Mick: We can now push on with job

He said: "Roy has benefited from a very impressive PR machine but I want people to know that he is the only reason he is not here today. When he was declared fit for the World Cup finals, I was doing cartwheels. I wanted him here but events over the last weeks dictated that he's not here. It is something that I am not happy about, it should not have happened.

"It is easy to say there is more to life than the World Cup, that he wants to spend time with his wife and children. I have a wife and children too and it had not been easy for them but we will tough it out, don't worry about that.

Asked if he considered walking away from the job, McCarthy replied: "Certain things that cropped up - or might have cropped up - made me consider all sorts of things over the last 24 hours."

McCarthy insisted that Keane's absence from the World Cup is entirely down to the player.

"It is his fault and his fault alone," he said. "We were prepared to have him back but he opted not to. I'm just glad it is all over now and we can concentrate on the job in hand.

"We have had to maintain the team spirit and maintain everything the team has stood for in the last six years and I think we have done that. We have had to motivate ourselves and the players and we have come through it.

"We have learned from it and we are stronger for it. We want to move forward now, enjoy this World Cup and get the support of the Irish people behind us."

In the past seven days, Keane has ripped the Irish nation apart, decimated the squad's preparation for what should be the time of their lives and left a manager on the edge.

"It was like watching someone in the family die slowly," said Football Association of Ireland treasurer John Delaney. The analogy was apt.

Keane shook the last ounce of blood from McCarthy with a campaign, orchestrated by his puppeteer and biographer Eamon Dunphy, that left a nation clinging to the forlorn hope that their one sporting God might bury his differences with McCarthy and play in Japan after all.

Instead, Keane chose to bury the manager when he rejected the olive branch last night. Only a passage through to the second phase of the World Cup finals will see McCarthy stay in this job before the friendly trip to Helsinki next August. He will never lose his players. Their show of solidarity with the manager yesterday was the final straw as far as Keane was concerned.

But McCarthy, thousands of miles away while Keane glistens across the Irish Sea, may not win the public back without a successful journey through Group E and those games against Cameroon, Germany and Saudi Arabia.

And he will definitely not have the stomach for a fight if St Roy announces his international comeback for the start of the European Championship qualifiers in Moscow next September.

Thus, the World Cup has gone to the dogs for us all here as an Ireland squad, shattered from nights staring at the ceiling according to Niall Quinn, prepare to face a Cameroon outfit wondering if it is in fact the tempestuous Dutch they will face after all in Niigata when Saturday comes.

Ireland already resemble a prize fighter on the ropes and McCarthy, robbed by circumstance of his prize fighter, is the promoter who must wonder if it is Barry McGuigan or Terry Wogan standing in that ring.