Late into the tackle on this one, but exactly what's the deal with Mick McCarthy? How is it that sane, rational men of my acquaintance get all foamy at the mouth whenever his name is mentioned? There is a confederacy of witchhunter generals out there who would drag McCarthy through the streets tied to a wagon until dead.

The context of McCarthy's tenure seems to have been forgotten. Mick McCarthy took the hard job, replacing not only Jack Charlton but also his team. That has been a tough and painful process and we are only just coming to the end of it.

I don't think Mick McCarthy would deny that within the course of his two competitive campaigns he has made mistakes. Certainly his studs-up approach to the media has been silly. In the early days he was slow making changes off the bench. Sometimes he has picked what I would consider to be the wrong team and often he has placed too much faith in a rickety central defence. The team has been prone to costly flashes of indiscipline.

The two campaigns have hinged on away games in Skopje where leads have been lost. In both Skopje games strokes of bad luck have been morally balanced by patches of rank Irish play. Neither manager nor team could make many claims for their performances in Macedonia.

These are mistakes. They aren't capital crimes. All managers make mistakes, and, given the cards McCarthy has been dealt with the players available, winning the odd hand was always going to be tricky. If Kevin Moran and Paul McGrath were both 26 now and playing at the centre of the Irish defence we would be going to the European championships next summer. They aren't, of course, and every now and then we are exposed cruelly at their old work stations.

I maintain, though, that back when the draw for the European qualifiers was made and we came out of the hat along with Yugoslavia and Croatia that all but those absolutely choked by anti-McCarthy bile would have said finishing second would be a decent result in that group.

And if we had said that Roy Keane would miss half of the away games, that Gary Kelly would miss almost all the campaign and that we would end up playing three games in seven days in three countries and still miss out on actually winning the group by virtue of a badly defended injury time goal in Macedonia, well, we would have accepted that deal happily.

It is not McCarthy's fault that Gary Breen's confidence is a plaything of Gordon Strachan's, or that Phil Babb is apparently translating War and Peace into old Irish. Or that Paul Butler, Richard Dunne and Jason Gavin aren't ready for international football. However much we may wish it were otherwise, there is nothing McCarthy can do about those things.

In international football you play the hand you are dealt. Niall Quinn and Tony Cascarino have formed the majority of our viable strikers. We have to play with one big man up front, which makes it unfortunate that most of our wingers need lots of time lying on a couch talking to a therapist.

It is sad that we don't yet have a midfielder whose creativity matches Roy Keane's other talents. In time Steve McPhail should be that player, but nobody would argue that he should have been in for the last campaign.

We have no strength in depth, we have a young team short on leaders and strapped for central defenders, a team which can't protect a lead and which suffered when Kinsella, McAteer, Duff, Kenna and Carsley all dropped out of the Premiership last summer.

We all accept that there is a very small pool of people who would accept the Irish job in the first place. It is not a coveted position. None of the available would have done better with the hand dealt to McCarthy.

Mick McCarthy's Ireland team has played 22 competitive games, won 12 of them, drawn five and lost five. They are unbeaten at home and haven't lost an away game by more than a single goal. They have been to the play-offs twice after two difficult groups, and all this has come against a backdrop of one old successful team filing, not always gracefully, off the stage and another far younger team arriving on the set.

It is disappointing not to be going to another major finals, but when Charlton went we knew a barren period lay ahead. We knew that Townsend, McGrath, Aldridge, Houghton, Bonner, Cascarino and others would have to be replaced. We knew that the kids who would come in would need a long time to adjust.

We have jumped so many of the young players right over the Under-21 grade, we have seen the form of quite a few of them see-saw and we would trade away the Celtic tiger for a pair of centre halves. Still, we have been moving forward.

McCarthy's job hasn't been made easier by being performed in proximity to the astonishing genius of Brian Kerr. The last thing you need when you are taking over from a much-loved stentorian character like Charlton is to be shadowed by a much-loved charisma-laden duo like Kerr and Noel O'Reilly whose wonderful way with players makes it all look easy.

The success of the youth team has driven up expectations of the senior team, yet as Kerr would be the first to admit the journey from his dressing-room to the senior international dressing-room is the longest in football. Damien Duff and Robbie Keane have made it. McPhail will make it. A couple of others in time. That's a good return.

McCarthy has to wait on the results shaped by so many external forces and then put together a team with what's left. Any fair analysis suggests he has done a good job. He has a young, loyal team which will be made better by the arrival of McPhail and the development of at least one centre half. Logic says it is better that he continue than invite somebody to start all over again.

It is well documented how long it took Alex Ferguson to get things right at Manchester United. It took Bill Shankly a couple of attempts to even get Liverpool out of the second division and, having won a couple of titles, he went seven years without winning a thing.

McCarthy is getting there. The tradition of management-savaging which began with Eoin Hand and took a holiday during the Charlton era seems alive and well. Sometimes you wonder, though, if it's driven by duty and habit rather than by logic.