GARY BREEN, the Republic of Ireland and Birmingham City defender, is likely to be out of the game for a minimum period of a fortnight after being assaulted in an incident in a car park in London.
Breen suffered head and hand injuries after being attacked by a group of men as he left a hotel. He later had several stitches inserted in a head wound and underwent surgery yesterday to repair broken bones in his hand.
A club spokesman said he was horrified by reports of what he understood to be an unprovoked attack. He expected that the player would be out for at least two weeks but stressed that was dependant on medical reports.
Breen, one of the bigger successes in Mick McCarthy's rebuilding programme, won nine caps in the year just ending and played in all three of the World Cup qualifying games to date.
Meanwhile, a discussion document issued yesterday by Bernard O'Byrne, the FAI chief executive, sets out the tantalising prospect of a National League representative team, being admitted to the European Champions League.
Giving expression to an aspiration nurtured for some time by football legislators in this country, O'Byrne paints a scenario whereby a National League representative team would be given a seat at the game's richest table.
The way he envisages it, UEFA could be lobbied successfully to countenance an idea which would test their maxim of "scaring about football" and making the competition as representative as possible.
Acknowledging that it would require radical new thinking on the part of the European authorities to bring it to fruition, O'Byrne points to the fact that they have already shifted the goalposts ink specific instances, by permitting second placed teams in national championships, to participate in the Champions League.
"We presume that UEFA want to cast the net as wide as possible without reducing the quality of the competition and by permitting us to field a representative team, they would be seen to be doing this," he said.
"I am suggesting that on a trial basis, they allow the National League to field a representative side on the premise that it would greatly help to foster the game in Ireland, not least in the amount of money it would generate.
"Monies coming back to the League would be apportioned in accordance with clubs' placings in the previous season's championship. All clubs would, however, benefit and there would also be a spin off for those in the First Division. I appreciate that the whole idea is somewhat radical but nothing ventured, nothing gained."
One suspects that the concept is inspired, in part, by the experience of the new European Cup competition in rugby in which provincial or regional teams are allowed to compete.
It is not, however, a case of comparing like with like, for while the rugby authorities are anxious to promote their new competition by giving it an extra representative element which it would otherwise have this is not a perceived weakness of its soccer counterpart.
The discussion document has been distributed to all 22 National League clubs and is likely to be debated at the next meeting of the Management Committee. The response, almost certainly, will be enthusiastic but the bigger question by far, is how it will be received by the hierarchy of UEFA.
Several other small footballing nations have been nurturing the same idea but as yet, there is no evidence that UEFA, and the political powers who influence it, are receptive to the innovative thinking.
