While the locals turned out in force at the airport in the hope of checking out Roy Keane for themselves, those who had travelled without the captain were more anxious to point to the remaining strength within a squad which will train here for the first time this morning.

It's early for Mick McCarthy to be giving away much about Thursday's second leg of this World Cup play-off, and the Ireland manager conceded that much may depend on how Steve Staunton and Niall Quinn look today. But when it came to central midfield, he made it clear he prefers to concentrate on the strengths Mark Kinsella will bring to the side rather than on any weakness that might be caused by the absence of the Manchester United midfielder.

"I've said all along," he remarked shortly after arriving in the Iranian capital yesterday afternoon, "when it was Kins (Kinsella) and Roy playing, that if they missed a game having Mattie (Holland) as a stand-in would make things a lot easier to bear.

"Well, now we have Mark, who has been an absolute stalwart of the midfield, as a stand-in for Roy. We don't want to miss Roy, but when you've got such capable players to come in then it makes it a lot easier.

"Mattie and Mark played together in Estonia, and while I know it was a very different sort of game, they were outstanding, so I have absolutely no worries about them for this one at all."

While McCarthy has grown used to the endless questions and stories about his skipper, some of the players have grown weary of reading them.

Kinsella will replace Keane in Thursday's line-up, but he made no bones about the fact that the saturation coverage of the man and his knee had started to become more than a little tiresome.

"To be honest, I'm just glad that we probably won't be able to read the papers out here," said the Charlton Athletic player, who returns after two games on the sidelines. "We're not stupid, it will all be about Roy and how much we're going to miss him.

"I'm not saying that it's disrespectful," he added, "and I'm not saying that it's going to be easy, but I think that Mattie and I deserve a little more credit for the job we do when he's not around.

"As it is, it's hard for us when Roy's not around. Every time you see it all over the place about how we're going to struggle. There was a lot of pressure on us in Estonia, just to carry on the good work after the Portugal game and I think we did that, but it was as if we weren't expected to."

Kinsella, in fact, appears to have an affinity with Holland. The pair, he points out, moved to their current clubs at about the same time, while they live less than half an hour away on different sides of the same Essex town.

"So in a way I see our careers as having gone together in a way," he says.

Though Kinsella admits he was disappointed after being dropped last weekend, he insists that he had absolutely no complaint in the circumstances.

"I'd missed the Netherlands because I was injured and Cyprus because I didn't have enough games under my belt, and Mattie was outstanding on both occasions so there were certainly no hard feelings. He's started a lot of the games in this campaign on the bench and ended up back there no matter how well he's done, even after the Portugal game when he came on and scored, so I know I had no complaints when it came to my turn."

Now, though, he feels he is coming back for what can be one of the most memorable days in Irish football history with the team, he insists, in a strong position to capitalise on Saturday's win.

McCarthy will not have the opportunity to weigh up his striking options until the squad train this morning.

While he waits to check on both Niall Quinn and would-be captain Steve Staunton, he suggested he will stick with the formula that has served his side so well over the course of this qualification campaign rather than meddle with his formation in the hope of defending the first leg lead.

"We've not come here to sit back and I don't even believe in all that stuff about protecting anything," he said. "We've played 4-4-2 in every game except the spell in Portugal when I took Niall off and went 4-3-3 or 4-5-1 or whatever you want to call it.

"We've won the first game in Dublin, but that's dead as far as I'm concerned now. This is a different game and we want a win or a draw from it, and we'll go about getting the result we need in the same way that we always do."