LockerRoom: Strange how football changes like the tides. Less than a year ago France played Israel in the Stade de France and very pleasant it all was.

Les Bleus were très heureuse. In fact Les Bleus scored three times and Israel didn't score at all. The French thus qualified for Euro 2004 with a perfect record. They had fireworks afterwards, lots of them shooting up into the Paris night.

You could argue that despite all that they might still have known better about this weekend. It hasn't always been fireworks and high fives with Israel. France have mistaken Israel for carpeting in the past and ended up tripping over. Israel cost them World Cup qualification 11 years ago, but that was before the glory days. When times are good memories are short.

On Saturday in Paris, the French hosted the Israelis again. No pyrotechnics this time, On or off the pitch. Instead there was booing at the final whistle and for the last ten minutes the yearnful chanting of "Zizou, Zizou". Where have you gone, Zinedine? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

You know things are bad when you read the quotes from France's new coach, Raymond Domenech. The poor man has come in just when the party has wound up. On Saturday he found himself pleading for time. He talked like a Fianna Fáiler seeking re-election. More to do. Sure. More to do.

News of the French distress will have brought a fleeting smile to Brian Kerr's lips. There is an Irish policy of getting the big away games out of the way early in qualifying schedules, preferably when the big teams still carry summer hangovers. This time the Irish policy worked well for the Israelis. In a month's time the French will have absorbed the loss of two home points. On Wednesday they will digest the Faroe Islands with salt or sauce. In a month's time they'll know the loss of two more will be a catastrophe.

We Irish will know more on Wednesday night of course but we know Brian Kerr took over at a time when there was lots to do and now, well, lots has been done. Of course on Thursday we may well be looking back at our own closing fixture of the Euro 2004 campaign and working out who has gone forward and who has gone backward. There were enough moments on Saturday at Lansdowne, however, to suggest we have progressed significantly.

Most of those moments came from Andy Reid, whose brief international career has already garnered him a groaning shelf-load of Man of the Match awards. Reid is the totem of the new era. Playing just his ninth senior game in a green top and still inexplicably mired in that netherworld outside the English Premiership, he dominated the game with his creativity and adventurousness. Not just that, he decorated the occasion with a goal as good as any the old stadium has had cause to celebrate.

Perhaps that was what was so pleasing. The tantalising nature of what unfolded. Reid has blossomed suddenly it seems - but actually under the careful green thumb of Brian Kerr - into a player with the trickery which reminds one of Damien Duff and passing redolent of Liam Brady. He looks in gait like the old Forest thriller John Robertson and his presence suddenly enlivens a team already bursting with possibility.

Reid is the pearl gleaned from Kerr's patient examination of every oyster on the seabed. Of course there's Duff and Keane and O'Shea and other graduates from the happy underage days but Andy Reid has been more of a prodigy and a project in Brian Kerr's mind than in anyone else's. He has nurtured the player and developed him and on Saturday as Reid directed the game with his intelligent passing you had to wonder how any player could get to look so good on an international stage without having been fattened on hype and expectation for the previous few years.

You look at Reid in this week of all weeks and think of the virtue of being underestimated. This is the week after all when Spurs refused to part with £5 million for Reid and Alex Ferguson gambled hugely by surrendering a fortune for Wayne Rooney, a callow kid of undoubted talent but a kid nonetheless. A kid who seems so thoroughly surrounded by the wrong people that his career could be a disaster waiting to happen. The path to waywardness begins early and this summer's tabloid fodder about Rooney's recidivist brothel creeping would worry any manager. Rooney is a creature of big appetites and around him are many ready to indulge him. Ferguson has just rid himself of the distraction of the Beckham circus. One wonders does he still have the energy to deal with the Rooney circus.

This was the week too when Sven Goran Eriksson's luck started to evaporate. We listened on Saturday to Brian Kerr's quiet elucidation of the bare facts concerning his plans for developing his team over the past year. That sense of substance doesn't exist when you see Sven speak. England have as much talent as most managers can accommodate but all too often they underachieve in the limpest fashion. And persisting with a goalie nicknamed Calamity? We spent all of Euro 2004 waiting for the David James howlers to commence. They never did. On Saturday though James made up for that surprising streak of competence.

The sense you came away with from this weekend was that the Irish team are being handled right now with quiet expertise and a little native cunning. Everyone is moving in the same direction.

It's just a little over two years ago since Steve Staunton and Niall Quinn and Jason McAteer and Gary Kelly were the big names and Stephen Reid and Colin Healy were the advance guard of the next generation. Back then Roy Keane was never going to play again and Mark Kennedy was. Graham Kavanagh was gathering dust on the shelf.

Yep, it all changes like the tides. France will dismember the Faroe Islands this week and suddenly perhaps they will be bubbling with confidence and flair again. Or maybe the Swiss will look like world beaters on Wednesday and this hack will eat this column for breakfast on Thursday.

And yet, and yet. Progress is progress. Ireland play football in a way that hasn't been tried since the Eoin Hand era. Passing the ball. Playing with intelligence and guts and flexibility. There were many great things about the Big Jack/Mick eras, many great nights and fine trips, but only rarely did the team perform in a way that suggested they believed in their own talents rather than in their own system. When we got to a major tournament we always knew in the back of our heads that the men who got us there saw getting there as the achievement and everything else as trimming.

And when both those managers walked away and back to England they managed to do so in a way that left a sour taste and made you wonder, unfairly perhaps, if they ever looked back over their shoulder at us.

We begin this campaign as princes of the tides. People used to say Brian Kerr was a grand fella but top soccer professionals wouldn't respect him. They said this even after it was clear that our greatest player, Roy Keane, couldn't find anything to respect in Big Jack/Mick. One a world cup winner, the other a former Irish captain. Respect doesn't come with a flash of the CV though.

We begin this campaign with respect. All the ducks in a row and put there as professionally as possible. At one end of the spectrum Keane is back on board. At the other we have an under-21 team that has forgotten how to lose. Hopefully we'll be underestimated, because merely doing things right never gets headlines these days.

We begin this campaign with a three-nil win and a management team who believe World Cups aren't just for qualifying for. Football is looking at Roonaldo and Sven and the French. May they keep looking and keep underestimating us all the way to 2006.