Emmet Malone On Soccer: More than six months after the irrepressible Bobby Robson took on the job of providing guidance to Steve Staunton during these early days of his career in football management, we shouldn't be too surprised by news that the 73-year-old, who is due to have a brain tumour removed tomorrow, was apparently both anxious to attend yesterday's press conference where Staunton announced his squad for Germany and keen to travel to Stuttgart next week for the game itself.

Thankfully, he was talked out of both trips, though in the wake of last week's defeat by The Netherlands the latter offer must have been just a little painful for the FAI to decline.

The veteran coach's expertise was sorely missed on Wednesday night when Staunton and the rest of his coaching team looked utterly shocked by the extent of Ireland's onfield disintegration and entirely at a loss as to how they might halt the slide.

Five days on, the manager was putting a remarkably brave face on the situation yesterday, claiming he, Robson and the players were all taking heart from the second-half performance and looking forward to building on it during the game against Germany.

It is, of course, understandable that nobody in the Irish camp wishes to dwell on the fact that the team was only slightly less awful after the break than before it. But one suspects that in private, far from being "buoyant", they would acknowledge that if the performance in Stuttgart significantly resembles the one in either half last week they will be simply at the mercy of their hosts.

During the Brian Kerr years, the Republic's record in friendly games was outstanding but the team never beat a side of any quality in a competitive match.

Staunton's problem at this stage is not that he has lost two of the three games he has overseen since taking charge; rather it is that there has been a marked decline in the quality of the performances and a growing suspicion that the players do not really understand what is being asked of them tactically.

For this, Staunton must bear much though not all of the responsibility. It was well known how the Dutch would play here, and yet his side proved incapable of dealing with a situation that no end of positional tinkering seemed to improve in the slightest.

Still, Eamonn Dunphy's insistence on absolving the players of any responsibility for what happened at Lansdowne Road was even more surprising than his assertion, just two weeks ahead of the start of the Euro 2008 campaign, the FAI should change a manager he had once endorsed.

There was certainly very little during the 4-0 defeat to support Staunton's claim that the training sessions he had overseen during the previous few days had been impressive. But the idea that a back four consisting of Steve Carr, Andy O'Brien, Steve Finnan and John O'Shea, defenders who have played around 700 Premiership games between them, should be unable to co-ordinate the marking of an opposing side's lone centre forward at a corner - regardless of what their international manager had gone through with them in training - is surely absurd.

There were individual as well as collective failures everywhere last week, and one of the few things Staunton can take away from the game is that it is surely implausible quite so many of his players could perform so badly again on Saturday week.

Whatever about his players, though, the manager now appears to have been guilty of a serious misjudgement in opting to bring his squad to Portugal for a training camp rather than lining up a couple more games prior to the summer break. He said yesterday he was anxious to allow his senior players as long a break as possible so as to have them fresh for the new season. But, as it turned out, he was still without a string of them last week.

He went on to insist that without the bigger names, nobody was interested in playing us at that time of year, yet Northern Ireland could line up games against Uruguay and Romania in America.

Additional matches would have helped the players adapt to the new regime, while even working with a weakened team would surely have benefited the Louthman as he tries to prepare for an encounter next week that would prove a major test for men with far greater managerial experience than he has been able to amass in a few months.

As he discussed his squad yesterday he referred more than once to the lack of depth available to him and his aim to develop talent over the next four years. For the moment the development of his own management skills is perhaps the most pressing concern.

The FAI can hardly argue with Dunphy's assertion that they took a major chance in appointing the 37-year-old at a point when he had nothing really but an illustrious playing career on his CV. While it is far too early to say they have gambled and lost, they could do with having some evidence to point to during the next few months that things are indeed moving in the right direction.

For the most part there remains enormous goodwill toward Staunton, but whatever about the last three games, his job would become much harder if the next three - Germany and Cyprus away, then the Czech Republic at home - were all to go poorly.

If that is how it transpires, it will be interesting to see how long the FAI retain their faith in a man whose appointment was sold on the basis of his ability to inspire the current generation of stars rather than uncover the next.