'If they were in swimming, they'd be doing it," Brian Kerr said about the night-after-night training repetition required of 10- and 11-year-olds with the potential to make it in professional football. It was a throwaway remark on a television review show and might well have been the most illuminating observation on the slow-fall into irrelevance of the Ireland team.

The Republic of Ireland’s 1-1 draw against feisty Scotland last Saturday was so deflating precisely because the match had brought alive the idea – for a few minutes at least – that further days of improbable magic were on the horizon. At half-time, the Aviva Stadium was a great place to be. You could feel happiness and self-belief beginning to flood back.

The staggering off-sidedness of Jon Walters’s goal could easily be waved away as a trifling misdemeanour because the Irish deserved to be in front after a convincing and imaginative performance. The many champions of Wesley Hoolahan merely had to point a regal hand towards the pitch as if to say: See? The noise in the stadium was redolent of the old Lansdowne Road and, on the sideline, Martin O’Neill looked closer than ever to reprising that vivid, on-the-edge-of-reason figure who coached Leicester and Villa with such passion.

The Derry man is distinguished in the history of top-flight English football managers for mime-dancing every ball kicked while still looking like the smartest guy in the entire ground. Somewhere, an aging academic has wept tears that his prodigy wasted it all for bloody football.

You couldn’t listen to O’Neill when he was a club manager or TV analyst without grasping that he is enthralled by the game. Ideas and opinions tumbled out of him. As Ireland manager, he has cut a much more subdued figure.

When he took over, it was understandable but still disappointing that he chose to wear a standard suit rather than the football sweater-tracksuit-and-spectacles combination that became his trademark. Maybe the game had changed, maybe the attitude of imperial indifference affected by José Mourinho ended the era of football managers going berserk on the sideline. But O’Neill as impassive onlooker has never seemed quite right. So on Saturday when he unleashed those arabesques of encouragement and despair, tailored suit be damned, we were all thinking: this is more like it.

O’Neill knew he was dealing with fine lines when he took the Ireland job. A cursory glance at previous World Cup and European qualifying campaigns tells a story of winter after winter of nail-biting, crucifying draws and 1-0 wins that left the rest of the world numb with boredom.

Success – which translates to getting Ireland to the next major championship – would be dependent on a number of factors, luck being far from the least of those. Big Jack was happy to trust his luck in spades. So too was Giovanni Trapattoni, along with his unwavering belief that he was working with an inferior and peripheral football nation whose foolish locals harboured delusions of grandeur.

Technical limitations

Trapattoni behaved as if he believed that his being on the Irish sideline made Ireland a better football team – even as he despaired of their technical limitations.

Had Ireland hung on for the first major victory of the O’Neill era after what seems like a lifetime of draws, the tone of the conversation this week would have been very different. But Shaun Maloney’s fluky, maddening goal – like a debt repaid for the famous Gary Mackay goal which gave birth to the idea of the Republic of Ireland as the plucky overachievers – brought about an acknowledgement that Irish football looks lost and caught in a time warp.

The team’s best players are also its oldest. Once they leave, who will fill their shoes? Richie Sadlier said on television on Monday night that the outlook for promising young players coming through the Irish youth system is “a big black hole”.

On Saturday evening, Eamon Dunphy sounded melancholy when he spoke fondly about the Dublin schoolboy's league as a model which just doesn't work anymore. Dunphy is a romantic at heart and wants to live to see Ireland produce another midfielder of the calibre of his friends John Giles and Liam Brady: footballers capable of wowing the connoisseurs. He recalled that in a recent conversation with Brian Kerr, he asked the former Ireland manager a question concerning the Irish player through which he channels so much of his despair: "What does Glenn Whelan do?"

It was an interesting question. Anytime you watch Ireland play live, it is hard not be drawn to Whelan, who has been subject to so much scathing criticism.

Whelan went from Cherry Orchard to Manchester as a kid. Willo Flood and Paddy McCarthy were with him there and with virtually no fanfare he has, at the age of 31, survived the odds to make a highly lucrative career as a hard-working, uncomplicated, never fashionable Premier League midfielder.

Flimsy midfield

Whelan was the figure Trapattoni relied on to keep some sort of shape and cohesion in a flimsy Irish midfield, O’Neill has found him equally indispensable. Whelan does the thing which he realised early in life would give him the best chance of succeeding: his job. He works, he tackles, he keeps the ball moving, he does the basics, and he goes home. The highlights are few. He operates in a league filled with players infinitely more talented than he is but still he plays. That is his attribute. He can’t be what he is not. As Kerr responded: “He fills a space.” The bigger problem will become apparent when it emerges that there is no ready replacement, no grafter who on toughness and guile made it through the brutally demanding apprentice stages of English football.

There are hundreds of coaches across Ireland who give their time to young football players. But without a cohesive system in place to make sure that the best and brightest are identified early and given an opportunity to play football four and five nights a week, they will always be playing catch-up. As Kerr said, if they were swimming, they would be doing it.

Last weekend’s draw was more than likely the end of Ireland’s ambitions in this tournament. The old ways don’t work.

Saturday was a bleak outcome for this Irish team but if it could also mark the beginning of a mood to establish a new direction to find and mind the next Robbie Keane or Paul McGrath or Roy Keane rather than hoping that they just materialise, then just maybe it could also be the most significant Irish football result in years.