REPUBLIC OF IRELAND v RUSSIA BIG MATCH INTERVIEW:Liam Lawrence has a passion to continue to wear the green jersey, even taking a drop to a lower division to help his chances, writes EMMET MALONE

IT’S A little after lunchtime in a hotel on the edge of Portsmouth when Liam Lawrence, almost unnoticed, arrives into a bar area populated mainly by small pockets of business people preoccupied with their work.

For the moment, this is where the Republic of Ireland international calls home and, while it’s not exactly the lap of luxury, it’s at least a lot nicer inside than you imagine it’s going to be when you first lay eyes on the place from the motorway.

Still, it’s not the sort of place you’d willingly leave your family and comfortable home behind for, even in the relatively short term, unless you had good cause but then Lawrence can think of few better reasons than the one that brought him here – playing football, with Portsmouth boss Steve Cotterill having offered the prospect of regular starts to a man who reckoned the choice was between leaving Stoke or resigning himself to life on the margins of Tony Pulis’ squad.

And the bigger picture, he insists, is his blossoming international career, with the 28-year-old, who only made his first appearance for Ireland a little over a year ago, anxious to cement his place in Giovanni Trapattoni’s team having recently earned his 10th cap against Andorra.

His prospects, admits the likeable midfielder, did not look the best initially given the widely held belief that the current manager has stronger options on the flanks than anywhere else on the pitch.

Injuries to the likes of Damien Duff and Stephen Hunt, however, have helped to present Lawrence with opportunities he has enthusiastically grabbed and his eagerness to please the veteran Italian has not been limited to the pitch with the midfielder essentially offering Trapattoni, whose advice to Darron Gibson and Aiden McGeady fell on deaf ears, a considerable say in the future direction of his club career.

“Yeah, I spoke to Traps before I came to Portsmouth,” he says. “I was speaking to Cotterill and I asked Trap would it affect anything if I decided to go, because, obviously, I wouldn’t have gone, I wouldn’t have wanted it to ruin my international chances.

“If Trap had said that it would have done then I would have listened to him because I wouldn’t want anything to ruin what I think has been an amazing thing. I love getting called up, going over; I love the craic and seeing the lads and everything.

“It was good when he said, ‘no, go, I need you to be playing football, it’s okay. As long as you’re playing football every week, you’ll always be involved’. I was like, ‘right, fair enough’.”

His long-time partner and fiancé, Rebecca, might wish she had the same amount of say in the move for Lawrence admits that after she had argued he should give Stoke another six months and shown a marked reluctance to move so far away from her family near Doncaster, he had eventually insisted on making the call, telling her she would have to “like or lump it”.

“It was difficult, but in the end I told her I had to do it for football reasons, I needed to be playing.”

The plan now is to find somewhere as quickly as possible so that she and their young son, Thomas, can join him on the south coast. Lawrence’s apparent devotion to the Irish cause is, on the face of it, precisely the sort of thing that tends to earn ridicule from observers in Britain.

His connection to the country is slight, a grandfather, Jimmy Diggins, from Kerry who became estranged from the family for reasons the player declines to go into (“It just all went off,” he observes, “I can’t say too much really.”), so that Liam did not grow up with anything like the awareness of his “Irishness” the likes of Lee Carsley or even, for that matter, England international Martin Keown, had due to their family environment.

He knew enough, though, to know he was eligible when Mick McCarthy and Ian Evans, then in charge of Sunderland where he was playing but still recruiting for the Irish cause, asked if he had any roots that would allow him to qualify.

“I’d never really thought about it up until then because nobody had ever asked me,” says the player whose earlier career – rejection by Nottingham Forest who he had joined at nine from local club Retford before a few good years as a young pro at Mansfield Town – had never merited much interest from anyone at the FAI, “but I was delighted and as soon as they mentioned it to me I went to see my nan who explained the Irish side of things to me.”

His grandfather had passed away by then, but Lawrence had enough to go on and proceeded to sort out the paper work by himself, eventually heading for the Irish embassy in London in order to secure his passport.

Though English herself, his grandmother, along with the rest of his family, he says, was immensely proud he was getting the opportunity to play international football. His first cap took a little longer than expected to arrive with Steve Staunton calling him up for his first game in charge in February 2006 for a friendly against Sweden but never playing him in the end.

In the meantime, he says, he has developed a much stronger sense of identity as he has settled into the squad and strong links have since been forged between him and his family in England and relations in Athlone. “From the first cap to my 10th, the difference in how I feel has been huge,” he says. “When you’re going to the games you can see that all the bars are full, they’re all green with the hats on. You can see that it means a lot to the country and that means a lot to me.

“I spoke to Breeny about it (at Sunderland) and I remember one of the lads there taking the piss out of his cockney accent. He said something about: ‘How can you be Irish with an accent like that?’ And he (Breen) just went totally off the lid. Breeny was going to kill the lad, he’d crossed a line that no one knew was there. I suppose I can understand that a lot better now. Because once you feel that sense of pride it means a lot.”

Trapattoni eventually gave him his chance and while he briefly feared he’d blown it by turning in a mediocre performance against Nigeria at Craven Cottage last May, he did much better against South Africa in Limerick last September where a goal and a great deal of industry clearly endeared him to the Italian.

The affection is mutual with Lawrence talking with considerable enthusiasm about both the Italian’s approach and personality.

“He’s very honest. He says it as he sees it and I believe in his methods. Sometimes people say that we go long ball a bit too much, but we play some good stuff at times as well. I think he’s done a great job, his record stands up, and we were suddenly so close to the World Cup although that’s another matter, isn’t it.”

Trapattoni can have, Lawrence admits, a rather short fuse when things aren’t done the way he intends, but, observes the player whose maternal grandmother left the small Italian coastal town of Fondi for England not long after the Second World War, it’s nothing to be surprised about.

“He’s a typical older Italian fella, isn’t he,” he says with a broadening smile. “I’ve been over to Italy with the grandma and met that side of the family and they were basically all Traps. She’s as fiery as hell when she gets going, they are too and when Trap loses his temper he’s pretty fiery as well.”

Given the manager’s nature, Lawrence views the story that circulated in the aftermath of the Paris game, that the players had staged a mini revolt, insisting themselves on playing a more attacking game as “ridiculous”.

“Look,” he says emphatically, “we’d never question Traps, ever, because everybody believes in what he’s trying to do. That night we just happened to play really, really well and we should have beaten them, we should have finished them off before we even got to the hand-ball and they knew that.

“When it comes down to when it matters in the qualifiers, I just hope it (a similarly strong performance) happens against Russia. Usually we do well against the better sides. But we’ve got to build on where we left off in Armenia, grinding results out when we need to because that’s important.”

If they can, and he is adamant the team is a match for anyone on its day, reaching the next European Championships and perhaps the World Cup two years later wouldn’t appear to be beyond the realms of possibility and Lawrence reckons getting to play at either would represent the high point of his career.

“It’d be amazing,” he says a little dreamily. “That would mean more to me than winning the Premier League to be honest, to go away and play in the World Cup or the Euros; it would be amazing.

“Think about it – all the Irish fans going over there and filling up the stadiums, playing in front of millions and millions of people world wide. Playing against top teams, I’d love to play against England, it would be class. I’d much rather do all that than win the Premier League.”

The latter goal, of course, is rather a remote prospect, not least because he has just opted to drop out of it in part so as to maximise his international opportunities. It’s not the first time he has felt the need to leave a club for the sake of his career and it has been, to be fair, rather less traumatic than his departure from Roy Keane’s Sunderland nearly four years ago.

The now 28-year-old had just made the front pages of the tabloids following his role in an incident involving two team-mates, a very young woman and a video camera that he now describes ruefully as having been rooted in the “stupidity of a much younger man”.

He left the Stadium of Light soon after, although he insists Keane never suggested that the story was an issue. “I have to be careful what I say because I fell out with him good and proper to be honest,” he says. “It (the tabloid story) came out, but he never said anything about the tape, he never mentioned it.

“We had a big argument on a training pitch and then afterwards I went into his office and we had another argument, nearly toe to toe, that sort of thing. The day after, I was at Stoke. I’d sort of been speaking to them already to be fair because I wasn’t playing for Keane, he’d been killing me.”

Asked if his position was similar to that of Tony Cascarino at Chelsea where the striker recalls Glenn Hoddle repeatedly putting down players less talented than the manager felt he had been, Lawrence says it was.

“Yeah, very much,” he says with the frustration of that time suddenly apparent. “Keano has to remember that he was a one-off. He was a fantastic player, but not everybody is as good as him. He demands that of you, but if you can’t do what he’s asking then you can’t do it and I needed to get away from him.”

His departure from Stoke came after he and Pulis essentially agreed he had more chance of playing regularly elsewhere.

Still, when a move to Celtic fell through for reasons he says he does not fully understand, his decision to join Portsmouth while they were rooted to the foot of the Championship table raised a few eyebrows.

“People were saying that in today’s market clubs couldn’t afford the transfer fee, they couldn’t afford the wages and that the only way it was going to happen was if it was a swap deal. That’s what happened, but then people were saying I was mad to do it, to come to a club that was at the bottom of the Championship but, we’ll see, won’t we.

“Personally, I’ve come here and I believe the club will be fine. It’s a good club with great support. It’s got some good players and really good supporters so we’ll see, the proof will be in the pudding.”

Seven points and 11 goals – three of them scored and a couple more made by Lawrence himself – from their last three games goes some way towards suggesting the midfielder’s hunch may just be right.

Whatever happens, Lawrence is enjoying the fact his “honest” brand of football is valued by both of his managers now. “I’m never going to go past four or five the way Duffer or Aido (McGeady) does, but my delivery is decent enough and I was looking at the stats here at Portsmouth the other day and saw that I’m averaging 12.5km in every game.

“I think managers appreciate that, that even when you’re having a bit of a beast, you’re trying to help the team win the game in whatever way you can.”

It is, one suspects, all Trapattoni would ever dream of asking of him, or anyone else in this Ireland squad.