When Stan was the man

OVER the past couple of days, it’s been hard to avoid those doleful images of Tony Mowbray, head in hands while the rain sheeted down, barely able to watch as mighty St Mirren ran riot against his battered Bhoys.

The inevitable followed, and the last we saw of Mowbray, a Celtic man to the core, was his tearful face behind the wheel of a car as he was unceremoniously cast out of Paradise.

Much less attention was devoted to another managerial sacking last weekend but then the departure of the gaffer from a club propping up the English league will never be headline stuff.

Still, this was another unhappy milestone in the managerial career of Steve Staunton and it wouldn’t be right to let the week go by without offering commiserations and, perhaps, a little bit of necessary perspective.

In choosing Darlington, already rooted to the bottom of the football league when he came on board, Staunton could hardly have picked a more daunting challenge for his first job as a club manager — unless, of course, he imagined that things simply couldn’t get any worse.

But they did and, capping a dismal run which saw just four wins in 23 league games — leaving the club 19 points adrift of safety — the last straw proved to be a 2-1 home defeat by Barnet in a game played in front of a record low attendance of 1,463.

Staunton was promptly relieved of his duties, his chairman’s remark that he “desperately wanted things to work out for Steve but it just clearly wasn’t to be” resounding like an echo of an earlier and much more high-profile fall from grace.

Staunton’s career as Ireland manager will forever be defined by its lowest points, not that there was a surfeit of highs on which to look back fondly. But even if the most memorable results of his regime came in friendlies — the inaugural 3-0 win against Sweden, a classic false dawn if ever there was one and, later, a hugely unexpected 4-0 trouncing of the Danes in Copenhagen — it wasn’t all doom and gloom throughout his time in charge.

Performances at home and away to Germany were far better than the results delivered, something which also applied to both games against the Czech Republic and the 2-2 draw in Bratislava which is mainly remembered now as the last time Stephen Ireland played for his country.

But, really, all of that was ultimately by the way. The key matches of Staunton’s managership were the ones which brought Irish football to unprecedented depths — the 5-2 shocker in Nicosia, the pipsqueak win over San Marino and, the final nail in the coffin, the awful 1-1 draw at home to Cyprus.

No manager could have survived those terrible punctuation marks, especially not a novice gaffer like Staunton who, because of the most unfortunate and ultimately tragic of circumstances, was too often denied the hands-on guidance of Bobby Robson, the man whose vast knowledge of the game the FAI had hoped would help pay off on the gamble of appointing a managerial rookie like Staunton in the first place.

Yet, if the Louth man turned out not to be a leader in the dug-out they had hoped for, that still shouldn’t negate recognition of the qualities — including a natural inclination for leadership — which marked him out as an inspirational figure on the pitch, especially in his country’s hour of need.

That was never more evident that in the dying days of his international career when, at a time of unprecedented crisis for Irish football, Staunton stepped up to take on the captaincy, move to centre-half and turn in a sequence of absolutely outstanding displays for Ireland at the 2002 World Cup.

As he announced his retirement in the wake of the cruel exit to Spain, Staunton had just established a then record haul of 102 appearances for his country. But even that place in the honour roll has since been taken from him by Shay Given and Kevin Kilbane, two more evergreens who jointly hit the 103 mark in the recent friendly against Brazil in London.

And now comes the sacking at Darlington, a blow from which you wonder if his career in football will ever recover.

As it happens, I got a chance to mull over all this a little bit with another great Irish full-back yesterday. Denis Irwin’s reputation as Irish football’s Mr Reliable will forever remain intact but then, by his own admission, steering well clear of the challenge of management might have helped in that regard.

“Any management job is tough,” he remarked, “whether it’s Ireland or taking over the 92nd club in the football league. But I admire him for going into management.

“It’s alright for us to sit on the sidelines and say he should have done this or he could have done that, but it’s different when you are in there. It’s easy for the media and the football pundits. Everybody forgets how bloody hard it is. Me? I never thought of going into management. Never did. But I think it’s great that he’s had a go and I hope he gets another chance.”

That seems unlikely now, with Staunton’s name once again a byword for failure in football.

But his has been a story of two careers and the failures of the second should never be allowed to eclipse the successes of the first.

It’s certainly not something you hear said much, if at all, these days but it’s no less true for that: Irish football will always have reason to be enormously grateful to Steve Staunton.

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