Inside two minutes, Ireland were showing once again just why the only anger worth using within their set-up is the kind they direct at themselves. Nobody stood in front of Tomas Rosicky's quick free-kick even though he'd been taking them at the earliest opportunity all evening; Stephen Kelly's left-back position was empty for the first time all night; Paul McShane was a half-yard off Jan Koller but was motioning him towards where his left-back should have been. For want of a calm head, the war was lost.

Truth is, calm heads would have come in handy in more than just obstructing Rosicky's free last week. The white noise of two-pint punditry and off-the-mark hysteria so obscured the main sticking point as to make it almost invisible. You could have done a roaring trade down Dublin's Moore Street with the amount of red herrings that were available for public consumption. Truth is, the crisis in Irish football doesn't exist because someone mocked Steve Staunton up as Kermit the Frog or because Lee Carsley didn't play against Cyprus or even because 14 players had to pull out through injury.

The one and only reason for the crisis is that the man in charge of the team hasn't convinced anybody that he is up to it. And for all the improvement evident on Wednesday night, nobody can pretend that a 1-1 draw with the Czechs changed many minds. The defeat in Cyprus obliterated what trust there had been between the manager, the team and the public;

Wednesday night was chocolates and flowers and a desperate attempt to get back in the good books. It saved Staunton's skin in the short term but he'll have to get used to the surrounds of the doghouse for the next while.

Before Cyprus, it was silly to suggest that he be removed from office. Not because he was doing such an outstanding job but because having been made, the bed was there for the lying in. Check back to what people were saying when he took over in January. Great servant. Pride in the jersey. Give him a chance. Hope for the best. Beyond John Delaney and some FAI Pollyannas, nobody pretended that he was anything other than a triumph of what was left after Martin O'Neill wasn't interested.

Fitting him for concrete shoes after one competitive defeat and a hiding in a friendly would have been overly rough, especially since the opposition in both cases was of a level that has long since left Ireland behind.

Cyprus was different though. That defeat brought Ireland to a much lower echelon of the world game than anyone should be prepared to allow. The downward spiral since the end of the 2002 World Cup has been wretched but it can't have reached that level of hopelessness yet and nor should it ever. Staunton could have had no complaints if he'd been made walk the plank for it. He had his chance;

he used it to lose 5-2 to Cyprus.

There's no defence for it. There can't be.

It wasn't the first time in recent years an Irish team has strolled around the pitch in sullen listlessness but it was the first in which they suffered ritual humiliation as a result. Beyond that, the pride-in-the-jersey thing was supposed to have been the top line of the Staunton manifesto. Nobody expected an untried coach to have his team playing Total Football straight off the bat but effort and industry were taken as rock solid first principles. When he didn't deliver even those meagre offerings in Nicosia, it was bacon slicer time.

It was San Marino's turn to have a bye night on Wednesday. Had it been Ireland's, Delaney would surely have had no choice but to end the Staunton era. His reprieve was earned by half-time, however, not because the scales have fallen from the nation's eyes but because Delaney had been presented with a reason to give him another chance. Whether or not Staunton will come to thank him for doing so is another matter.

Because there's every chance that this will get a lot worse. For all that Ireland were expected to beat Cyprus . . . and it was predicted in this space as being "the right fixture at the right time for Ireland" so take these opinions with however much salt you fancy . . . the Irish performance didn't come from the clear night sky. Much of what was there to be seen has been wrong for ages.

A goalkeeper who saw way too much of the action. No protection for the back four. No invention in attack. No steel in midfield. No sense that playing for Ireland was anything other than a matter of incurable indifference to some players. Dismissing the whole farrago . . . as Staunton, Kevin MacDonald and their players have done . . . as being the fault of a few individual errors at the back is either dangerously missing the point or just being downright untruthful. Credit is, of course, due for Wednesday night. However much people bleat about the Czechs settling for a draw and not being all that much to sing about anyway, to pull a result and a performance out of what should have been a crippling injury situation was a serious achievement. The players responded to a crowd that gave them incredible support and, by packing the midfield, Staunton came up with a way to keep Rosicky, for the most part, in check.

But the debate over whether or not he should continue in the job hinges on the level of confidence anyone can have in seeing a repeat performance the next day and the next day and the one after that.

The two best performances under him have come in the wake of soul-destroying defeats, first against Holland and then against Cyprus. As a motivational tool, abject humiliation is hardly the safest horse to be betting on.

There's every chance he's ridden out the worst of it now and will see the campaign to its inevitably tepid end. Still the delusion continues in some parts, however. It felt ludicrous to hear people ask on Wednesday night if Staunton thought qualification from the group was still possible. Qualification? This is a country where losing to the 103rd-ranked team in the world doesn't even get the manager sacked. Asking about qualification after that is like a Leaving Cert student failing lower level maths and wondering what the points are for actuary.

That said, Staunton is right about a few things. There's no question but that Lee Carsley did a tip-top job against the Czechs; everyone being fit and ready next time around, however, and there would be no harm in Staunton sticking to his guns and saying thanks but no thanks again.

People deride his constant references to South Africa in 2010 and his four-year plan but it's the only show in town and was even before the Cyprus game. You can't on the one hand complain about Brian Kerr padding out his record by playing his best team in every game and on the other give out to Staunton because he wants to build a team for a competition that's four years away.

Carsley's fine performance doesn't make his exclusion from the Cyprus game wrong. What it does is confirm that in an emergency, Staunton can break glass and call him up. Cyprus shouldn't have been an emergency; the Czech game was. Of course Stephen Ireland isn't the player Carsley is yet . . . he said so himself after he got overrun by Carsley when Manchester City played Everton a few weeks ago. But Carsley won't be playing in South Africa.

Give Ireland his head now and maybe he . . . and the rest of them . . . will.

Staunton shouldn't have survived last Saturday and it's going to take a long bout of keeping his nose clean for him to be trusted with the job. If he ever can be.