In terms of international management, Mick McCarthy comes of age in Brussels this evening. Game number 21 at the Irish helm presents the team's former captain with a chance to celebrate in style by leading his team to the World Cup finals.

And that, after all, is what he was hired to do in February of last year. Never mind all the talk of Romania being a spent force. Finishing second, possibly as the best second-placed team, looked to be a formality. At the very least it would be all up for grabs in the play-offs.

Instead, McCarthy's side made abysmally difficult going of reaching this stage of the competition, dropping points to Macedonia, Lithuania and Iceland along the way. Now, McCarthy has the opportunity he requires to prove himself. The task is to devise a route to victory over a team that carved us up in Dublin, but which is missing far more quality players than ourselves.

It won't be easy, but for the first time in five years of management, Mick McCarthy will have something clear-cut to point to as a significant achievement.

Such evidence of ability would be welcome for McCarthy has done rather little to indicate that he is a good manager. At Millwall, a few indifferent years ended with the team in fairly much the same state as when he'd arrived.

It is argued that, at club level, McCarthy never had the players required to really improve things. Much the same sort of defence is used to defend his won six, drawn seven, lost seven record as Irish manager (in competitive terms it is five, four, two - and that includes two wins over Liechtenstein).

The players may no longer be as good as they once were - the likes of Brady, McGrath, Lawrenson and Whelan certainly haven't been replaced - but that is only part of the story.

We are no longer narrowly failing to come out of groups packed with Europe's footballing powers. These days we repeatedly find ourselves unable to break down poor sides in Dublin, while on the road we can fall apart in Skopje, or, as in Bucharest where we turned in our one truly impressive performance of the qualifying group, fail to take our chances.

It should be remembered that without a magnificently inept Icelandic goalkeeper, we would not even have reached the play-offs for he had a significant hand in all four of our goals in Reykjavik where anything less than a win would have meant third place in the group.

Kevin Kilbane started that game, apparently as part of an attempt by McCarthy to give his favourite son, Mark Kennedy, a jolt.

Kennedy, a promising player whose development has been terribly hindered by a move to Anfield, has been one of those players to benefit most from McCarthy's abandonment of the principles which he said upon taking the job would be the cornerstones of his management philosophy.

Firstly, McCarthy insisted that players would not be considered for Ireland unless they were playing for their club's first team.

Secondly, he said that the employment of wing backs was the tactical way forward for the boys in green. Both principles were soon ditched.

Ian Harte, a left-full back who can not get into the Leeds team, plays at the heart of our defence (with another full back, Kenny Cunningham), while Gary Breen, outstanding at centre half in recent games for Coventry, can not get a look in.

It is not the only selection anomaly. Denis Irwin, so sorely missed for this tie, was reckoned not to be good enough to play in two qualifiers. The partnership of Keith O'Neill and David Connolly is repeatedly referred to as our most desirable. Yet O'Neill now plays as a wing back at Norwich and it is the man who would lose out, Tony Cascarino, whose goals have saved our bacon in recent months.

Kennedy, who like Harte actually plays most of his competitive football in the World Cup these days (there are not enough Pontin's League matches to keep either man match-fit), is consistently asked to be the one who unlocks things for our strikers.

McCarthy obviously wants to see Kennedy do well, but were the 21-year-old's interests really served by asking him to play at the front of a diamond-shaped midfield a couple of weeks ago when he was supposed to cause problems for one of the most experienced and polished midfielders in European football, Franky van der Elst?

Ironically, Kennedy was actually a victim of McCarthy's other great shift in policy. Since the wing backs went we've seen just about every formation, from 4-4-2 to 4-5-1, 4-1-4-1 and 4-3-3 (Kennedy has played up front in that one too).

McCarthy is still searching for a way to get his team to amount to more than the sum of its parts.

That was what he had to achieve if the team was to make it to France next summer, but with 90 minutes of our qualifying campaign to go, it seems McCarthy is still hoping to stumble upon the right combination.

"I believe I'll be judged on what the senior team does over the next two years," he said, when his appointment was confirmed. He also said "expectation brings pressure, but I think we'll cope."

As we head into the most important match of McCarthy's term, those expectations are without doubt a good deal lower and, sadly, he has played no small part in bringing them down.

Matters may indeed get better over the next couple of years as fresh talent comes into the team. But two years ago, appointing McCarthy to the Irish job seemed to many like a worthwhile gamble. If we lose tonight, extending his contract to cover the European Championship qualifying campaign is still a gamble. But is it still a worthwhile one?

If we still believe that McCarthy will come good then fair enough, but if not, then, as any poker player will tell you, sometimes you need walk away from the table rather than throw good money after bad.