Emmet Malone On Soccer: With tomorrow's game against the Swiss potentially marking the end of the international road for some of the senior team's best known and longest established players, there has been growing concern over the apparent lack of emerging Irish talent at a time when the manager's options are already thin on the ground.

The changing patterns of player development at British clubs and the growing number of youngsters brought in from continental Europe and beyond have led to a significant drop in the number of youngsters from this country ending up in the academies. The logical conclusion, it would appear, is that fewer players of international quality are going to come off the production line.

The situation isn't helped by the fact the club careers of three of Ireland's most promising young stars of the past few years, Liam Miller, Colin Healy and Aidan McGeady, have, for one reason or another, stalled. Others who were obliged to endure the "next big thing" tag for a spell in their teens have seen their prospects plummet dramatically.

For all the setbacks, the FAI's technical director, Packie Bonner, maintains things are not nearly as bad as they have been portrayed.

"For a start," he says, "we have a senior squad the nucleus of which is young but very experienced. Players like Damien Duff, Robbie Keane and Richard Dunne are going to be around for quite a few years yet. Of course, we could always do with plugging a few gaps here and there, but for the most part we have time on our side and there are some very good young Irish players coming through the system."

The Irish end of the system, however, is about to change dramatically with the launch soon of the FAI's Emerging Talent Programme, a long-awaited scheme to identify youngsters with potential and provide substantially greater resources to assist with their development.

The project will result in kids around the country being offered the chance to do additional training with specialist coaches at regional centres. Mindful of the problems there have been previously when schoolboy clubs felt their best players were being poached, no attempt will be made to take the players away from their existing teams, the aim will simply be to ensure they get the sort of coaching required to get the best out of them.

The intention is that there will be a "finishing school" here in Ireland, with players brought through to senior level, possibly with a good deal of input from Eircom League clubs who will be major beneficiaries from the entire project.

For the moment, though, it is conceded our best players will continue to be "finished" in Britain, although their prospects of cracking the first team at a really big club are almost minuscule.

"To end up in the first team at a club like Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea or Arsenal an Irish lad really would have to be very talented, and it's because the bar has been raised by the number of foreign players coming in that it's probably not such a bad thing at all that the clubs are taking over fewer young lads from here," says Ireland under-21 manager Don Givens. "It's something of a relief that they're being more selective, because what was happening before was that they were hoovering up numbers just in case they missed the next Damien Duff."

One reason for this changing, points out the FAI's careers development officer, Eoin Hand, is that compensation must be paid to a player's previous clubs when he first turns professional. For the big boys the money is small beer, but in the lower leagues a manager is going to be careful about who gets offered deals when each one effectively costs £50,000 in payments to the schoolboy outfits that helped to develop his skills.

A priority of the new FAI programme, meanwhile, will be to improve technical ability. That many of our leading teenagers are lagging behind in this department is conceded, although there is still surprise at just how disparaging Manchester United's academy director Les Kershaw was recently when he told the Daily Telegraph that, while his club is working hard to develop gifted young English players: "Some clubs would rather take a rag-arsed Irish lad at 16, who is a hardened competitor because the Dublin and District Schools League is tough but he doesn't have great technique."

"The funny thing is," says Hand, "clubs like United have tended to be at the front of the queue for the best lads from the DDSL and they'd be the first ones to bend or break the rules if there was a lad they really wanted."

On that score the FAI is unlikely to make real progress.