Case for dismissal was too strong

The case for his survival may have been less than compelling but as news broke last night that Brian's Kerr's fate had been sealed by a vote of the FAI's board it was hard not to feel sorry for the 52-year-old Dubliner on a personal level.

If John Delaney had his way in January of 2003, when he sought to have Bryan Robson appointed in Kerr's place, it would all be rather different.

The Englishman would presumably have walked away in circumstances like these disappointed that a job, which might have proved a useful stepping-stone to greater things, hadn't worked out but without much real emotion.

With Kerr, though, it was easy to believe him when he said managing the Republic of Ireland was something akin to a dream come true. Now, after less than three years in the post that dream is over and though there will doubtless be some decent offers during the weeks and months ahead by his own measure of these things, it's more or less all downhill from here.

The day he was unveiled by the association to huge acclaim in the Shelbourne Hotel, Kerr himself acknowledged that he would be judged on the basis of results in the job. Sadly for him, it is primarily on precisely that basis that he fell last night.

There may well be something to the suggestion that he was a victim of internal politics too, but the fact is that had the results been better he would have been untouchable.

That he could point, as he has done in each of the major interviews he has done since the Switzerland game last week, to the fact that his preparations for each and every game had been meticulous, was never going to come close to saving him. The reality is that those who had witnessed his methods previously had always expected that much from him . . . that much and a good deal more.

Most of all it might have been expected that Kerr would get the best out of the group of players he inherited from Mick McCarthy. His own passion for the job was beyond question and his ability, while in charge of Ireland's youth sides, to inspire teenage players to heights many would never scale again, marked him out as a man whose motivational skills would be a key asset. Still, for whatever reason, there was little enough evidence that he had it in his gift to make this side, as great managers do, amount to more than the sum of its parts.

There might be many reasons for that failure, among them the shortcomings of the players themselves but overcoming such hurdles is a key part of the job and it was hard to escape the feeling from rather early on that Kerr was failing to fully connect.

He has reacted angrily in recent days to suggestions that there was no game plan ahead of last week's crucial game against the Swiss and the idea is, quite frankly, ridiculous. What is almost blindingly obvious to those who witnessed the game, however, is that his players either did not fully understand what was required of them by their manager or they were wholly incapable of implementing the scheme he had devised to beat a decent but far from awesome side at home.

Late on there was the added concern that he appeared, with elimination from the World Cup staring him in the face, incapable of substantially altering things. With his original 4-4-2 line-up having failed to seriously trouble the Swiss, Kerr made only like-for-like switches all of which involved the replacement of players who, though playing poorly enough on the night, had previously shown themselves to be the sort who might pull something out of the bag and grab a goal. Rarely can a team with real hopes of making it to a major championship finals have limped more tamely out at the tail end of the qualifying competition.

Qualification, of course, hadn't simply been blown last Wednesday night. Kerr suggested afterwards that the turning point had been last month's game against France, something that allowed him to portray Ireland's fate as having been decided by Thierry Henry's fleeting moment of second half brilliance. The fact is that a draw against France would not have prevented the team finishing outside the group's top two. A win in either game against Israel, on the other hand, would have and it is those games that he will surely come to reflect upon as having been the most costly.

In both matches the Republic allowed its lead over an average if very well organised group of players slip away. The manner in which it occurred in Tel Aviv was terribly disappointing with the initiative steadily surrendered over the course of the second half but the Dublin game in June, when a two goal advantage was squandered, through widespread ineptitude was simply unforgivable.

In eight competitive games against sides in the world's top 80 nations Kerr failed to engineer a solitary win. Of the four nations the Irish played in those eight games only the French were higher on the world-ranking list.

That the FAI resourced him to an extent that would have been almost unthinkable just a few years ago can hardly have helped him in the end. The cost of hiring a private jet for the return trip to France in order to avoid missing a single training session in Dublin after seeing Raymond Domenech's side beat the Faroe Islands, is, for instance, the sort of thing that only looks like value for money afterwards if it helps to yield a result.

Ultimately, though, Kerr has paid the price for the results themselves. It is hard to imagine that he would have "taken" those six draws and two defeats in the games that mattered had he been offered them on the day he was appointed.

What's perfectly clear now is that his employers weren't happy to settle for them as they weighed up his performance last night and decided it simply hadn't been good enough.