the scan eased his mind, there was a moment when he feared the worst.