MENTIONING a testimonial match to a professional footballer at this time of the year, brings to the player images of a chance to cruise through a soft afternoon without the normal pressures that come with a competitive match.

Because of this, it is notoriously dangerous to read anything whatsoever into them and you would have to say that there was nothing obvious in yesterday's proceedings at Lansdowne Road that would indicate that this game was, in any way, an exception to the rule.

Two sides weakened by injuries and the unavailability of key personnel going through the motions in front of a very big crowd, who didn't particularly care who won. It never exactly had the making of a classic.

For all that, however, there were a few positive points on which McCarthy will reflect, while for the likes of David Connolly and Dave Savage it will have been a useful opportunity to integrate into the senior panel.

In the case of Connolly, his opportunity is also his biggest problem. There is nobody else coming through in that position and it will be the job of his manager to attempt to aid his development without heaping too much responsibility on his shoulders before he has the experience to handle it.

At this stage it seems somewhat remarkable that we are looking at a kid who has played just a handful of first division games at Watford as the big hope for the future but, unless somebody else pops out of the woodwork, it really does seem that a great deal is going to depend on how good a player Connolly becomes over the next few years.

This game will have been a chance for Connolly to get the feel of things with the Irish squad and, on the face of it, he should be very happy with the way he performed on his first big Dublin outing.

Despite his youth and relative inexperience, he took his goal very well, while also looking quite neat and tidy with a willingness to show up all over the pitch in search of the ball.

Against he is very slight and looks like he would have serious difficulties trying to go around quality defenders but then, at this stage there is definitely considerable potential there and the thing about being so young is, of course, that you have the time to learn.

Hopefully he will not get thrown too far in at the deep end as, with the lack of any real depth to the panel of players that we have available to us here, there is a bit of a tendency to rely too heavily on those young players who show promise and, while we should have a better idea about Connolly's worth to us after the trip to the United States, the way he is handled over the next couple of years will be important.

Of the other youngsters, Savage and Mark Kennedy both acquitted themselves quite well, while Mick McCarthy will also be happy with the way Ken Cunningham came through yesterday's game.

When a player's former club manager brings him through to international level there is and added compliment involved, because that manager knows so much more about that player, having seen him warts and all in the day to day grind of the ordinary game.

There is also a special relationship because the manager will consider the players to be "his" in a way that the other squad members are not and this will surely be the case where Cunningham, Savage and Kennedy are concerned.

In the cases of these three too, McCarthy has a role to play in helping to get the best out of the players. He will have a particular insight into their shortcomings and a sense of how he wants them to fit into his future teams, so he has a particular opportunity to mould them into assets for the future.

Players coming on to the international scene like this are impressionable and it's up to McCarthy to make that impression.

He will be hoping to make considerable progress on the trip to the States, for spells away like that offer great opportunities to gel a team together. There will be chances to practise basic set pieces, a few good run outs and time for the players together to build morale.

It is perhaps a bit of a pity that those more senior squad members who have opted out have done so, because the next time everybody is together again there will only be a few days before we are playing for real, with World Cup points at stake and, although McCarthy has given the players themselves the option of not travelling which is fair enough, the more time that they spend together as a group the better.

Obviously the young players will benefit from the chance to play and from taking on greater responsibilities within the team, but it would obviously be better to have the players who are going to be kicking off our next qualification campaign on hand and I think at this stage that it is going to be the very experienced players that are called in for the first qualifier. As for how we do in our group, the worry still persists that we simply cannot score enough goals to qualify and it's hard to see Connolly being of much use to us at that early stage.

It's nice to see the ball being passed around by an Irish team these days, but we have to marry that to the sort of approach we used to take - the sort that made it so difficult for other teams to beat us.

If we do not deny other teams opportunities to play their game against us, then we going to find ourselves in trouble again and again. At the moment the three centre backs system seems to create more difficulties than it solves for us, but McCarthy seems certain to stick with it and the forthcoming, hopefully slightly more demanding, friendlies will provide another few opportunities for him to prove that he is on the right track before the stakes get higher.