It seems a long time ago since Mick McCarthy brought a fresh-faced bunch of footballers off to Prague for his first away international as Irish manager. We stretched our brains and for a week sprinkled little allusions to Prague Spring into our copy.

We weren't coming off happy times. Memory telescopes history, and among the things which McCarthy has taken the blame for in the popular imagination is folding up the carnival tents of the Charlton era. He's the one telling folks to go back to their homes. There's nowt to see here, nowt to see here.

Towards the end of the affair between ourselves and Jack Charlton, however, the big guy's idiosyncracies had begun to cost us. The 1994 World Cup campaign was a disaster alleviated by the not inconsiderable pleasure of beating Italy in Giants Stadium.

There followed a god-awful death march through the European championship qualifiers which ended with Portugal, Austria and Holland in turn fingering the wrist of our decrepit team and finding no pulse.

We should have known that our condition was terminal right back when Spain came to Lansdowne Road in 1993 and humiliated us. It was 1993, though, and we were still in love.

Anyway, Jack shuffled off and Mick McCarthy, with a difficult home friendly against Russia under his belt, took his side off to Prague and installed them in the lovely old party hotel above the city. Every morning in the pale sunshine he would take the chaps off to a muddy pitch and write the music for the new era.

Training was different. In the Charlton era, every man was a king and Charlton respected the boundaries. Players sorted themselves out according to familiar routines, shaking out their kinks before beginning a training session which ran like a jazz gig with improvised riffs chiming in and out of Charlton's barked vocals.

The McCarthy sessions were all syncopation and rhythm. The new manager was in the thick of it, carrying a gammy leg through the quickstep, one-touch exercises, butting into the seven-a-sides, infecting everyone with enthusiasm.

In Prague that week and on the trips which were to follow certain things became clear. McCarthy loved the away trips and the unimpeded access it gave him to his players. His plans and his style suited the kids better than they suited the greybeards.

McCarthy has never been given credit for the decommissioning of the rusting arsenal of players Charlton left behind. Charlton hadn't the courage to do it. McCarthy had to create his own style with old colleagues looking over his shoulder, bickering and snickering. Not easy.

Now that the avalanche of blame which followed the most recent campaign has settled, we might usefully take stock. It is this column's, not very popular, opinion, that reaching play-offs in the last two qualifying campaigns represented a realistic level of achievement given the transition process underway, the size and youth of the player pool and the blows of bad luck which have struck McCarthy.

Mistakes have been made, but in a team lacking natural leaders, adequate centre halves and a decent degree of cover when injuries and suspensions occur (Gary Kelly and Roy Keane have been sorely missed), the performances have been acceptable.

This week we start perhaps the last spring of the Mick McCarthy era. Away defeats to Holland and Portugal at the start of this autumn's World Cup qualifying campaign would stretch Bernard O'Byrne's commendable loyalty to the point where the very short line of applicants for the job might need looking at.

Little has changed for McCarthy, and perhaps he was always right when he said that the tenure after his would be the one to have. No quality centre back has discovered an Irish granny. Paul Butler comes to Dublin this week riding the crest of Sunderland's defensive slump. Gary Breen has established tenure at Coventry but 90 hard minutes of mistake-free concentration still seems beyond him.

Better news comes from Elland Road, the font of all good things, where Gary Kelly, Ian Harte and Stephen McPhail should all be first choice internationals by the autumn. If McPhail can cure his niggling hamstring, his ability to deliver the telling, creative pass will be the most significant addition to McCarthy's quiver since Robbie Keane's emergence.

The emergence of McPhail and the continuing crisis at the heart of the defence stirs up an argument which McCarthy appeared to have lost a couple of years ago. Coming off the back of a superb Irish midfield performance against Macedonia in Lansdowne Road in the autumn of 1996, McCarthy welcomed back Roy Keane for the following month's international against Iceland and experimented, as Alex Ferguson has done, by dropping him back to sweep in front of the central defence.

We drew. Great was the wrath of the nation. The experiment was abandoned. We have paid the price for creaky defence ever since. McPhail is no great fan of tackling, but with a practising aggressor beside him and Keane behind him, mightn't there be an improvement at both ends of the field?

Other than that, the harvest of the Brian Kerr crop will continue to be unavoidably erratic. You look at Colin Hawkins and Ger Crossley and realise that there is no such thing as a blue chip prospect. Then you cross the fingers for kids like Thomas Butler, Colin Healy, Shaun Byrne, Richie Partidge and Graham Barrett. Just a couple of good breaks away from the big time.

The changes at the helm of the under-21 regime are welcome. Ian Evans lost out initially with the number of players who skipped the under-21 grade entirely, but results in the last campaign were unimpressive and a full-time manager with Don Givens's record is another sign of the FAI's patient commitment to the future. Evans was no Maurice Setters, but the time has come to devote somebody full-time to continuing the thread of the Kerr work.

We need that bridge to maturity for the next wave. Back in 1996, McCarthy looked at the future and it had people in it like Phil Babb, Jason McAteer, Gareth Farrelly, Keith O'Neill and Mark Kennedy.

Never can tell, can you? Hindsight is the only exact science in football and springtime in the world of last chances allows no time for it.