He's much too mannerly to say so and he's perfectly nice all the way through the interview but the feeling that he's being cattle-prodded into it by the FAI's truth and reconciliation department never quite dissipates. A 4-0 defeat a fortnight before his first competitive outing won't be easily spun but there needs to be spit and there needs to be polish and that's why he's here. Given the choice, he'd almost certainly be anywhere but.

Last week was the facesplash week, the one in which the worst realities of this life dawned like a morning storm.

He knows now, if he didn't before, that when you're Ireland manager, nothing is excused and nothing is waved away. Missing your four best players? Go yap to the Samaritans. Limited playing resources? Sorry Stan, not tonight. Transitional period?

Tell your story walking, pal.

Those are the terms and conditions. Good thing he read them before signing on the bottom line, then.

"I know things are bad and I'm not daft enough to think that this will be the lowest ebb, " he says. "There'll be a lot lower. But there'll be a lot higher as well. Let's be honest, we're a whole-hearted nation.

But we need all our best players fit. I learned over my career that when you see your main players fit and flying round, when you watch what they're doing in training and in the hotel, how they act and play the game, you gain so much respect for them and you want to be like them.

"And although we haven't got too many, we were missing a few leaders last Wednesday night against Holland.

When I played, I came into a Liverpool team with 11 leaders and I came into an Ireland team with 11 leaders. Times have changed but that's a situation we need to get back."

He tries a couple of times to eliminate the negatives from the Holland game, stressing a better second half and a refusal to lie down and wave in a cricket score. But when your silver lining is the old saw about learning more from defeats than from victories, you can't but acknowledge the cloud belonging to it.

"We were disappointed but we were up against one of the best teams in Europe if not the world and they punished us. We gave away silly goals.

The aftermath of a result like that is always hard, whether you're a player, manager, coach or whatever. It's a transitional period and that was brought home the other night. That's why we've said it's a four-year plan. Yes, we all want to qualify, nobody more so than me. But we've got ourselves to the point in Ireland over the past 20 years where expectations are very high. But a little bit of realism has to come into it all. We are 37th or 38th in the world. We have to climb that ladder first before anything else."

The aftermath brought with it its own charms. As it happens, he wasn't a bit put out by the front of The Star the next day and its 'Staunton Must Go' headline, mostly because he knows the majority of folk are fair-minded enough to give him this campaign at least. But he still hasn't hauled himself to the point where he can brush off all the slings and arrows that he feels coming his way when he walks past a news stand around the time of an Ireland game. Long and all in the tooth as he is, it still doesn't quite sit right with him.

"To be honest with you, I didn't realise how much more I'd be under the scrutiny of the press and the public. I'm much more of a public figure than I expected to be. As a player, you know you're highprofile but you can manage it.

I always did as few interviews as possible and kept myself to myself and that's the way I was. Obviously now, I have to do all this; it's part of my job. I just had no idea there'd be as much of it.

"I always knew this was something I'd want to do some day so as I went along, I was always keeping an eye out for the demands of the job, picking up bits and pieces. But as much as you see, you never see what all's going on behind the scenes. I think the way football in general has changed over the years is incredible. The hype and the media is so huge now.

I remember when Jack took over, there was a handful of journalists, one TV crew and one or two radio. It's in the hundreds now, you can see that yourself. John Delaney told me it was the second biggest job in the country after Taoiseach and I've realised he wasn't joking."

If this is the aspect of the job that he's found most difficult to deal with, it's also the one for which he's found most use for Bobby Robson.

When there have been wobbles, Robson has provided the stabilising wheels. That he hasn't been able to attend either the Holland or Chile matches frustrates them both, as has the limited amount of hours they've put down together, curtailed as they are by Robson's ongoing health problems.

"Over the last few months, we've got to know each other.

I've been to see him, he's been down to my house. We'd obviously have liked to have spent a lot more time in each other's company away from football but we're two football men and to be honest with you, when we get talking, we don't talk about anything else. He's been a great comfort and has given me a lot of encouragement, especially over the past few days. He's calming, he's reassuring. He's seen my interviews on TV and has told me he likes what he sees.

I'm still getting advice off him, albeit on the end of a phone.

"You're just learning all the time off him. Whether it be by his mannerisms, how he deals with the press, with people, with sponsors.

It's everything, the whole package. You see even when he might be down how he gets himself up and he'll tell me that you've got to put on this face and show everybody that you're up for the fight.

"He certainly is and he's fighting a bigger fight than the rest of us are. As my mother said to me this morning, he must have nine lives.

He says this one's a minor operation and he's still full of the joys of life. He's a great bit of stuff, he really is. He was on the phone to me again this morning saying he knows what it's like when things are going wrong and that the only thing to do is to keep your chin up."

Staunton is no fool. He can't but know that the immediate future is a bleak prospect and that there'll be a lot of keep-your-chin-ups coming his way before the end of this campaign. Still, next Saturday night, he'll walk out into the gleaming white curve of Stuttgart's Gottlieb-Daimler stadium and he'll stand beside the away dug-out and belt out 'Amhran na bhFiann' as the manager of Ireland.

No matter what happens after that, only a curmudgeon would ignore the achievement.

IRELAND MUST COME THROUGH EARLY GERMAN ONSLAUGHT EURO 2008 QUALIFIER GERMANY v REPUBLIC OF IRELAND Saturday, Gottlieb-Daimler Stadium, 7.45 Live, RTE Two, 6.45 Abandon hype all ye who enter here. It's difficult to remember an Ireland international in recent years saddled with so gloomladen a build-up. Even in the dog days of the beginning of Mick McCarthy's reign when the available pool of established talent had all the depth of a lad's mag letters page, solace was taken in the fact that the opposition was never particularly fearsome.

This time though, it's only the semi-finalists from the last two major international tournaments to contend with, the first of them rolling around next Saturday.

You'd almost have to go right the way back to the 1995 European Championships play-off against Holland at Anfield to find a game with so few takers for an Irish success. Sign of the times.

For what it's worth, here comes the straw-clutching bit. Germany are without three of their four preferred centre-halves and Christophe Metzelder is by no means certain to avoid jacking that number up to four. Joachim Low, the German coach, says he's expecting Metzelder to begin training with the squad tomorrow but even so, full fitness and sharpness can't be guaranteed.

Michael Ballack should be fit but the same deal applies to him.

That's about it though.

Everyone else is healthy, nobody of any consequence retired after the World Cup and the German public is still going dotty over the team that gave the country its most loved-up summer since reunification. Not just that, but since the team played all their World Cup games in Munich, Dortmund and Berlin, the good burghers of Stuttgart are only bursting to get hailing their idols down in Mercedes country. The feeling that this would be a doomed assignment even if Ireland were in decent shape is impossible to shake.

In decent shape they're not, of course. Nobody needed a 4-0 hiding to realise that Ireland have four utterly irreplaceable presences in Shay Given, Richard Dunne, Damien Duff and Robbie Keane but it was still the only concrete certainty to emerge from the whole farrago. Given a fair wind with injuries, Staunton could perm any two from six in the centre of midfield and yet not one of them is a nailed-on sure bet to start there. The bestdressed of them just now is probably John O'Shea but he looks like he's going to be needed beside Dunne at centre-half if Lukas Podolski (right) and Miroslav Klose are to be tamed.

Graham Kavanagh had a good old-fashioned 'mare against the Dutch, ditto Steven Reid.

Stephen Ireland is only getting minutes here and there for Manchester City, ditto Kevin Kilbane at Everton. That leaves Liam Miller. Could do worse, could do better.

So it's all a bit of a pickle.

Germany's repeated trick during the World Cup was to score early and score often so we can expect to see some serious digging in for the first 20 minutes. If Ireland manage to hold out until halftime, then a draw is just about a possibility.

Far from a probability, though.