Has Irish sport had enough indispensable men?

When the FAI — or rather John Delaney, since they remain one and the same thing, at least for now — declared on Saturday night that they were creating a new position for him, it transformed a mere theory we had last November into an obvious truth.

The decision to not give Stephen Kenny the senior international manager job (yet give it to him), to give it to Mick McCarthy, but for two years only, was an outright fudge. A Machiavellian stroke to survive and appease a couple of key constituencies.