SO it looks like Steve Staunton's going to be stuck with us for another while at least. There was a spell there when it seemed as though he might be coming close to casting off the shackles of the media he so despises. There's little doubt that had results gone his way over the past eight days, he could have extricated himself from the situation and gone back to living his life unwatched and making his mistakes unseen. No more intrusion, no more 32-second pitchside grillings, no more talk of full-backs playing out of position. Bliss.

But then he had to spoil it all for himself by going and sending out a team that played with a bit of brio and fizz and skill and structure to win two games in five days. To beat Wales was unfortunate but to beat Slovakia . . . and play better than any Irish side had in eons . . . seemed careless.

Poor Stan . . . lumbered with us for the foreseeable just when it looked like he might be about to grab a bit of peace for himself.

Funny thing, though. Wednesday night laid bare a truth Staunton has been wilfully ignoring ever since he took the Ireland job.

Send out a team that plays the right way, that gives a little hope for the future, that looks as if it's interested in more than pre-ordered PlayStation 3s and how he conducts his relationship with the media wouldn't matter a whit. All the unpleasantness of the past week melted away when Staunton's team put in a performance in Croke Park and there has been blanket praise in the days since for an Ireland team that, for the first time since September 2001, beat a country ranked higher than them in the Fifa rankings. If he thought this was all personal, if he believed he was getting picked on because of his manner or his distance or even his accent, the days since Wednesday haven't provided much evidence to back him up.

As a general rule of thumb, there are few more boring subjects to inflict on your reader over their Sunday spud than a bout of happy-slapping between an Ireland manager and the press. But when it gets to the stage where that relationship has become such an integral part in the man's thinking in and around an international week that he takes it upon himself to organise his own press conferences, it's not something that can really be ignored.

Because there's no doubt this is affecting the way he's approaching the job. Why on earth waste time dreaming up schemes to nutmeg the people who follow the team around when there are a million more productive things to be attending to? Why get involved in petty squabbles like the Lee Carsley quote last Sunday and the 32-second briefing on Monday? If it was to foster some sort of siege mentality among his players, then so be it. More likely though is that he decided to take things personally.

For what it's worth, he's never going to get very far in flat-out accusing people of lying, as he did when he claimed the Carsley thing was taken out of context. Even as Carsley himself was calmly explaining that he'd misunderstood the question, Staunton was grumbling that this was the kind of thing he'd come to expect in this country. What the player saw as a crossing of wires, the manager saw as a conspiracy.

As for the show-and-go routine on Monday, you have to wonder what it was he was trying to achieve. If he thought it was some sort of punishment meted out to show how angry he was over Carsley, he really ought to have run it by somebody first. We're not a complex breed, the football writers. All we seek of an afternoon is a hook to hang a piece on. The daily writers who went to Malahide on Monday went back to their offices with a much more readable story than if Staunton had actually taken questions.

More to the point, they had no tape to have to transcribe and no quotes to have to work into their pieces so all that was required was for them to sit down and write a simple piece pointing out how silly it had all become. The only person properly inconvenienced was Gerry McDermott, the FAI press officer, who was left having to explain away a situation that took him as much by surprise as it did the reporters.

There's an irony involved here in that, actually, the soccer reporters are the very ones least inclined to indulge in personal criticism of him. The ones who've sat through most of his press conferences over the past 14 months are by and large the last ones you'll find attacking his press performance. We knew from the start that he was never going to be Ali with a microphone in front of him and where there is no expectation, there can be no disappointment. It's the football side of things that grabs the interest more.

After Nicosia and Serravale, there was no appetite to keep watching him flounder about so aimlessly in a job that looked beyond him. There's no getting away from the fact that Wednesday night's display fell from the clear night sky, like some longforgotten Cold War satellite. Nor is there any point pretending that it was the performance to which the Staunton reign has been building, the inevitable Z at the end of his alphabet.

Slovakia caught Ireland on a good night . . . the best night there's been for a long time . . . but whether it was the future laid bare before us or a case of a stopped clock being momentarily right, we can do no more than wait and find out. And the relief with which the manager welcomed the upcoming six-month break afterwards was as clear a sign as any that, just now, he is more than happy to sit out the next few hands and collect his thoughts for a while.

But if he deserved the criticism after San Marino, he deserves the credit now.

His team played quick, precise football against the Slovaks, using Damien Duff to full effect for the first time in ages and calling on Kevin Doyle's willingness at every opportunity. He could also lay claim to some decent tactical work, finding a way to accommodate Stephen Ireland's silk without needing him to put his slight frame in harm's way around the centre of midfield. These are all positives, evidence of a man growing into the job.

Which is all anyone ever asked of him and his team. If the six months since Stuttgart have done nothing else, they have at least reset the dials of expectation around the Irish squad. The criticism that followed them around wasn't due to the fact that qualification was a pipedream (it's still a huge ask, incidentally) but rather that we seemed to be watching a side that was hopelessly lost.

Last week was the first real sign that maybe they're not going to be wandering around aimlessly for much longer. And that maybe the man leading them has finally laid his hands on a map.