England situation highlights Irish plight

On Soccer: For the nation's many begrudgers it's been an exciting few days. This time last week England looked to be in with a decent shout of spoiling the World Cup for thousands of pub supporters here by winning the thing. Just as alarming from their point of view, perhaps, was the fact that the team's longer-term future was set to be placed in the hands of a man of proven ability at the very top level. Now? Well, as Yeats might have put it: All has changed, changed utterly.

"Big Phil" Scolari's decision to exit the race to succeed Sven-Goran Eriksson has, of course, left the English FA's leadership with a good deal of egg on its collective face. Interestingly, though, the upshot is that, while there are obvious differences at the finer detail level, the English FA's campaign to find a successor for their current manager has ended up bearing a striking resemblance to the search mounted not so long ago on this side of the Irish Sea.

In both cases, a three-man committee was appointed to oversee a process which dragged out for months. In each instance the associations pinned their hopes on attracting an established name that would really impress and in the end both organisations (assuming, as was widely expected yesterday, Steve McClaren is appointed at some point this week) had to settle for somebody who didn't quite meet the expectations they themselves had generated.

McClaren may, just as Steve Staunton hopefully will, prove to be a fine international manager but just as the FAI has tried to sell the Louthman as a sure-fire thing on the fragile basis that he possesses the qualities of a "born leader" so the FA must now attempt to convince a sceptical audience the Middlesbrough manager is the best man to take on what is probably international football's most thankless task.

When the process started three names - McClaren, Sam Allardyce and Alan Curbishley - were mentioned as front-runners but since Eriksson's impending departure was revealed the challenge of the latter two has diminished considerably because of a dramatic slump in their respective clubs' form in the Premiership. Middlesbrough, by contrast, have secured a place in the final of the Uefa Cup.

Crucially, though, the club's revival during the second half of the season has been fired in no small part by players McClaren sought to marginalise around the turn of the year and Gareth Southgate recently credited club chairman Steve Gibson with having intervened to get two of the strongest performers - Mark Schwarzer and Jimmy-Floyd Hasselbaink - back into the team. The former England defender went on to suggest that his manager is simply not yet ready to take over the national team.

Still, it appears that for those anxious to see a home-grown coach appointed McClaren is reckoned to be as good (or safe) as it currently gets, something that has sparked a flurry of criticism of the Premiership's biggest clubs for appointing foreign coaches.

But if the English think they have it bad on this score then they should, perhaps, spare a thought for their Irish counterparts. Several previous Ireland managers were appointed on the basis of their achievements here at home but those based in England invariably feature prominently whenever candidates are being weighed up.

At present, though, only three men from the Republic of Ireland (five if interim Walsall boss Mark Kinsella and QPR's caretaker Gary Waddock are counted) are managing clubs in the whole of the English league. Just one, David O'Leary, is with a Premiership side (Aston Villa) while the others are working in the lower divisions with Sean O'Driscoll at Bournemouth in League One and Jim Gannon in charge of League Two side Stockport County.

The generation of players who represented Ireland through the 1980s and '90s looked set to produce good managers or coaches but most have been lured instead into media work which is often better paid and generally more secure.

Andy Townsend, for instance, sought to get into coaching at West Brom some years back but having taken a pay cut from £17,000 a week at Middlesbrough to £13,000 when he arrived at the Hawthorns where he signed as a player-coach, he is reputed to have been offered a £30,000 annual salary and a second-hand car to stay on when his playing contract ran out. At ITV he earns a multiple of that and so, like a string of astute and articulate fellow former internationals, he has chosen to don a shirt and tie rather than a tracksuit.

With Staunton set to be in charge of Ireland for at least the four-year term of the contract he was given a few months back, there is no urgency about identifying potential successors.

Renewed underage success, the emergence of a stand-out candidate from an improving domestic league or the rapid development of one of those currently working to make the breakthrough in England could transform the situation. For the moment at least, however, there seems little reason to suspect that when the time does come to cast the net again the Irish options will be all that more numerous than they were before Staunton's appointment and the fact is that an Irishman with McClaren's CV would be a shoo-in if the FAI could afford him.