The buck stops everywhere

‘I DON’T shine if you don’t shine,’ a line from The Killers’ new album rang a bell when considering Steve Staunton’s situation during the week. Management is all about reflected glory, when you think about it.

The assignment of responsibility for a team’s performance has interested this column ever since the day we heard a US college basketball coach asked whether his job was safe or not: “Staying in my job depends on teenagers in their pyjamas remembering what I tell them when they run around. What do you think of my job security?”

Basketball is a deliberate choice, by the way. The relatively small size of squads meant that when television money started pouring into the sport in the US, professional contracts became so generous that it was one of the first sports which gave commentators pause about pay and motivation — if players had so much money in the bank after one season, where would the motivation to actually win games and trophies come from?

Which brings us to the Ireland performances. Last Saturday’s debacle against Cyprus has been raked over in an unsurprisingly vindictive and personalised way when it comes to inexperienced boss Staunton, but the players have escaped much of the blame.

The poor innocent players: while it’s true that Staunton is a novice, the players at his disposal are experienced professionals for the most part, the majority of them playing in one of the toughest professional leagues in sport. Yet a hapless 5-2 defeat isn’t their fault? Scratch that ‘hapless’, as a matter of fact. It’s not strong enough. Other Ireland massacres have been against good teams: the 4-1 loss to a Denmark including Laudrup, Elkjaer and Molby, the 7-0 loss to the 1982 Brazil, the Brazil of Socrates and Falcao. In Brazil. Compare leaking five against Cyprus, the Cyprus of . . . go on: can you name one of them? The fact that many of the same players featured in the moral victory (trans: draw) on Wednesday night compounds the problem. If they could do the unglamorous but necessary work in Lansdowne Road — covering, harrying, marking, backing each other up, organising — why couldn’t they do it in Nicosia? Hence the basketball comparison cited above. If a player is in a culture where Ashley Cole can describe a pay offer of £55k a week as opposed to £60k as “taking the p—”, are we expecting too much that that player will leave it all on the pitch in a mid-season encounter with Cyprus? Are we expecting too much if we expect anything at all? Maybe that appalling possibility explains the understandable tendency to focus on the manager’s performance. He’s the replaceable part of the jigsaw.

We can always get another manager, runs that argument, but we’re stuck with the players. Heaven forbid we should find fault with their performance.

Granted, you don’t have one without the other. The manager sets the tone, and a good one can infuse an inferior team with the spirit necessary to overachieve. And Staunton hasn’t helped himself. People aren’t accustomed yet to his blunt media manner, but more worrying was his handling of the Lee Carsley situation. That was dreadful. At least something was retrieved from that with the Everton man stiffening the midfield against the Czechs, though it’s up to you to decide whether to celebrate Carsley’s presence on Wednesday night or lament his absence on Saturday evening. However, it should surely tell us something about ourselves — and Cyprus — that it is being seriously suggested that the inclusion of Lee Carsley, with all due respect, would have solved all our problems last weekend.

What’s making the whole thing worse for fans here is the parallel improvement of Northern Ireland. BBC’s coverage of the North’s fine win over Latvia last Wednesday was soundtracked by ecstatic fans in Windsor Park; at one stage a suspiciously familiar chant — famously echoed around Lansdowne Road over 12 years ago — could be heard: there’s only one team in Ireland.

It’s not all sweetness and light in Belfast: the Sammy McIlroy era is remembered with the fondness of a gulag survivor reminiscing about Stalin, and only a couple of weeks ago current manager Lawrie Sanchez seemed on the verge of quitting. Then he beat Spain. The team had bottomed out under McIlroy but now they work hard for each other and grind out results.

The question for those south of the border is simple: are we in the equivalent of McIlroy era or Sanchez era?