News: Emmet Malone talks to the new Irish captain who was surprised to be handed the honour of leading his country at the age of 25

As the snow grew heavier outside, the top table at yesterday's pre-match press conference in Lansdowne Road contained the only two members of the last Irish team to start a game against Sweden still involved with the current squad. One has since become the manager while the other, Shay Given, will be employed tonight in precisely the same role he occupied in April 1999 when he kept a clean sheet as the Republic won the only meeting between these two countries in the past 35 years thanks to goals from Graham Kavanagh and Mark Kennedy.

Beside them on the podium was the day's real focus of attention, Robbie Keane, whose night nearly seven years ago ended in frustration as Mick McCarthy left the teenager to watch the entire game from the bench. His role tonight at Lansdowne Road will be altogether different and the Tottenham striker already has the look of a man who reckons his name and the title, captain of Ireland, have something of a ring when said in quick succession.

Some were surprised when it emerged that Keane rather than Given (who has been named as vice-captain) would skipper a side led in recent years by Roy Keane, Kenny Cunningham and, of course, Staunton himself. The Dubliner, though, admitted only to being slightly taken aback by the timing. "You always dream of leading you country," he said, "but I imagined it might be something I'd get to do later on, never at 25. But then," he continued, "I never thought I'd be playing for Ireland at 17 or that I'd break the scoring record by 24 so you take what comes. All I can say is that I'm honoured and deeply grateful to the manager for the faith he's showing me . . . I don't intend to let anyone down."

Explaining his decision, Staunton said he had been impressed with the way Keane has handled himself at Tottenham both during periods when he was struggling to get his game and then when he was leading the team on the pitch. "Spurs handed him a lot of responsibility and he handled it well," he said.

"He's a world-class player; he has the respect of the other players and the fans see him as an icon. He'll get people going, the players and the fans and I think this will take him on a bit too."

Given, Staunton said, had an important role to play too, but it was one that the new manager expected his goalkeeper to fulfil regardless of whether he is the skipper or not, something that may just have tipped the manager's decision against him.

"I'll be depending on him a lot because he's a leader. But I don't think he needs the armband and I needed somebody out on the park."

The fear might be that the performances of Keane, Ireland's top scorer by a long, long way in recent years, might be adversely affected by the added responsibility, but the player himself insists that this has not been the case at Spurs where he has been captain a few times when Ledley King has been absent.

"I'm not going to suddenly change the way I play or anything that I do," he said, "Stan's picked me for a reason, because of how I am and so there's no point in going and trying to change that."

Having last attracted major media attention here in Ireland for his socialising in the run-up to an important qualifier, this marks quite a departure for Keane. He is, "delighted, excited, ecstatic, you name it," at the thought of leading the team out tonight in front of his friends and family. And happy too, he says, to consign the events of last autumn to history.

Here's to the future, then. Keano is dead . . . long live Keano.