Knives were at ready for McCarthy's fall

McCarthy, who has repeatedly said he will walk away if Ireland fail to qualify for Portugal, has earned the right to be given time to try and sort the situation out himself.

A couple of days before Ireland played Cameroon in Niigata, two or three of Mick McCarthy's fiercest media critics sat in the lobby of their hotel and speculated on how the team might fare in its group games now that Roy Keane was missing.

A consensus quickly emerged. African champions Cameroon would easily beat the Republic - two or three goals was the predicted margin - after which a German team, built around players from Bayer Leverkusen, Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich, would do much the same.

By the time the Irish faced the Saudis (no mugs, it was felt) the logic went, McCarthy's men would be battered and demoralised and might well end up losing again, returning home without any points.

You might have expected that the team's subsequent achievement might have won a few sceptics over.

The Irish scored in every game, drew with the eventual finalists, and avoided defeat, until the penalty shoot-out against Spain, judged on a man-for-man basis, quite obviously a much better side.

Sure, McCarthy made mistakes along the way, the last of which - failing to prepare his players adequately for the eventuality of a game being decided by spot-kicks - almost certainly contributed to the team's dismal performance, when it happened.

But the fact remains that Ireland went a round further in the competition than France, Portugal, Argentina or Cameroon, reached the same stage as Italy and Mexico and went out just one round earlier than England or Spain.

As for his broader record, well the results in Japan and Korea left McCarthy with a competitive record for the previous two years of nine wins, six draws and one defeat in 16 (the Spain game officially counts as a draw). Throw in friendlies and it reads 13 wins, seven draws and three defeats in 22 games.

Since he took charge in early 1996, the team has yet to lose a competitive game at home. Indeed, Ireland's success in the qualifying group stages of the World Cup ultimately cost Dutch coach Louis van Gaal his job.

For some time now the team has had no recognised striker of any real quality who has regularly being playing first-team football at club level. Yet, Ireland has scored on each of its past 10 outings and in 26 of its last 27 games.

In part, the above is due to the fact that a number of McCarthy's players have made a habit of producing much stronger performances for their country than their club. A case in point is Gary Breen, who attracted attention from Serie A clubs during the summer but now can't get his game at West Ham.

On Saturday, almost none of his players performed.

Much has been made of the fact Russia are a young and inexperienced side. But the average age of the players in both starting teams at the Lokomotiv stadium was, in fact, 26. It is true to say, however, that Valeri Gazzayev's XI were less experienced in terms of international caps, with roughly half the number of caps amassed by McCarthy's men.

However, an indication of the depth available to Gazzayev is that, even after ditching many of his most-experienced personnel, and starting with eight players who hadn't made his predecessor's World Cup squad, eight of the XI are regulars at clubs that will be playing Champions League or UEFA Cup football over the coming weeks, while one of the exceptions is the vastly-experienced veteran Victor Onopko. The equivalent figure for the Irish side is three.

All of this suggests that McCarthy - given the pool of players available to him - has been doing something right for the past couple of years and that, perhaps, he and his team are entitled to have a bad night and go down away from home to Russia without a frenzy of speculation breaking out about his future.

Most of the stick he has taken over the past couple of days has centred on Roy Keane, and McCarthy's handling of the situation has certainly left a good deal to be desired.

At present, it seems, he is incapable of talking about his former skipper at press conferences for more than a couple of minutes before feeling the need to call a halt and departing. Yet, his forthcoming book, written with friend Cathal Dervan, will, of course, deal in some detail with the dispute.

Keane, as it happens, won't be fit for the visit of Switzerland next month and there are those who reckon that by the time the trip to Georgia and Albania come around, things may have thawed slightly between the pair.

The fear is, though, that McCarthy's book will - as Keane's and some of the interviews that accompanied it did - simply make matters worse.

Within the FAI, hopes that some sort of truce might be achieved faded almost to nothing after Keane, having had much time to reflect on the situation, chose to announce on MUTV that he would never again play for McCarthy, who, the Corkman told the Observer, could "rot in hell" for all he cared.

Those comments did much to persuade the association's officers that it would be wrong to push their man on the issue and a spokesman confirmed yesterday that, despite suggestions to the contrary, there are absolutely no ongoing talks with anybody regarding the situation.

The fact that Dervan in his column for the Irish Voice a few weeks ago expressed regret that he had not left the Manchester United player to drown in his own vomit when the pair went drinking together a few years back doesn't exactly provide reason to suspectthe manager's book will take the form of an elaborate peace offering either.

In any case, the manager's observation on Sunday that the breakdown between the pair is "beyond repair" suggests that he is determined, while fully aware of the potential consequences, to plough on without his best player.

His employers appear to feel that his achievements with the team over the past couple of years have earned him the right to make that call.

The hope is, though, that having been too determined not to change things when results were good, McCarthy will draw some other lessons from Saturday's inadequate performance.

Maybe, he will finally make the changes in personnel that have been required for some time. He should also reassess his decision to award the captaincy to Kenny Cunningham, who may well be one of the nicest people you could hope to meet but who proved incapable of providing the required leadership on the field.

Whatever happens, McCarthy, who has repeatedly said he will walk away if Ireland fail to qualify for Portugal, has earned the right to be given time to try and sort the situation out himself - even by a media which he believes is populated by "liars" and which will, for the most part, not mourn for long when he finally does decide to call it a day.

emalone@irish-times.ie