Aiden O’Brien eager to cement his place in Martin O’Neill’s starting plans

In the perennial Robbie Keane succession stakes, you could say that Aiden O’Brien has a head-start on the rest of the current competition.

Which is a nice way of making the pretty sobering point that, with a header on his senior debut away to Poland in September, the Millwall striker did what the five other forward contenders in the latest Irish squad — Scott Hogan, Sean Maguire, Callum Robinson, Ronan Curtis, and Michael Obafemi — have yet to do: score for their country.