ROY KEANE ON. . .

WELSH PREPARATIONS

“There’s no point ranting and raving next Monday or Tuesday. It’s about balance and giving the right information. We’ve got to make sure we are in the right zone on Friday, and that’s where Martin’s experience comes into it. The players will know a lot about Wales already anyway.”

LEARNING FROM MISTAKES

“Club owners seem to have no patience these days, so you have to try and make less mistakes as you get older and wiser. But experience and making mistakes is part of life.”

GOOD MIDFIELD PLAY

“There’s a lot of lazy midfielders out there, I look at them when they get the ball and the full-back is on and they kind of pass it to the side of them, or just behind them. Pass it in front of them, you can dictate the play by passing the ball ahead and forcing them to get onto it.”

THAT OVERMARS TACKLE

“He wouldn’t have been the toughest player on the planet. I wouldn’t worry going into a tackle with Overmars. If a player takes a bad touch and shows me a little bit of the ball. . . and he played for Arsenal. . . that was all part of my job. There’s no point in praising me. If I couldn’t dominate Overmars in a tackle, I should have been sitting in the stand.”

ENJOYING HIS JOB

“I’d never say I lost my love for the game but you can get frustrated with what’s going on around the outside of the game with chief executives, agents etc. The beauty with the Irish job is that I can home in on the matches and the players on the pitch and not get bogged down by off-the-field stuff.”

HIS TRAINING-GROUND FOCUS

“I tend to look towards the midfielders if we have the 11 v 11 because I’d like to think I have that extra bit of information to give them, just like Steve Guppy would talk a lot to the wide players and Seamus (McDonagh) would focus on the goalkeepers. Steve Walford does a lot defensively, while Martin would have an overview.”

BARCELONA v PSG

“That was a freak game, you could analyse it and say defensively it was poor and PSG gave some bad goals away but in terms of attacking play it was fantastic. I’m not sure we’d want that much goalmouth action in the Wales game.”