Players must stand up and be counted

LockerRoom: Deserve. Deserve has nothing to do with it. Fortunately. If World Cup qualifying Group Four was to be decided this week on the basis of who deserves to go through, well Israel would be on their way to Germany.

Avrahim Grant's collection of journeymen have played with honest passion throughout the series. They've got the draws in the places where it is hard to get them. They've come from behind five times. They've been efficient in the dispatch of minnows. They've been honest and they have punched above their weight and only a hardened churl or an oppressed Palestinian would begrudge them. It's not about who deserves what though.

Cyprus didn't deserve to lose on Saturday night in Nicosia. What verve the game had came from the men who had only pride to play for. What chances were created belonged in the main to the Cypriots, men whose combined income would scarcely match that of any given Irish players. They missed a penalty and they saw Shay Given perform heroics to keep them at bay. Even in the second half they put two lovely, low crosses behind the Irish defence. They were just a big toe away from glory. Deserve? Tell the Cypriots about it.

France and Switzerland scarcely deserve a trip to Germany. The French, even fractured and declining as they are, should have bossed this group. Of the teams we have played, they have undoubted quality. In the end though the French have gone robbing the graves and exhumed a handful of legends. It will be enough to see them over the finishing line.

The Swiss, fragile and cautious, have struggled to convince those of us who aren't quite sure whether they are a talented side on the way up or an ordinary side who have had the luck to draw the insipid Irish in their last two qualifying campaigns. Only the prodigality of their closest rivals leaves them in with a chance as the group of mediocrity goes to its merciful death.

Deserve? Bah! When it all ended in Nicosia on Saturday night the Irish players applauded those who had paid dearly to be there with them. One player made a little show of running to the fans and throwing his jersey to them. It was a cynical milking of the endless good nature of those good people who follow Ireland. It wasn't the prawn-sandwich brigade who were in Larnaca on Saturday night - though they will be in Lansdowne on Wednesday.

It was the bread-and-butter soccer people whom Brian Kerr refers to affectionately as "the ordinary shams". It was the people who went to the bank or credit union to be in Cyprus. They didn't deserve glib applause and a tossed jersey. They didn't deserve any easy gestures from the pampered heroes. They deserved an honest and passionate performance. They got gutlessness.

Deserve? Shay Given deserved the Man of the Match award. Against Cyprus with it all on the line. Say no more. The entire back four deserved to be substituted at half-time. They were only marginally more deserving of the bench than the midfield were.

After that we get into the moral relatives of deserving. Brian Kerr didn't deserve all that was thrown at him last week but he did deserve more from his team than they offered. All the words about loving Brian to bits and owing him so much and respecting him so much mean nothing when you walk onto the pitch and offer a performance that is an act of betrayal.

We know Brian Kerr, Chris Hughton and Noel O'Reilly are meticulous and professional football men. We know the current Irish squad lack for nothing in terms of preparation, planning, information on the opposition. All last week Brian Kerr's team watched him dangle from a rope the FAI had made for him. As he dangled they watched the media light a fire underneath the soles of his feet. And they walked onto the pitch in Larnaca and left their hearts in the dressingroom to mind their money. Say what you like. Brian Kerr deserved better.

The Irish public deserved more from Brian Kerr than he delivered to them through the media, however. It's fine to mess around with people who are trying to do their job just because you don't like what some of them write but there's a bigger picture. It's the national team. It's not the Brian Kerr XI. Tomorrow Switzerland are making all 22 of their squad available to the media. Makes us look small and backward, doesn't it? Well, we deserve it.

And the fringe players deserve a better more sensitive way of being told they are dropped. The film critic Joe Queenan once published an anthology of interviews entitled If You're Talking To Me Your Career Must Be In Trouble. The Irish team have taken a leaf out of his book. Instead of telling a player he has no chance of playing they send him to press conferences. We got Kevin Doyle, Andy O'Brien, Liam Miller, Gary Doherty and Paddy Kenny during the week. When Kenny Cunningham made an appearance at the mandatory press conference on Friday we thought to ourselves, "Oh no, Kenny, what have you done to deserve being dropped?"

Then again the readers of Irish newspapers didn't deserve to see acres and acres of space devoted to how hard we, the media, find dealing with the current Irish team. Rubbed up the wrong way by the self- absorbed petulance of a group of callow millionaires, we got a little wrapped up in ourselves too.

This group and this past week of shake-up and showdown haven't been about what anyone deserves. It's been a crazy, lawless Wild West sort of situation where first principles have been lost or abandoned. When the dust settles this Monday morning we find ourselves in a position we don't deserve to be in. In order to progress we have a home match against a team that fights in our weight division.

And when it comes to the final audit of who deserves what, the facts are stark and simple. If the players, many of whom talk rhapsodically about what they owe Brian Kerr since their youth days, give him another performance as lacking in passion and heart as Saturday's was, Brian Kerr will soon be a former international manager. His legacy to Irish soccer will have been diminished by some of the very people who helped him create it.

The last three times we have played the Swiss, we have been bland and insipid bordering on pathetic. It makes one squirm to see that from an Irish side. You think back to the great days - England in Stuttgart, Italy in New York, Germany in Japan, Holland in Lansdowne - and you realise we didn't deserve those results on balance of play or skill. We deserved them for guts and passion and honesty. We deserved them for pride in the Irish jersey and solid belief in what it means to represent your country. We deserved them because players took responsibility and chose not to hide.

There's a scene I remember from McCarthy Park - Jim Duggan's documentary on Mick McCarthy's first campaign in charge of the Irish squad. The team were in Lithuania with their backs to the wall and the camera found them in the tunnel in Vilnius waiting to come out for the start of the game. Steve Staunton was marching up and down the line of players, his face white with passion, his fist clenched, and he was shouting into the faces of his colleagues: "We don't get beat. We don't get f***ing beat." They didn't.

They were an imperfect team but they knew the value of honesty. On Wednesday their successors can lie down in a petulant sulk and lick their wounds or they can stand up and fight. I don't know what they'll choose to do. But I know what we deserve.