Tom Humphries watches as a pair of old hands and one forgotten man talk about life in the future under the new man, Brian Kerr

The new era has a downbeat feel. The Irish team are cossetted in a hotel in the shadow of Kilmarnock's ground. Around them is a cordon sanitaire. The media are miles away in Irvine, in the hotel where Alan Partridge used to live.

For relaxation there's a bar and the Blue Lagoon pool, Irvine's premier Hawaiian- themed aquatic experience. The plastic palms are a cruel reminder of Saipan.

Life goes on though. Press conferences are lighter and more plentiful. News came through yesterday of Mick McCarthy being part of the England team's training session and it seemed bizarre and remote at the same time. Some distant madness.

Brian Kerr is putting his mark on this Irish squad. It's odd how quickly and remorselessly football moves on.

Kenny Cunningham is in situ, sitting beside a new manager and smiling on. Mattie Holland comes into the press conference too and makes it a trinity of happy faces gazing down at the press. It occurs that there aren't two more senior players in the squad; as an exercise in semiotics the pictures and the event will reach out not just to Ireland but to Roy Keane's house in Chester and other points beyond where doubts about Brian Kerr's ability to gain the respect of senior professionals may have been raised.

Mattie Holland fields a Scottish question on whether he thinks Ireland overachieved at the World Cup. He might say that only in Scotland would getting to the second round be considered overachievement and that at home the question is whether we underachieved. Mattie takes the question, contests its premise and turns it into something else.

"Did we overachieve in Japan and Korea? No, I would dispute that. We have lost Niall and Stan since then obviously, but we did ever so well in Japan. We were unfortunate not to progress even further and we still have a good nucleus of players.

"What's important is the future. Win these next two games against Georgia and Albania and we change everything around. What is important is this week. It would be great to get Brian off to a winning start."

The question and the manner of the answer seem to encapsulate where the Irish are going. What's behind them is well behind them. They are drawing up a new manifesto. New plans, new attitude and new philosophy. Even the mandatory Roy Keane question seemed a little jaded and drew just the

most inscrutable of smiles from Kerr. That story will end soon one way or another and the progress towards the future will be swifter.

For now, Kenny Cunningham remains the team captain, albeit one with very little chance of playing this week. He and Kerr had a long meeting in the team hotel on Sunday night when, one imagines, the surface affability which both men show to the world was laid aside and hard football matters were discussed. Both seem happy and continually cross-referenced each other in their answers. To wit, Cunningham on the Scots:

"As Brian has mentioned already, they have a good blend of experience and youth. Paul Lambert and Barry Ferguson, still at quite a tender age, two outstanding footballers. Neil McCann, Neil Sullivan - who I played with for a long time - and Paul Devlin, who I am with at Birmingham. As Brian says, there are signs of late that they are heading in the right direction."

A little later Stephen Carr joins Kerr for an informal session with the daily media. Two things are clear. Under the McCarthy regime there was a distinct managerial preference for the company and style of English journalists. That axis has shifted. Kerr likes throwing things out just to see what the non-Irish media will make of them. He discusses the achievements of his new technical officer and mentions him coaching Tralee Dynamos to an FAI youth cup "which they wouldn't have too many of in Kerry".

You can tell he's having fun as well as making a point, but for some in the room he's speaking a different language.

Second point is Steve Carr. Wow! Eighteen months ago it was a commonplace that we had only two world-class players, Roy Keane and Steve Carr. The withdrawal of one from the World Cup seemed to thoroughly overshadow the absence of the other through a knee injury. Then the emergence of other players seemed to push him further into the distance. Yet here he is and he's paraded almost like a new signing. He hasn't played a game for the country since the away fixture in Estonia in the summer of 2001. He's 26 and has just 18 caps. Ian Harte, by contrast is a year younger and has 47. Robbie Keane already has 40. Carr is almost starting over.

"It's been a long time coming for me, obviously I had to pull out of the last game too (Greece) with an injury. At some stages I thought it wouldn't happen again. It's a new beginning. Coming back like this makes you appreciate it even more."

And he has the sort of happy perspective now which fits right in with the new philosophy. During his time away from football he became a father for the first time. Young Anthony, or Anto as his father says, is nine months old and provided a welcome relief from any self-pity which the World Cup might have brought on.

"I suppose everyone gets their fair share of setbacks," says Carr, "hopefully that's the end for me. It can drag on if people just keep talking about it. There's bigger tragedies than missing the World Cup, and a lot of good things happened to me in that period. I had a baby. We had. That's more important. I've realised there's more important things in life than football."

And soon he is talking about Brian Kerr who is sitting beside him. He doesn't know Kerr well, just through casual meetings around the hotels when the full international team would gather over the last few years. And Kerr would always stop him and have something useful and interesting to say.

That experience has been common to them all. When they gathered in Scotland this weekend, Kerr says he didn't need to introduce himself to anybody. Perhaps from the more remote media gantries he seems like a nobody or a Merrion Square politician, but in the business and at the coalface he has the qualifications and the respect. That much was clear yesterday.