Almost a decade after he broke Niall Quinn's record of 21 international goals for the Republic of Ireland by scoring two against the Faroe Islands at Lansdowne Road, Robbie Keane will become the country's most capped player in tonight's game at the same venue against the same opponents.
There’s enough symmetry about it to have prompted just a tiny suspicion a couple of weeks ago when the FAI had to correct its press release of 24 hours earlier and make clear that the striker would be coming in for the games against England and Georgia after all, that Giovanni Trapattoni’s “cap-ee-tan” might actually be preparing to walk away once the record was wrapped up. Nothing, it turns out, could be further from the truth.
“I don’t feel I am coming to the end,” he said yesterday, as he sat beside the man who has handed him more than a third of his caps at this stage, “because I am not, I still have another at least five, six years left in me.”
Keane’s rivals for the shirt might have slightly mixed feelings about the Dubliner sticking around that long but what is more surprising is the fact that there will be a portion of Ireland’s fans actually disappointed.
The 32-year-old has never, it seems, managed to win everyone over, with a determined minority persistently criticising him for everything from not pulling his weight to preventing a tactical rethink to, in recent weeks, even turning up when they wanted to see younger players get a chance. Keane is suitably bemused.
'Scoring goals'
"It (the criticism) is not something I worry too much about, to be totally honest," he said. "As a football player, all you have to do if you do get criticised is do your talking on the pitch, and the way you do that is by scoring goals and turning up for your country when other people don't turn up and don't want to play for their country . . . having that will to want to do everything you can for the country.
“If people want to criticise me for wanting to play for my country,” he added a little contemptuously, “then I don’t think I’ve got the problem.”
Keane has certainly done his share of talking out there where it is supposed to count. He made his debut in Olomouc in the Czech Republic in March 1998, coming on for Alan Maybury at half-time, but remembers more about his first home game, against Argentina, the following month.
"To play at Lansdowne Road when I used to go there to the schoolboy stand, get my £2 ticket and sit with my brother and cousins, was obviously great," he says. So too, he recalls, was the World Cup in Japan and South Korea, especially that late equaliser against Germany, while the costly 1-1 draw in Macedonia in 1999 and the controversial one 10 years later in Paris represent, he says, the career lows.
Since eclipsing Quinn’s record in 2004 he has utterly obliterated it and is now on 56 goals, second only to Didier Drogba amongst active international players around the world.
His 126th appearance, meanwhile, will move him to the fringes of the 15 or so most capped current players and the leading 50-odd of all time. The leaders are well out of sight but Alan Kelly suggested the other day that he might well make it to the 150 mark and Keane is not laughing when he says he is not ruling it out.
'Just keep going'
"It's not," he observes, "something where I look ahead and say, 'I really want to get this'. I have never, ever done that in my career. I was happy to get 100 caps – delighted to get 100 caps – and now to continue and keep getting as many as I can, great.
“I’ll just keep going as long as I can,” he continues. “Obviously, there were a lot of questions about it (after the European Championships) because myself, Richie, Shay and Duffer came through together, so (people seemed to feel) we should leave together. But that’s not the case. Shay is older than me, even though we came in around the same time. It was Damien’s decision to retire but I didn’t contemplate it. If I felt like I had nothing to offer the team, I certainly would do that, but I still feel like I have a lot to offer the national team.
“People forget I am 32 years of age; it’s not like I’m 34, 36 or whatever. People are talking about (David) Forde being in the squad and he’s a newcomer, but he’s 33 years of age; I am a year older than Wes Hoolahan and he’s a newcomer; John O’Shea is the same age as me. People talk about it because I have been around for so long. For me, I have certainly got no intentions at all at this moment in time.
“I still have the same appetite as I did when I was 18 years of age and so for me, it (the aim) is just to keep playing. I will,” he concluded firmly, “retire when I stop scoring goals.”
