Republic's pounds 5m price of failure

The Republic of Ireland's players will lose around pounds 50,000 per man in bonus payments and the country's Football Association can wave goodbye to an estimated pounds 5m if they do not reach the European Championship finals.

And the Irish will almost certainly lose the the services of their manager, Jack Charlton, if Portugal put them out of the finals in tonight's decisive Group Six qualifying match in Lisbon. Charlton will probably resign if the Republic fail to qualify, even though he now insists he will not immediately walk away if the result goes against him in Benfica's famous Stadium of Light.

If so, it would bring to an end a glorious era in Irish football and present the incoming manager with an enormous rebuilding task. Charlton has shown considerable loyalty to an ageing squad, but if the Irish fail to qualify it would almost certainly be time for a clear-out.

The Football Association of Ireland's commercial manager, Donie Butler, said: "There is certainly a hell of a lot riding on tomorrow night's events. I estimate Uefa will hand out pounds 1.52m to each of the 16 nations who make the finals and, of course, there will be huge new openings for sponsorship, advertising and television fees even though we already have very valuable agreements in place taking us through to the year 2002.

"Reaching the World Cup finals in 1994 was the probably the height of financial growth from our marketing sources, but it is an on-going story as this will, hopefully, be the fourth major finals we have reached in eight years." The 22 Republic players who went to the World Cup shared a pounds 1.4m qualifying bonus, boosted by reaching the last 16. And this time, although the payment is not expected to be quite so much, the squad limit for the European finals is 20.

Andy Townsend, the Republic's inspirational captain, appears to be losing his battle to be fit for tonight's game. He is desperate to make the team, but Charlton appears close to ruling him out because of the foot injury which forced him off after just 30 minutes of Aston Villa's Premiership win at West Ham 11 days ago.

Townsend was unable to pass a fitness test yesterday despite a course of injections designed to ease the pain in his instep. Charlton is likely to leave it late before making a final decision, but his probable absence will leave Charlton a complicated selection puzzle.

Steve Staunton has been declared fit for his familiar role on the left side of midfield, though he has been out for three weeks with hamstring trouble, having had Achilles tendon surgery in the summer. But with Manchester United's Roy Keane also absent again after his latest hernia operation, Charlton needs security at the base of midfield and Blackburn's Jeff Kenna was not an outstanding success in the anchor role against Latvia last month.

"I've still quite a few options and may bring Phil Babb out of the back four to play in front of them, and put Alan Kernaghan in there," said Charlton. "We've managed without Roy before," Charlton said - in fact Keane has played in only three of the other 11 qualifiers - "but when you are also missing Andy from that area it becomes very difficult for us.

"We are not the team we were. We used to have a phenomenal work-rate and always said the most important thing was what we did, not the opposition. But some of the players are getting a bit long in the tooth now and others are inexperienced. We'll see."

The Republic produced their best performance for some time when beating Portugal, the leaders, 1-0 in Dublin in April and a repeat tonight will put them into the finals as group winners.

Otherwise they must sweat on Northern Ireland beating third-placed Austria in Belfast for the chance to almost certainly take part in a play-off against the runners-up of another group at Liverpool on 13 December.

PORTUGAL (probable): Baia; Secretario (both FC Porto), Couto (Parma), Helder (Benfica), Santos (FC Porto), Sousa (Juventus) Oceano (Sporting Lisbon), Figo (Barcelona) Joao V Pinto (Benfica), Rui Costa (Fiorentina), Domingos (FC Porto).

REPUBLIC OF IRELAND (probable): A Kelly (Sheff Utd); G Kelly (Leeds), Babb (Liverpool), McGrath (Aston Villa), Irwin (Man Utd); Houghton (C Palace), McAteer (Liverpool), Kenna (Blackburn), Staunton (Aston Villa); Quinn (Man City), Aldridge (Tranmere).