Stan shows what sort of The Man he is

Sideline Cut: Imagine being Steve Staunton for the past week. Stan could have been forgiven for thinking that the most dangerous moment in his life as the undisputed Boss and Gaffer of the woebegone Boys in Green was when the unknown gunman pulled a piece on him outside the team hotel a few months back. Stan played down the matter with such success that it was quickly glossed over, as though the sight of a guy brandishing a lethal weapon outside of a hotel lobby was no more unusual than someone wielding a cigarette lighter.

But it was an odd episode, that, presaging the turbulent days which have marked Staunton's time in charge as nothing if not memorable. It was as though the gunman was trying to warn the Gaffer off instead of doing him harm, like Christopher Walken's clairvoyant in The Dead Zone foreseeing tragedy on the skating pond and shouting, "the ice is gonna break".

Everything about Staunton's experience to date has been extreme, from the slightly dreamy 3-0 victory on his debut night when a callow Irish team played as though the Beautiful Game was all they know and all they needed to know, to the stark reversals against Chile and the Netherlands after that. Ireland were somewhat unlucky to lose out to a horrible deflection of the opening night of the European campaign across in Stuttgart, an occasion on which Staunton indulged himself too wildly on the sideline and suffered the embarrassment of an early exit for his sins.

A cursed and flabbergasting series of injuries followed the team as far as Nicosia, and in the strange, half-empty stadium the pitiful sight of a bad team scoring for fun against Ireland was set against the suggestive shots of a helpless and stunned Staunton banished in isolation as he watched the horror unfold.

For 20 full years, Irish performances on foreign fields have been characterised by soulful, heroic shows of resistance that made us feel rosy-cheeked and proud and important as a nation. Many of those starred Staunton as a grumpy and thoughtful copper-haired fullback delivering long, measured balls for the excitable heads of Big Cas or Big Niall, before trundling back to mind his patch. The capitulation, so meek and despairing, against the straightforward aggression of the Cypriots must have seemed to many Irish people for whom football is a passion like a betrayal of all those years of against-the-odds heroics.

It was little wonder RTÉ were able to find the enraged and disenchanted on the terraces long after darkness had fallen on Nicosia, with the Irish football team reduced to a bunch of vaudevillians locked in a room somewhere underneath the stand. It is hard to put a brave face on a 5-2 drubbing from a bit-part soccer country. It was an awful performance by an Irish football team, so bad that the travelling press corps were happy to announce it as the worst in history.

But that is all it was. However dismaying and numbing losing to Cyprus was for genuine Irish football people, the subsequent mocking and pillorying of Staunton in the days after were much more depressing. In the days before Wednesday's anticipated blackout against the Czech Republic, several Irish newspapers went to town on the Dundalk man. Borrowing on wheezes that London's Fleet Street tabloids - with some modicum of wit - flung at Graham Taylor a decade ago, Staunton was presented as a Gombeen Man in the Celtic Tiger age. He was mocked and derided as that most hapless and pathetic of fools: a man who could not do his job in an era when people are defined and glorified through their ability to cut it at work.

There was a world of difference between the cruel and sensational headlines, the ho-ho! superimposition of Kermit the Frog's body beneath the manager's made-up face and that most strident of soccer clichés, Staunton Must Go, and the more measured analysis on the inside pages of those tabloids by the football reporters who are paid to follow the international team and who are, presumably, expected to be able to look the likes of Staunton in the eye in the months ahead.

The treatment of Staunton was indicative of the rapacious standards and brutally aggressive, bullying voice favoured by editors of Ireland's burgeoning tabloid market. It was clear they saw in Staunton an easy target, an easy piece of meat good for a few tasty headlines dreamt up in the anonymity of the office. They regarded Staunton as a piece of shit there for their amusement.

Through it all, Staunton kept his cool. He is not the most accomplished media performer. He never was one for the slick chat and never will be, and the slow, repetitious nature of his delivery means he won't ever talk a good game. But in the gallows humour of his retort to what he would have done had he been allowed on the line again - "I probably would have been sent off again" - there was the glimmer of a man who knows himself.

He threw no sulks during the press conferences and there was something wonderfully disdainful about his instruction to the assembled press to "tell your media friends to leave my mother and father alone".

Against the Czech Republic, on a moving and slightly dreamy night, Staunton's Ireland team bared their hearts, and the fans in the old place responded as though it were one of the great nights. Who knows whether that was down to Staunton's ability to lift them or whether the professionalism and wounded pride and patriotism of the players rescued the night? Nobody, is the answer. It is too soon to say.

The appointment of Staunton was controversial. The promise of a "world-class manager" was foolish and unnecessary on the part of John Delaney of the FAI. It was probably attributable to the delusions of grandeur and a pining after the glory years that continue to colour expectations of Irish football teams.

The brightest years for Irish football have surely passed. Those epic performances of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the nation bedded down to see if we could manage the crucial, victorious 0-0 draw, will never have the same power to enchant.

Ireland have an ordinary football team and a young, novice manager who has been entrusted with the task of restoring some of the atmosphere and spirit and the ability to squeeze out big results. Even if he does well, he is fighting the odds. It is the easiest thing in the world to be anti-establishment when it comes to the Irish football team because they are always punching above their weight when it comes to qualifying for the great summer football carnivals.

But after a bad result in sunny Cyprus, a nasty, low-life characteristic of Irish society, a gratuitous need to see an individual brought down and humiliated, was shockingly illuminated. It was a grim reflection on where this country is going. Few people emerged with any credit.

Staunton did, though. Most football managers end their terms in failure and Staunton may prove no different. He may not have the coaching badges and it remains to be seen how strong his intuition for the game truly is. But in a black week for Irish sport and Irish sports coverage, he handled himself with a bit of class.