Sowing the seeds of quick catastrophe

Republic of Ireland managerial team: It beggars belief to suggest that any manager would come to the FAI and offer to take the Irish job on condition that an overseer is appointed to make sure things go okay, argues Tom Humphries

Grasshopper: Master, tell me. What is the sound of one hand clapping?

Master: Ah Grasshopper, a wise question. It is the sound withheld. If this gig goes wrong, you shall become accustomed to it.

Grasshopper: Thank you, Master.

Master: Just doin' my job Grasshopper.

By last weekend the word was out. Bobby Robson had been told to say nothing. Steve Staunton had been told to say less. So someone with a blazer and a mobile phone did the traditional leaking. Bookies whittled odds accordingly.

Details followed as surely as night follows day. Four-year contract. The boss to get half-a-million euro. The sidekick/mentor to get half that.

We have no word of how Brian Kerr received the news, but as a final stiletto inserted between his ribs it was bound to hurt. A four-year contract for a tyro manager in an experimental set-up? Kerr, we were told, had been discarded to allow the FAI freedom to go to woo somebody from the very top drawer.

As the last piece of shabbiness meted out to one of Irish football's greatest servants, it was in keeping with what had gone before.

But none of that is Steve Staunton's fault. Staunton, too, has rendered great service, and while he might have been the ideal candidate to succeed Kerr in another year or two, he now finds himself instead being fast-tracked into the big job as Merrion Square succumbs to the politics of expediency.

This elevation comes just months after beginning a managerial apprenticeship at a club which until this week most people had thought was properly titled Lowly Walsall. It says much for the quiet impressiveness of Staunton's character that the FAI would even think about selling such a gambit to their public.

This, after all, is the FAI which spent months hinting that they were just about to shift Martin O'Neill or somebody even sexier. In those circumstances, that they have settled for somebody a little more homely seems like anti-climax. That the association apparently trusts their own judgment to the extent that they have secured an elderly tutor to supervise things is not just disappointing, but seems to sow the seeds of catastrophe at the outset.

For Steve Staunton only best wishes and a little sympathy are appropriate. He is smart enough to know that had this job come to him when he was in his forties it would be time enough. He's smart enough also to learn quickly and to appreciate that if he doesn't he will have begun his management career with a few conspicuous blots on his copy book.

As for Bobby Robson? The whole affair seems a little unfortunate. Public opinion hasn't exactly moulded itself into a joyous chorus of hallelujahs at the news that the FAI have nailed down the services of Walsall's assistant manager to manage the national team. But people know Staunton and his character and he's always struck one as being officer material.

The reception which news of Robson's rather poorly defined role has received has been different entirely. It's a pity to think of a great football man bracing his dignity for the inevitable glut of Stan and Ollie headlines which have already begun and which will be everywhere when the first bad result of the new era comes in.

(Steve Staunton, incidentally, wasn't nicknamed after Stan Laurel, but his fair features and hangdog countenance have often misled people into thinking that he was. Stan Laurel, by the way, wrote and produced much of the Laurel and Hardy oeuvre and always insisted on being paid twice as much as Ollie, whose contributions were merely advisory. Just saying.)

How will it work? Have the FAI set down parameters? If so, where does that leave Staunton's relationship with his new employers? If not, what's the point of the exercise? Will Bobby Robson report back to the FAI, liaise with them? Is Robson to be left to chisel out a role for himself while Staunton attempts to do the same? What are the optics of the dressingroom? How do players know when they are talking to the monkey and when they are talking to the organ grinder? Will the national team become known across the water as "Sir Bobby Robson's Eire side"? Who will take responsibility for not talking to the media?

Staunton has spent a lifetime in football himself. Was Robson the cheapest mentor he could find?

Staunton is a smart, resourceful man whose toughness on the field has been matched by an ability to handle himself well off it. There is no doubt there are many people in the game off whom he could informally bounce things. The suggestion that Staunton asked to have an eminence grise like Robson oversee his work is risible, but will no doubt be persisted with.

It beggars belief, however, to suggest that any manager would come to the FAI and offer to take the Irish job on condition that an overseer is appointed to make sure things go okay. The truth is more prosaic. The FAI found the queue of people who wanted their big job to be alarmingly short. They scarcely had the nerve to ask Martin O'Neill to get up and dance. They recognised Staunton's potential, but felt they couldn't sell him. They came up with an FAI solution to an FAI problem.

Steve Staunton has to swallow it.

IT'S NOT A great start, and the pity is that the FAI didn't have more guts or fewer spin doctors. In the rush to justify the sacking of Kerr, the prospect of a top-line appointment was talked up merrily. Every big name in European football had a day out on the back pages of the Evening Herald as the next man in the hot seat.

The reality is that this was nobody's dream job. The reality is that, as Kerr found out, Ireland don't have a squad brimming with world beaters.

There are no leaders on the field.

There's more reality than that. Since Saipan, since Genesis, since the unsightly end to the tenure of Kerr, the FAI haven't been placing highly in award schemes designed to find the Employer of the Year. The salary is not great by the standards of what's out there.

Oh, and there's a couple of other things: we don't have our own ground and we're fourth seeds for the next championships. If we're out of that qualifying competition by, say, the halfway stage, we face playing the final games while rattling around in an 80,000-seater stadium which we can't afford to pay the rent for.

Meanwhile, the press will throw poison darts from the gallery. Okay, as you can see, this is a fairly attractive package.

STAUNTON IS A brave man to take the post. The FAI have been busy commending his leadership in the breach during the last World Cup. Staunton excelled, although, now that the excitement has faded, a draw with Cameroon, a win over a sad Saudi side, another draw with the worst German side ever to play in a World Cup and a good performance but an unnecessary defeat to a moderate Spanish team doesn't seem quite like purple heart valour stuff.

The team had been galvanised by the fallout of Saipan, but Staunton merits credit for his dogged concentration on football matters and his quiet leadership. This has been the hallmark of his long career, and perhaps even Mick McCarthy would concede that some of the greatest service which Staunton provided was during the shakiest period of his tenure, that first campaign which included the disaster against Macedonia.

With the Irish team requiring radical transitional surgery, Staunton stepped up as a leader. There is a moment which stands out from Jim Duggan's documentary about that campaign, McCarthy Park. The Irish team are in Vilnius desperately needing a result to stay alive in the competition. The camera picks them up as they emerge from a decrepit dressingroom which, bizarrely, has big old stuffed armchairs in it. Staunton is walking up and down the line of Irish players punching shoulders, jabbing chests, getting in faces. "We don't get beat," he keeps saying. "We don't get beat."

That's the quintessential Staunton.

HE SPENT MORE of his career at Aston Villa then he did at Liverpool, but his infancy as a footballer was spent at Anfield, where he absorbed the ethics and standards of the old Liverpool sides. His appointment is a gamble, but not one with massive odds attached.

Bobby Robson, quite unintentionally, confuses things. His role as Master to Staunton's Grasshopper has the unfortunate effect of cutting the ground from underneath his putative protégé. Robson's age is not an issue, but his hunger for the donkey work of scouting and viewing matches all over Britain is in doubt. A conventional assistant manager would have performed these tasks usefully and well.

Thus there is the prospect of Robson adding an unfortunate and potentially ugly postscript to what has been a distinguished career.

Long ago, an old tabloid journalist used to tell a Bobby Robson story. The journalist's paper, a prominent London redtop, had been instrumental in screwing Robson over during his harried time as England manager. Nice guy, Bobby, but a tabs gotta do what a tabs gotta do.

Anyway, the tabloid journalist was dispatched on one of those breezy little assignments which involve so little work they are virtually a paid holiday: a Fifa conference in Mexico City. He was - wink, wink - to go ahead of the posse and see what stories he could find while lounging around the pool ordering cervezas.

All peachy, until the day he arrived in his hotel. The city got an alarming jolt from an earthquake and our man was advised not to go wandering the streets, as not only would he not be safe from the locals but he wouldn't be safe from the buildings. So he retired to his room and listened to the air conditioning for a long time.

After two or three days he was bored beyond expression. So he leafed through the phone books, found an advertisement for escorts and decided, what the hell, it was all on expenses anyway, he'd order up a little company for the afternoon.

There followed a long and frankly hilarious account of how our man, whose only words of Spanish were "cervezas", negotiated with the equally linguistically challenged Spanish speaker at the other end of the line. In the end it was agreed he could have the only working blonde in the country sent to his room.

So he waited and waited, and finally there was a loud knocking on his door. Bedecked now only in a fetching robe and smell of splash-it-on-all-over aftershave, our man moved suavely towards the door and peeked out through the glass spyhole.

He saw two alarming things. In the foreground, wearing an unfeasibly small skirt and troublesome heels was a very large, very dark-complexioned woman whose lipstick was traffic light red and plentiful. Her considerable barnet had apparently been dipped in a bucket of peroxide. Our man was consumed with regret and moral angst.

The second alarming sight lurked in the background. There chatting, as the taller of the two men fiddled with his room key, were a couple of blazers. Ted Croker of the English FA and Bobby Robson.

Our man's name wasn't Séamus, but let us pretend that it was. The large "blonde" woman knocked louder. Croker and Robson continued chatting. Our man remained frozen behind the door, his eye pressed in horror to the spyhole taking in the fish-eye version of this appalling vista. He was afraid to breathe.

And the woman, sensing a threat to her steady income as the only blonde in the village, knocked again and shouted, "Señor Séamus Señor Séamus"

At which point Croker and Robson, being but mortal, let their conversation taper off and stood gawping at the door across the corridor. Could it be . . .

Alas, their final glimpse of the drama was of the large blonde being dragged into said room by a large hairy arm. A booming, American-accented voice issued from somebody hiding behind the door. "LAUN-DREE? YOU'RE THE LAUNDRY, RIGHT? WELL, I HOPE YOU HAVE MY PANTS."

So Bobby never knew. And we hope that he never knows what goes on behind the green door in Merrion Square.

NOT THAT ANYTHING so sleazy as solicitation or tabloid journalism goes on in the headquarters of Irish football, but there have been times when what transpires in there is just as unedifying. For Robson, so late in his career, to have walked into a scenario which has the words "Warning: May End In Tears" stamped all over it seems unfortunate.

This past week may have given him some hints as to the immediate future. Having been told to keep his mouth shut, the news of his pending appointment was all over the papers before he could say "mum's the word".

By midweek former internationals were complaining that they had still been awaiting news of job interviews with the FAI when they heard of the appointment. A clumsy, implausible spin was doing the rounds that Staunton had asked that Bobby Robson stand over his shoulder examining his homework. By Thursday, the FAI were in Walsall belatedly asking for Steve Staunton's hand for an arranged marriage.

For Staunton, this latest twist in his career provides him with a platform where he has as much to lose as he has to gain. Despite being handicapped by a clumsily conceived working arrangement, he enjoys the confidence and support of FAI chief executive John Delaney and the security of a four-year contract.

And Bobby Robson? He shouldn't be wrestling with the FAI at a time of his life when he could be fly-fishing or dandling grandchildren on his knee. His fate - having concealed the hardness necessary for prolonged survival in football to become an avuncular figure in the English game - brings Sondheim to mind. Isn't it strange, isn't it queer, to lose one's judgment so late in a career? Where are the clowns? There ought to be clowns. Send in the clowns.

Don't bother, they're here.