Ireland went out with a whimper

Tom Humphries/LockerRoom: There was a lot of sentiment in the Basel air these last few days. People spoke about Hampden Park in 1987, the last time we won a decent qualification match away from home.

That result, chipped out with a makeshift side and a rare Mark Lawrenson goal, was the gateway to the whole Jack Charlton era. It was unexpected and freakish and set Charlton up as a guru among tough professionals who had doubted him.

Many of us believed that on Saturday night Ireland would not just get a win but the result would create the foundation of the Brian Kerr era. Instead we lost. Lost badly and insipidly. We didn't rage against defeat. We slipped it in our pocket and came home.

The implications are too multifaceted and complex to be dealt with in sideswipes delivered to Brian Kerr with the benefit of hindsight. There was no consensus beforehand about the team which should be picked and when the line-up was announced I heard no howls of anguish out of anyone.

Several players were contained and several played badly and there were no successes on the night yet the bench wasn't groaning with world-class talents. This column would have had Steven Reid warming up early but as to something which would have changed the outcome of the game the answer doesn't lie in personnel. Brian Kerr knows how to pick a team.

What was haunting was the grey passivity of the side. Against Russia at Lansdowne Road the build-up was strangely muted, the performance was likewise. It happened again on Saturday. For Brian Kerr, whose genius has been for inspiring teams to perform at a level above themselves, it is a strange kind of curse to see his team suddenly perform within themselves on a big occasion. Where were the gore and guts?

Queerly, the meekness of Saturday brought back memories of 1987 too. The team we had then stand in stark contrast to the team we have now. Charlton had men at his disposal. That is said not to demean the current players but to better describe the brigade which Charlton found at his disposal. They weren't necessarily better footballers but they were bigger, physically stronger, years more mature - and collectively they had a hardness which made them virtually self-sufficient on the pitch.

Charlton drew them a crude blueprint, they saw the sense of it and off they went.

On Saturday we looked like boys pitted against men. Once we gave away a shambles of an opener we could never impose ourselves on the occasion. Our midfield was rigid and tentative. Our creativity was minimal. We looked to Damien Duff and Robbie Keane, slight young men who should be the decoration on an international team. We looked to Matt Holland, impeccable and mild but no swashbuckler. We looked to young Colin Healy, who seemed blinded by the lights. And so on.

We had no fierceness about us. No warriors.

For the first time we fully appreciated the task Brian Kerr was asked to take on. Accepting the statistic of having zero points from two games was one thing. Accepting the fractured team which had achieved zero points was another.

Leave skill aside for a while, because we are talking about proven internationals here; instead just assess the loss in terms of character alone to the team when Roy Keane, Niall Quinn, Steve Staunton, Alan Kelly, Dean Kiely, Jason McAteer and Gary Kelly of last year's World Cup squad are missing. On Saturday you can take out Kenny Cunningham for good measure. Those players represented a lifejacket's worth of reassurance for the younger men around them. They set the tone off the field and on it. Every one of them was a key personality within the group.

Go back a little way to the last qualification campaign. Two instances bookended. A night in Amsterdam where we throw away a lead and emerge with a draw and Roy Keane comes smouldering out of the stadium and sets the tone for the rest of the campaign. And the end of the journey. At Lansdowne Road five minutes in and Keane tackles Overmars, a gesture of such disrespectful aggression the Dutch might as well have surrendered there and then. That's a small part of what is gone now.

Little moments from the World Cup add to the impression of loss. Quinn's masterful knockdown to Robbie Keane against Germany. Was there one Irish touch on Saturday night that contained a comparable amount of wit and experience. Steve Staunton's magnificent long ball to set up Robbie Keane early on against Saudi Arabia. With that one stroke Staunton killed all nerves surrounding the occasion.

And McAteer? He has many detractors but his character made him a central part of Irish squads for almost a decade. And Gary Kelly? Mick McCarthy knew what he was doing when he started Kelly in every game at the World Cup. Now that he has declined slightly there are neater full backs available but none bring the intensity or infectious passion that Kelly had.

Afterwards in Basel the talk was of next year and just how far off Ireland's next competitive game is. It's a distance away alright but in many ways it is too near.

People tried to wheedle out of Brian Kerr the names of the young players he foresaw breaking through by then. Kerr winced slightly. It would be nicer if there was a list of older players who were coming back. It would be better if we could be three years down the road and the core of Irish players in their early 20s now could be in their prime.

There is no miracle growth formula for mature footballers though. Quite the opposite. The English Premiership keeps them young and callow. On Saturday it was surprising to note there was no major difference between the sides in terms of the amount of experience the Swiss had in terms of their caps or their average age. What we lacked was the character that comes with the hard road. What the Swiss had was big character in the right places.

Looking at the team coming off at the end another memory came back. Roy Keane in Saipan talking harshly it seemed about his team-mates. "Some people accept it easier. Maybe that's why some of our players are playing where they are." He got no angry refutation on the pitch this Saturday.

In the end when the pop music began blaring, you couldn't help but remember the end of Mick McCarthy's first campaign. Ireland went out to a similar decibel level of Europop, to Belgium in Brussels. Ray Houghton grabbed a goal back. Ian Harte was a spotty young centre back. Shay Given cried like an infant at the end of it and you knew they had invested heavily in the whole thing and lost. You felt for them.

There were big players that night. Andy Townsend, Houghton and Kelly were magnificent. Keynote players. We all got back to Dublin in the small hours and Houghton stood in the lobby of the airport hotel and made a little speech to journalists about transition and backing the manager and where Irish football was going.

Brian Kerr's players will hopefully feel the same thoughts Houghton expressed that night. Not one will step into a hotel lobby and express them, however. They are a quieter, less character-driven bunch, more insular and remote than their predecessors. The applauded the Irish support at the finish but often they seem tragically disconnected from that support. Previous Irish teams have fed on it and nurtured it through relaxed accessibility.

Brian Kerr won't lose much sleep over the team he picked or the substitutions he made or the errors his team committed. Those things are history now and if his core players are worth the salt they'll have learned from this humiliation. What he'll worry about is altering the personality of his team, getting wise voices and strong characters and fully formed leaders out of the wreckage of this weekend.