Manager of the Irish soccer team, the eighth one since the FAI did away with the old selection by committee caper in the autumn 1969. A job which, through the ups and (mostly) downs of these past 36-and-a-bit years has assumed outsized proportions as the game has swollen season by season. These days, even your mam could take a bash at naming the Ireland manager.

Could she have named Mick Meagan back in September '69? Doubtful. Or Liam Tuohy after him, John Giles after him, Eoin Hand after him? Maybe Gilesy but only because your da would give out about what a grumpy so-and-so he was. She'd have had no choice but to know who Jack Charlton was. His were the break-out years, remember. When resistance was futile.

It's because of those years that she'd be able to tell you about Mick McCarthy and how things were never right between him and Keano and how Saipan was totally inevitable and about Brian Kerr and how he did great stuff with the underage sides but how he just wasn't up to it at the highest level and about Stan, lovely Stan with the nice haircut and the accent and sure what would you wish the fella only the best but you'd have to worry at his lack of experience, wouldn't you?

That's how far we've come.

An aggregate of approaching 550 people attended the press conferences that announced the appointments of Kerr and Staunton. Nothing in Irish sport remotely compares. As for out in the real world, only the visit of a Bush, a Blair or a Clinton has drawn that kind of level of interest. This is the world Steve Staunton will be carrying around in his knapsack for the next few years.

We'd say it was unrecognisable from the one Meagan encountered except the comparison would hurt any sane person's head and that's not a nice thing to do on a Sunday morning. You'd have had an easier job trying to explain the internet to someone in 1969 than you would of giving them a picture of what the job of Ireland manager would have evolved into come 2006.

Like just about every turn on the long and winding road travelled by Irish soccer, the circumstances surrounding how it all started would be funny if they weren't simultaneously true. Ireland had had two managers before Meagan but nobody ever really called them by that name.

Jackie Carey and Charlie Hurley were nominally Ireland's first two managers but in reality they were little more than figureheads. A five-man selection committee made up of all sorts from junior soccer representatives to those of League of Ireland clubs picked the team and gave it to them to do with what they could.

It was only when, in 1969, the committee somehow contrived to leave Giles out of the side to play Denmark in a World Cup qualifier that the revolution came. Giles asked Leeds to make him unavailable for the next game against Hungary in protest and after Ireland subsequently lost, the squad demanded the system be changed and that an autonomous manager be chosen. Meagan was the popular choice, someone the players respected. One of them. On their level.

In the beginning, if the FAI were looking for validation of the idea that the old way was better, results certainly provided it. Meagan didn't win a game and was gone after 12.

Liam Tuohy came in for the following 10 but had to walk away when the demands of holding down three jobs . . . the Ireland one, the Shamrock Rovers one and that of a HB sales manager . . . became too much. If the FAI had paid him any sort of reasonable money he'd have stayed. But they wouldn't and he didn't.

Meagan's and Tuohy's were important steps in the evolution of the Ireland manager's job for a couple of reasons.

While the payment of a decent salary was still decades away, the fact that Tuohy pointedly kept two other jobs ahead of the Ireland one brought the issue to light.

More crucially, the spectre of FAI interference was hard to shake and Meagan never quite managed it. It was Tuohy's insistence on presenting himself as anything but the FAI's man that represented a major change, for if there was anything the players were wary of, it was the manager having any sort of close ties to the association.

Lying by a pool in Brazil on one trip away, he proclaimed within earshot of both players and officials: "I have a perfect relationship with the FAI.

They love me and I fucking hate them." The FAI men thought it was Tuohy having a little joke; the players knew it wasn't a laughing matter.

Giles and Hand would claim the next 12 years between them. They were the first ones to instil proper ambition into the set-up, the first for whom disappointment came in losing to the Frances rather than the Hungarys.

Giles likes to laugh that by the time he left, he was getting criticism from people who said he was a failure because his teams never qualified for a major competition, as if qualification had been as common as spuds in the pantry before his arrival. He was emphatically his own man, so the FAI problem became something of a non-issue. The money was still worth little more than a wry smile, however.

By the time Hand took over, two more factors were in play, the two that would become central to the job from that time to this. Firstly, out of nowhere, a batch of talented players arrived. Ireland had at different times down the years had Carey, Hurley, Giles and even Liam Whelan for a tragically short period as players who'd walk into any team.

They hadn't had what Hand had, however. They hadn't had the likes Liam Brady, David O'Leary, Chris Hughton, Mark Lawrenson, Frank Stapleton and Ronnie Whelan all at the one time, all playing in the same team. So for the first time ever in Irish soccer, expectation was a burden that had to be dealt with.

The fact that the talent was there in spades for the first time was in no small way responsible for the rise of the second factor. Us lot. The press. The outside-the-tenters. Coverage ratcheted up.

At first, it was mostly pretty benign stuff. The manager and his squad travelled with the press, stayed in the same hotels, had no problem going on the lash together.

Bit by little bit, though, expectation led to a widening of the distance between those who wrote and those who were written about. The Sundays started getting stuck in, this one in particular leading the charge under the byline of one E Dunphy. Hand famously took a tremendous coursing and where Dunphy led, the rest gradually followed. It took over a decade for the relationship to sour completely but by the midto late-90s, dealing with the press had become a trial the Ireland manager had to endure.

By then, Charlton had changed the job utterly and forever. As the good times rolled, no longer would failure be forgiven. The pressure . . .from the public as well as from the media . . . would border on the intolerable at times. Charlton's rhinoceros hide (as well as the not unimportant matter of the success) got him through it all relatively unscathed;

McCarthy's propensity for feeling out the pea of criticism under a heap of mattresses' worth of goodwill made it a less pleasurable experience than it might otherwise have been.

Perhaps the biggest change in the demands of the job is the one Meagan, Tuohy, Giles, Hand and Charlton would have struggled to get their heads around and the one McCarthy and Kerr lived through as best they could.

The money earned by the players. In a way, it might just be the aspect that Staunton can most easily adapt to. He lived through the Premiership years and invested what he made well and happily and is easily the wealthiest man ever to hold the job. He won't have a problem getting inside the heads of millionaire footballers. He was one himself.

One of them. On their level.

You might even say that the more things have changed since Meagan's day, the more they've stayed the same.