Staunton in no mind to quibble

Manager's reaction:We were curious. All week before Saturday's game Steve Staunton had sounded eerily similar, more than several of his audience noted, to a Premier League manager in the north-east of England. No, not Sam Allardyce or Gareth Southgate, the other one.

All this steely determination to banish forever our tradition of limping home from competitive away trips horribly scarred by self-inflicted wounds (often, appropriately enough, in injury time), and still concluding we hadn't done too badly for a little island. In the last 20, 30 years, he told us, we've not been positive enough in these games, over-cautious; the time had come to change the "mindset" of the players.

By full time you couldn't but wonder if it was the manager's mindset that needed to be modified.

Andy Reid and Stephen Hunt left to file their nails on a bench in Bratislava, when the game, not least once Kevin Doyle made it 2-1, was pleading for the former's guile and the latter's energy, while Darron Gibson and Jonathan Douglas arrived on the pitch, greeted with a collective "Eh?" from the Irish support.

Hard to interpret the message to his players as anything other than "what we have we'll hold", when we're rarely all that terrific at holding on to what we have. No mindset-altering stuff there.

Doyle's goal, a thing of beauty, protected with much the same conviction as England defended their Ashes crown in Australia. In other words, Groundhog Day. What's it they say? "It's not the despair I can't stand - it's the hope."

Staunton did, though, put a brave face on it all, as has been his wont through a campaign that has been liberally sprinkled with calamities, when he strode in to the media centre after the game.

"Judging by the dressing-room the lads are absolutely devastated. It's like a morgue in there," he said, but added, "I wouldn't say it is a bad result."

Germany and the Czech Republic would. After all they won 4-1 and 3-0 in Bratislava, which goes some way to explaining why they're filling the top two spots in the table.

"They're disappointed, and when they see the goals they will feel even worse," he said. "But it's over with. We have a big game on Wednesday and we know what we have to do; we always had to win it. You try and win every game and at least now we know we have to beat the Czechs in Prague.

"A win is a win if you win it," he added, setting the mother of all challenges for the Slovak translator sitting beside him.

Why didn't Reid and Hunt make an appearance?

"I went out with the team I picked. I was quite happy with it and the way game panned out. We got one or two knocks or niggles which forced the changes we made, but both (players) were in our minds. But Kevin Kilbane did a job on the left. Andy came into consideration, but I changed my mind because Doyler felt a twinge with his hamstring." And what of this inability to protect a lead, the team dropping so deep it almost disappeared into downtown Bratislava?

"When you are away from home it is natural. I talked about the mindset. It's natural to drop deep. They find it hard to get out of their own half - but what I want to do is change the mentality; I've been on about it all week. We will improve and I know from the disappointment in the dressing-room that there is a real determination to put things right."

The Czech game coming so quickly, he said, was a "bonus". "We are still on course," he insisted. And he suggested there would be one or two changes for Wednesday night. With a bit of luck the mindset might be one of them.