Locker Room: Saturday night in Croke Park and it seemed as if there was something for everybody in the audience. Whatever type of comfort you were looking for you could find it after a light rummage through what was on offer.

We got a draw! The Germans (surprisingly!) were controlled and efficient. That's all they needed to be. A draw was all they had come for. Still, we sucked comfort out of the thought we had avoided defeat.

The Germans became the first nation to qualify for next summer's European Championships, doing so without looking like the sort of team who had purchased the express ticket through the vital currency of their play. After the giddy charisma they found themselves radiating during the last World Cup under Klinsmann, this campaign has seen them embrace the comforts of stereotype again. They play the percentages like mathematicians playing poker. They needed a draw and duly extracted one.

We had our chances to take a lead, but the Germans revealed enough of themselves to remind us that we would be kidding ourselves to think that having those chances was the same thing as having chances to actually win the game.

The visitors reserved the right to step the tempo up when they felt like it, and at an urbane and mildly amusing press conference afterwards the German media and management spoke with quiet satisfaction about the future in the context of having secured their qualification with what they called their "C team".

That categorisation wasn't quite fair or accurate, but you could see where they were coming from.

If you were Steve Staunton, there was enough there for you to feel you could come to the press room and speak about your bitter disappointment at not having won the game. If you were a critic of Staunton, you could scold him about the enduring eccentricities of his team selections and point to the fact that when this fixture list was drawn up Ireland versus Germany in Croke Park advertised itself to us as possibly one of those famous last stands, an old-fashioned occasion for cranking up the passion machine and hurling ourselves at a more accomplished side knowing a win would tip us over the edge and into the land of qualification.

Instead, it was evening when you read Staunton's team selection and just smiled quietly at the thought of what Roy Keane's expression might be when he noticed Liam Miller was not included.

It was a night when people got a little bit passionate but in a dutiful sort of way, when the Germans crushingly revealed the gulf between us not through their performance but in their talk of a "C team" and their obvious preoccupation with the future and not with us.

You could allow that Ireland's was a decent performance, but it was necessary to add several riders. Germany got what they came for. The bottom line is that from a group which was less than daunting we were out of contention very early. Instead of bitter disappointment at not having won, it would have been more refreshing to hear Staunton point to the fact the fixture was mere routine to the Germans, and that is the most damning indictment of the gap between the nations. The Irish manager's bitter disappointment should have been centred on the bigger picture. Saturday night, after all, was a long way from Ibaraki.

The most revealing and cruel moment of the night came just as the sides were coming out for the second half. The caffeinated announcer who gees everybody up at our matches had been cajoling us with some trivia question about which Irish player won his 100th cap when Ireland played Germany in Ibaraki during the 2002 World Cup.

Ah, stop the lights, Bunny. Not a tough question, but one asked at a time when few lovers of Irish soccer needed reminding of the difference between our circumstances now and then. Certainly not Staunton. Just as he was emerging from the tunnel the PA man parped happily that the answer to the question was "our present manager, Stephen Staunton". Instantly there was a short and cruelly reflexive wave of booing.

It was possible, not for the first time in this campaign, to feel acute sympathy for Staunton. I remember seeing him march flushed and alone across the compound in San Marino as a small cluster of Irish fans abused him viciously from the other side of a chainlink fence, and even after the high comedy of Ireland's performance that night it was possible to feel no individual deserved to feel what he must have been feeling.

Steve Staunton of all people. That day in Ibaraki, when Niall Quinn and Robbie Keane combined to smuggle a ball past Kahn and into the net, that game was one of the great occasions, one of the landmark episodes of romance that are part of our soccer folklore. At lunchtime on the day the game was played the Irish squad sat in the team hotel and the youngest member of the group, Steven Reid, presented Staunton with a watch to mark the occasion of his 100th cap.

It was a nice touch, and Staunton's place in the affections of Irish fans seemed unimpeachable that day. Through the Saipan saga, while his great friend Quinn had been the front-of-house man dealing with the increasingly operatic feud between the houses of McCarthy and Keane, it was Staunton who had stepped up his efforts on the training ground and on the pitch to hold the Irish side together.

For all that the FAI have chosen to represent Staunton as some kind of motivational guru, a latter day Vince Lombardi, the role didn't come naturally to Staunton. This column can remember a conversation with Irish backroom staff after that nightmare day in Skopje many years ago when Ireland lost to Macedonia. We spoke quietly about the general lack of leadership on the field - and Staunton, by then a much decorated veteran, was named as a prime example of the honest pro who offered leadership through assiduously minding his patch but was generally shy of providing anything more strident.

In Japan though, when he was needed, he pushed himself beyond his comfort zone and inspired people. Those were his finest moments, and it was impossible back then to imagine that within a few years the mere mention of his name at a game in Dublin would draw a stinging chorus of boos.

Steve Staunton must reflect sometimes that he lost more than he gained when he took this Irish job.

On Saturday, when he came to speak to us in the press room, a job he hates, facing people he has come to hate, Staunton was flushed, the strain of the campaign written all over his face. Knowing we would be dealing with the gaffer for another few days in the run-in to Wednesday's game, we cuffed with him gently in much the same manner the Germans had done with his team. No hard questions, nothing to make him get up and leave and further reduce media access to his team.

There was a little instant, though, which reminded us that Steve isn't a big-picture guy. He was asked about Brian Kerr's revealing piece in this paper on Saturday. Brian spoke of what we have all suspected for a long time, his sense of frustration at the fact for some Irish players defeat just doesn't mean as much as it does to management or fans. In lives that offer an endless cavalcade of whimsies and distractions, the young professionals just don't feel our pain.

It was put to Steve Staunton that some of the players are isolated from their public.

It was an interesting question asked at a time when the personality of our national team has become unprecedentedly vague and opaque. We looked at Staunton, not expecting he would heartily endorse the views of his predecessor, but hoping for a sign he too had identified this difficulty, hoping it was an issue which engaged him.

Staunton's initial response, however, was all bluster and ultimately quite depressing. He could have spoken of the effects of the treadmill life of the professional footballer, the certain difficulties easy money and outsize fame brings; he could have alluded to the troubling case of Stephen Ireland; he could have said it was a difficulty all managers in the game face, etc, etc.

Instead, he retorted angrily that when his players stay in Portmarnock they sometimes go for walks on the beach. At other times they might go into Malahide. He said he had just witnessed scenes of real disappointment in the Irish dressing-room. He added that he never reads newspapers.

Fair enough. As a performance in a press room it wasn't the worst or the most incoherent Steve Staunton has given, but as with the preceding campaign of football it lacked just enough of everything.

Most especially, it lacked reason to hope.

You could take what you wanted out of Saturday night except any real conviction that the future isn't filled with more of the same: occasions when we play for pride and seedings and better teams humour us in our delusions; nights that are a long way from Ibaraki and the manager and his team are isolated not just from the public but from reality.