Dangling man hangs by a thread

Republic of Ireland v Wales:  Tom Humphriesfeels that Steve Staunton is fighting a losing battle in his shambolic role as Republic of Ireland manager.

Steve Staunton is in a corner. When John Delaney arrived at the scullery door at Walsall, a lank prince charming carrying a glass boot with the words World Class Manager engraved on it, Delaney somehow managed to convince himself that he could make the boot fit Stan's gnarly foot. Stan would go to the ball and the plain people of Ireland would gasp at how right and perfect it all was. John Aldridge and Frank Stapleton could be the ugly sisters. Again.

It is not going well. We are not hurtling towards the happy-ever-after pay-off line. The footwear pinches and chafes. Steve Staunton, a decent man to whom nobody wishes ill , hobbles from game to game showing none of the lightness of touch or facility for speed learning that his Prince had gambled on. And for all the clumsy touches and poor instincts which have so poorly served Staunton in his brief managerial career, he is also becoming a victim of fate, a dangling man.

Today is an historic day but the bitter drama at the centre of it suspends all celebration. The Irish manager twists in the wind blown one way by fate and another by his team. That spectacle overshadows all else. Today, Steve Staunton, a decent GAA player in his time and the brother of a county man, becomes the first Irish soccer manager to put a team out in Croke Park. Sadly that team is spavined not just by poor selections and odd tactics but by older players (not all, but a critical mass) whose characters betray no flair for leadership - just a sulky disaffection from their task.

It would have been hard to choose the most damning of Roy Keane's criticisms this week (delivered it should be said more with weariness than venom) but as he listed various underperforming senior players he mused almost wonderingly about the most golden of them all. "And Duffer" said Keane "Well, he's at Newcastle." Enough said.

Five years ago Keane pinpointed the lack of ambition in the generation coming after him. His words caused some hurt but half a decade on seem to have inspired nobody. Few of us can see any trace of Keane's rage in any of the players who followed. Steve Staunton, were he honest, probably can't even see anything of himself.

The failings of those players now hitting their prime is well documented and much lamented. They were the first generation of Irish players to actually grow up in the cash-soaked paddy fields of the modern English game. The effect was corrosive. Staunton's younger players offer the lure of the same doomed promise, though. The most vaunted, Aiden McGeady, brings less than the glitzy advance publicity touted. The most substantial, Paul McShane, operates in a minefield of a defence and has had to help with inquiries himself after goals conceded against the Czech Republic and San Marino.

And Staunton is cursed by circumstance too. Being plucked from a life down the food chain at Walsall (an organism itself so far down the food chain that it qualifies as food's food) and getting thrown onto the international scene was a tough enough challenge, but to be fumbling with the basics at a time when his contemporary and former friend Keane is so conspicuously showing signs of master craftsmanship is unfortunate.

His mentor or assistant or whatever job description Bobby Robson is employed under has been ill (although the sympathy being channelled Robson's way when he was put forth by the FAI as a human shield after San Marino was a little cringeworthy. He takes the hefty paycheck. Going on the radio wasn't too much of an imposition.) and whatever there was at the beginning in terms of master/grasshopper relationship can barely have survived.

It scarcely helps either that Ireland's most highly paid sporting team trot out onto the field this afternoon with their, ahem, achievements and prospects thrown firmly into the shadows cast by the nation's rugby and cricket teams. Their cause is unhelped by any comparisons. The rugby and cricket teams don't offer the public jaded condescension. They draw on massive goodwill as a consequence.

Then there is the collision with history which takes place this afternoon. It's no secret that the FAI have handled relations with their new landlords, the GAA, with less sensitivity than their rugby counterparts and little doubt that what residual resentments still linger from the "ban" years are thinly concealed at times. Even so, there has been less tickertape and hullaballoo about today's landmark game than about rugby's comfortable arrival in Croke Park. Yet the resonances and undercurrents are stronger and the stakes are higher.

When Croke Park was mooted as a venue which would serve the country's two largest professional sports while the decorators were in at Lansdowne the panjandrums of Merrion Square could scarcely have foreseen themselves entering the cathedral in quite such a state of deshabille. Back around that time, indeed, the FAI were touting the place as a possible host stadium for the very competition the national team is currently not qualifying for. Things move quickly in the world of Irish soccer. Glancing at the immense stadium today will remind Staunton that he is involved in a high stakes game where the outcome is not of his own making. Events beyond his control may yet determine his fate. It's like that when you take a white water ride with the FAI. Less than five years ago Steven Reid was presenting Staunton with a watch in a hotel room in Chiba , Japan, the youngest in a young World Cup squad being asked to honour the most capped. Since then two managers have bitten the bullet and two chief executives have gone.

The woes of Staunton's side unfold also at a slightly difficult time in the domestic game. The Shelbourne debacle and the failure to implement any of the groundsharing recommendations made in the Genesis report may yet spark some difficulties of morale within the FAI (who will be heartened perhaps that a government which said there could "no cherrypicking" among those recommendations seems determined to fund a stadium in Tallaght solely for Shamrock Rovers and not for Rovers and Pat's as envisaged in the "stadium on either side of the river" recommendation). As a rule of thumb nothing diverts attention quite like the sacrifice of a national manager and the endless speculation as to who will replace him.

If a Welsh side, which boasts no more than three premiership baubles in Giggs, Davies and Bellamy, should take a lead this afternoon it seems likely that all the aggregated frustration which has built up amongst Irish soccer fans during Staunton's brief engagement will find loud and vocal expression in a cloudburst over Steve Staunton's head. The sound of boos ringing around Croke Park for the national soccer team would be an acute embarrassment for those who play for the team and work around the team. The response will speak volumes.

The sense of alienation and disillusionment is deep at the moment. After the fruitless but as yet inadequately chronicled search for the "world class manager" John Delaney's implicit declaration that the Irish national team could actually be used as a training vehicle for a tyro (and a friend) was a slap in the face to a soccer public which had seen one of its greatest servants stabbed and dragged off stage just so that the epic quest for the World Class Manager could begin.

In hindsight it seems a serious error to have announced that this campaign was for learning. It was an error in terms of motivation, a fresh excuse for players who seem content to tread water. It was an error in terms of good faith with the paying public and a misjudgement in terms of the disrespect heaped on Brian Kerr whose solid tenure, it seems, could not have been extended to accommodate any such undergraduate studies.

There is an impatience abroad at the moment and a sadness too. Steve Staunton took a huge gamble in signing on for the Irish job and the chips he used were his own reputation with the Irish public. Even for those of us who have been underwhelmed by his effectiveness as Irish manager there is regret at having seen such a servant be so ballyragged and mauled across the tabloids and chatrooms over the past few months and bewilderment at how Staunton manages to be his own worst enemy.

Having set out his stall at his inaugural press conference with a ringing declaration of a happy new era in media relations (perhaps more accurately termed relations with the soccer public) Staunton has quickly relapsed into a model of brooding Nixonian paranoia. The latest manifestation of which was his assertion, during a routine squad announcement, that he had been told that he wouldn't be showing up for the announcement. Asked by a baffled journalist as to who had told him this Staunton replied gnomically that "walls have ears". If that had been the largest morsel which that press conference to announce the squad for this afternoon's game threw up it would have been sustenance enough for those whom Staunton would depict as vultures. The bizarre inclusion of Caleb Foran was, however, chief among the items being dined on afterwards.

The summonsing of Folan, a player to whom Staunton had apparently never spoken to and had seen just once (for Chesterfield, those guarantors of a gentleman's international credentials!), for the two games which could determine whether we are in the morning or the twilight of the Staunton era was a surreal touch which encapsulated much of what has preceded it. Just in case anybody in the room was under the misapprehension that we, lil ole Ireland, had beaten Brazil and Argentina in a race to secure Folan's services the manager was at pains to point out that Folan is a big awkward buggah "who accidentally bumps into you and stands on your toes and doesn't know he's doing it". Gary Doherty without the finesse in other words. Or the experience.

Injury has meant that Folen has been returned to the filing cabinet where conceivably he could stay forever, mouldering as footnote to the era. If the next few days bring less than six points to Ireland's account that could be the case and Folen could be the first player to have an entire Irish career without having spoken to the manager once.

There are so many other side issues that it is tempting to deal with. The decision to bring a group of League of Ireland managers (all better qualified than the national manager) to San Marino to see how things are done. The celebrations erupting in San Marino only to be cut off by the booing of visiting fans. Staunton's blithe comments afterwards about it just being the wrong time in the spring semester to have had to deal with a slippery handful like San Marino.

There is a bulging catalogue of minor misgivings. Staunton's baffling vagueness on simple questions as to which players he has been watching and when. His presence. Nobody needs Steve Staunton to have Marshall McLuhan's grasp of how media works but still . . . The poorly handled cases of Paddy Kenny and Lee Carsley to name but two would be forgiven easily to a winning manager but now . . . Capping a big awkward player you have never spoken to would be eccentric but could yet turn out to be stroke of genius . . . The key element, however, and the only thing which needs putting right today is the sheer awfulness which Ireland have displayed on the field. When Roy Keane, says that Ireland should win and that Wales "aren't that great" he is disregarding the evidence which suggests this Irish team doesn't quite know what it is doing.

Leaving aside (a pretty big ask) the landmark debacles of Cyprus and San Marino (and the Holland game) even the games touted as evidence of a generally well-disguised capability don't stand up. The Swedish friendly which kicked off the Staunton era was a happy aberration casually explained later by the Swedes when they explained that they had used the trip to Dublin to make plans for the logistics of their World Cup. They had spent as little time thinking about us as we had spent thinking about Bergman's cinematic metaphors.

The German game, the zenith of our claims to credibility, would have been a trouncing were it not for the godlike powers of Shay Given. The Czechs, who came here four days after the Cyprus massacre, studiously refused to notice the blood in the water and stuck to their decision to play for an away draw. Ireland's performance had a little passion to it but no more than the minimum expected from a side floundering for a basic self-respect. Passion and commitment after all are supposed to be the default settings for the new era. Any hopeful suggestions that suddenly the team had identified in Staunton's words to them a pattern within which they could thrive were scotched by what happened in San Marino last month. The thread of chaos was picked up again as the theme of the administration.

For now Ireland have flatlined. They are demised. Their manager is a switch hitter when he is asked to explain this distressing condition. Sometimes it's poor defending. Sometimes bad finishing. Occasionally he is jut surprised to be asked the question. He feels the team are hale and hearty.

Today, cruelly, Steve Staunton will shake hands with a celebrated and accomplished graduate of the Anfield University. John Toshack has inferior students at his disposal, a handicap which one fears only serves to make it an even match. If it ends that way, or worse, if another two or three points are leaked, this learning experience of a campaign will have taught us all we need to know and the autumn term will bring new tutors.