It's becoming a well-worn path for Irish teams. Having made our reputation in the game with a series of passionate displays that upset the apple-cart of international football, we're no longer the ones producing the shocks. These days we've become the soft touches against whom lesser teams can employ a system. Basically we're getting a taste of our own footballing medicine. The problems started in the latter days of Jack Charlton's reign but little has been done over the past 20 months to rectify the situation. Just as we were then, we're terribly predictable when we go forward and after Iceland came to Dublin and outwitted us to take a point, now Lithuania have left our qualification plans in serious need of revision.

Our record during that year and a half or so tells the story. We have won just four matches since McCarthy took over the Irish team and although there has certainly been progress made towards the long-term rejuvenation of our fortunes, for the moment there has been nothing of substance done to improve things. We've been working with much the same material, cutting the cloth in very much the same way and ultimately doing nothing more substantial than making superficial alterations to the window dressing.

The same problems were there for us to see in the opening period. It would have been one thing for Lithuania to start by hitting us quickly once or twice as we were still attempting to settle into our game but it was alarming to see them do a great deal more than that.

The visitors looked comfortable on the ball, they played some nice football and, while it was clear that they didn't pose too much of a threat to Shay Given's goal it was clear that they had come to Dublin confident that they could compete on equal terms with a side that a few years ago would have expected to see them off convincingly, confident that they could get a result.

We, on the other hand, looked hurried. There has never been a shortage of commitment in our players' attitude when it comes to application but all too often they fall back on the same old approach of attempting to crack the problem and, increasingly, there isn't the guile required to achieve the objective.

Last night it was clear in those early minutes that we were going to have problems. We weren't getting in behind the opposition's defence before attempting to cross the ball and all too often we weren't even attempting to.

Instead the ball was being played in from deep in midfield with Niall Quinn lunging for the ball again and again with his back to goal and finding only David Connolly in support because nobody from midfield had had a chance to get into the area.

Kennedy, who might have provided a worthwhile alternative ultimately failed to do so because he looked precisely what he is just now, a player who is desperately short of first-team play. If Kennedy was involved in the Premiership on a regular basis then we could expect a great deal more of him on occasions like this but until he gets the move that he wants or breaks into the Liverpool side he will never be able to deliver the sort of balls we need from the wings because he's always going to be half a yard short of the pace required.

In midfield Andy Townsend was another player who looked out of sorts on the night. The Irish captain looked unfit and struggled to get in to the rhythm of the game. For a player who would usually cause a defence of this calibre all sorts of difficulty, he contributed very little of real worth to our cause in attack.

Beside him Roy Keane had another fine game and Ray Houghton was as tireless as ever but whatever number of chances Houghton helped to create for those around him, the scoring opportunities that he himself missed were ultimately to cost his team a couple of points.

It wasn't like Houghton to miss either of the opportunities that he had at the end of the first half but when he lined up his header near the end of the second half it actually looked harder to miss and that is something that you simply can't legislate for because on any number of other nights a player of his class would have slotted the ball into the net without giving it a second thought.

Even if Houghton had scored, however, and Ireland had won this game, there would be a need for a rethink. We simply do not show the flexibility or ability to think on our feet that we must if we wish to regain our former status as a major force in the game.

It's funny in a way that I can still see us going to Iceland and winning, going to Lithuania strangling the game and perhaps winning and then, with a gun to our collective head against a team that has already qualified, beating the Romanians to finish second in the group. But if we do we can count ourselves lucky to scrape a play-off spot from a campaign that we once harboured dreams of winning. After that it seems virtually impossible to see how we could qualify in a two-legged game because we no longer seem to in games unless our opponents give us the opportunity to, and there simply isn't enough Liechtensteins to go round at this level. We may, when up against it or away from home still possess the ability to kill off a game when we have to but that's only good enough to get you somewhere when you can take teams like Iceland and Lithuania back to Dublin and beat them. These days, it seems, we can still dream about that sort of thing but we don't have the imagination to actually do it anymore.

(In an interview with Emmet Malone)