Locker Room:These two-leg away trips with the Irish soccer team are always tricky affairs for the poor misfortunates who scrape a living from extracting quotes and clichés from the boys. As conditions worsen I often recall the personal motto of a particularly chirpy friend of mine: just because your wife dies doesn't mean your house won't burn down.

So not being there this week is life therapy. The armchair at home is the best place to view Ireland when they are playing away from home. Especially on the two-leg trip like this when the mood and morale sink like the evening sun, leaving just darkness behind. This column passed Saturday night with the feet up watching the stodge from Bratislava and worrying why something as good as Peadar Carton being free to play in an All-Ireland under-21 final could feel so wrong.

And there was the pleasure of watching Dunphy, Brady and Giles in action, the three tenors of football criticism hitting the high Cs as only they can. Not travelling is the only way to travel. Honestly, my mind was broadened. It's the way to go. As Con Houlihan once said, he missed Italia 90 because he was away at the World Cup.

Besides, early reports from this official trip are alarming. The hackery who pay through the nose for these jaunts were left starving on the plane while the smell of hot food being inserted into happy FAI blazer types wafted down the aisles.

Instinctively many hacks found themselves looking under their seats just to make sure that they had been provided with safety jackets.

Ah! There's a very thin line between these trips and extraordinary rendition. At least if Uncle Sam whisks you away for some torture by proxy you don't have to watch the Irish defence as part of the deal.

Most hacks would rather cover a minor match in Basra than risk the frostbite and hypothermia exposure to so many cold shoulders can cause on the soccer trips and for the next few days it's going to get worse. There'll be enough of a chill in the air to reverse global warming.

Conceding a last-minute goal on a Saturday evening defers the pain for the Irish boys only slightly. The Sunday newspaper writers, usually the crack storm-troopers of soccer criticism, will have written the body of their copy acknowledging a rare win on foreign soil.

The prose will have had a "never mind the quality, count the points" sort of a feel to it. They'll have slipped out of the jackboots and into something a little more comfortable. Slovakia's late goal won't have left time for the quills to be dipped back into the ink for anything but a quick rewrite of the opening paragraph.

The first bulletins from Bratislava will read quite cheerily then. By this morning though the full implications of the problems evident in this Irish performance will have become evident. We will have acknowledged to ourselves that Slovakia were there for the taking, a poor team gawping at us open-mouthed like fish with a fetish for shiny metal hooks. We let them off our hook twice.

Worse. Our passing was, to borrow a phrase from the coaches' lexicon, brutal. Our defending (with the honourable exceptions of Sir Richard Dunne of Tallaght and Lord Given of Lifford) was sometimes comical and often troubling. And worst of all we display no signs yet of learning lessons.

There are people about who express a blind faith in the syllogism which says because A, Stephen Staunton is a decent man and B, he was a great and faithful player C, that he should be given the Irish soccer team as a learning resource for a management career which up until he got that happy phone call from Uncle John Delaney had comprised little more than picking up cones at the training ground at Walsall. Hmmmm.

The time for arguing over whether Steve deserved the job or not is of course long gone, as is the time to lament the deplorable treatment of Brian Kerr and Noel O'Reilly. We are at the stage though where Steve Staunton's acuity and ability to learn needs to be assessed.

Steve took his side to Denmark a few weeks ago and even though Scandinavian sides seem to enjoy "playing dead" against us we made them look like 11 traffic cones. It was an evening which suggested that Andy Reid might have a future as a central midfielder. Not that he was going to run like Keano or tackle like, uhm, Keano again, but that he was going to be able to pass the ball and create things and if he had the electrifying Stephen Hunt outside him, as he had that night, he might go some way to making Ireland regularly look as exciting as he made them look that evening.

And? Neither Reid nor Hunt started on Saturday night. When it came time to wrap the game up and keep the ball, a time when we needed to retain possession and keep applying the pressure, did we call upon Reid or Hunt? We did not. We crooked the finger at Jonathon Douglas, who plies his trade in what is basically the third division, and we beckoned Darron Gibson, a 19-year-old who had never played a competitive international before. We sat back at the 18-yard line looking like teenage girls shutting their eyes and holding tight as the rollercoaster comes to the crest of the hill.

And we got suckered by a goal which was marginally less slapstick than the one we gave away to San Marino but on a par with any of the five (yeah, five) we gave to Cyprus. Coming to the end of Steve Staunton's first campaign as Irish manager one would have to say that the learning curve has flatlined. From competitive game to competitive game we are showing no sign of improvement and no real sign of knowing what way we want to play or what our best team is. The omission of Reid and Hunt in preference for a midfield 75 per cent of which was last seen together when Cyprus beat us by 5-2 is just one aspect of the stasis.

Playing full backs in their opposite corners seems a bizarre perversion even when one of them is as good a player as Steve Finnan. When the full backs are John O'Shea and Stephen Kelly it's not just bizarre, it's grotesque, unbelievable and unprecedented too.

All these things will have occurred to those who must provide sober reflection to the Monday morning newspaper market and these thoughts when they appear in print will be ferried down the express lane of the information superhighway into the Irish team hotel in Prague, which will accordingly take on the aspect of a five-star beleaguered bunker. The lads will take the hump.

There was something a little poignant about the brave face a couple of the boys in green felt obliged to put on this latest setback. Halfway through a tricky two-legged trip is no time, we suppose, for candid self-assessment, but when the easier leg of a trip which just has to yield four points throws up just one point and a poor performance perhaps the time is ripe for some straight talking.

Doubtless we will be to Prague and declare ourselves to have been brave but outclassed or even unlucky, but the point is that we look a far worse team now than we did in Stuttgart last year, less cohesive and less confident. Bratislava may have been an away point but then again San Marino was an away win and Cyprus are never to be written off at home.

The rookie-manager experiment is only sustainable if the rookie manager is a fast learner. Stan looks less than prodigious in that department right now.

Or maybe I'm wrong; maybe the entire problem could be that most sports hacks are horrid, scurvy-ridden types for whom nothing is ever good enough.

God, I miss the roar of the crowd, the chill of the players!