His FAI tie was loosened now, his face drawn and his humour bobbing up and down somewhere between a kind of baffled resignation and a suspicion-laden crankiness.

You could see that by this stage of the night he was treating each question as a potential roadside bomb and instead of stopping at any of them to explore further and attempt to control any explosions, his way of dealing with them was to keep driving on regardless. It made for as dispiriting a 10 minutes as we'd experienced all week.

At one stage, he started to talk about all the learning he personally had done in the job over the past year. He made a point of saying that no coaching course in the world could teach him what the past 12 months of competitive experience has, that he would analyse all that had happened in time but knows that he wouldn't have done anything differently (which, you would imagine, defeats the purpose of the analysis but there you go).

Since he kept reiterating what a learning curve it had all been, it seemed reasonable to ask for specifics. Was there anything, we wondered, that he knew about the job now that he hadn't known a year ago? He started laughing.

"I won't go down that road, " he said. "You're learning all the time. Even Bobby Robson is learning all the time.

The day you stop learning is the day you're finished." That he was being so evasive with what was a wholly straightforward and not even especially piercing question was a wearyingly familiar tactic but we persevered anyway. It wasn't an attempt to trip him up or trick him into giving away state secrets but he instinctively went on the defensive nonetheless. "Well, I didn't know the job, " he declared after a pause, his voice becoming indignant now. "It's my first manager's job."

At that moment, maybe more so than at any time over the course of the 20 months since he sat in the Mansion House and declared himself the gaffer, it was very hard not to feel sympathy for Steve Staunton. Strip it all away, all the calls for his head and the wisecrack derision that follows his every utterance and action, strip it away and you're left with a man who can't help but give the impression of floundering in a job he should never have been offered.

When he followed it up by citing Pat Devlin's 30 years of managerial experience as something he's turned to to learn from, you could only wait until he stopped digging so that you could move on. It was the first time since he took over that he admitted straight out that he wasn't fit to be Ireland manager when he was given the job. That he pretty much admitted it by accident just made the whole scene sadder.

John Delaney hasn't come up with much that's been fit to hold water throughout this whole affair but he had a point on Thursday when he said that it's all become very attritional now. (As an aside, by the by, the FAI really don't help matters when they plaster one-eyed statements of support up on their website that read like Christmas cards from the Iraqi Information Minister. Seriously, how asleep do they think people are? What makes them think a single member of the public is going to read the FAI's take on events and decide everything's okay all of a sudden?

Or, indeed, that anyone is all that interested in their take to begin with? The arrogance is almost breathtaking. ) It doesn't matter that there was obviously a fair amount of he-would-say-that-wouldn'the about Delaney's RTE interview with Tommie Gorman.

What he said is undeniably true. It has become far too attritional. To judge by the breadth and depth of anger directed at Staunton since Wednesday night, you would swear that Ireland had just been on the end of a thrashing, that they'd slunk out of the qualification stakes with barely a whimper, that it was a crime against football for them to have come back from Prague with one arm as long as the other. None of this is the case. Qualification hopes have been on life-support since Cyprus and yet people have been reacting as if it's a thundering disgrace that the machine was eventually switched off.

What really and truly has happened over the past week?

Ireland drew a game they should have won against the team in the group that is closest to them in the world rankings and lost a game they could have drawn against a clearly superior side.

Staunton survived Cyprus and he survived San Marino; getting rid of him now would be saying that nothing has changed in the intervening months. It would be saying that it was still expected that Ireland would qualify even after those two performances.

Again, none of this is the case.

Anyone who holds that Ireland have not improved since the lows of Nicosia and Serravalle are either refusing to watch or refusing to see. The listlessness that brought about all the embarrassment on those two nights wasn't in evidence either last Wednesday or Saturday. The muchballyhooed emphasis on restoring spirit to a squad that for whatever reason had looked weary and disinterested in the Brian Kerr days has paid dividends, as has the infusion of new faces and new energies. So they didn't qualify . . . so what? At least they went down swinging this time, at least they fought for each other, which is more than could be said for the previous two campaigns. Put it this way . . . Damien Duff flew in to Bratislava last Saturday to sit on the bench in his civvies.

That simply wouldn't have happened under the old regime.

And if these sound like mighty small mercies to be offering up thanks for then, not for the first time, it has to be pointed out that we're not talking about a squad full of Maldinis, Mascheranos and Messis here. Staunton has taken a massive amount of flak for persisting with Stephen Kelly even though on neither of the two nights last week was he able to name a defender among the substitutes. The notion that he erred haplessly in not starting Kevin Kilbane at left-back on Wednesday just because 10 years into his international career Kilbane has played a few games there for Wigan is downright disingenuous.

What next? If Richard Dunne hadn't been able to have that gash stitched up in the second half, were we to have Kilbane moved into centre-half because he was the tallest man left on the pitch?

Staunton has enough faults as a manager without flailing about wildly looking for more.

The popular retort when you defend Staunton is that the players are there and he's just making a hames of using them. But blithely naming players who are getting into Premiership teams doesn't prove a thing. Kelly and Paul McShane are starting every week in poor teams that are getting their asses handed to them, Kevin Doyle's goal in Bratislava was his first of the season and good and all as he was last season, there was no massive clamour to prise him away from Reading over the summer. The truth is that, just now, Ireland have maybe four players who could hold their own in a competitive Champions League team and two of those were injured last week. But no, get the bastard out comes the cry.

Okay so, what then? To anyone who watched the fag end of the Kerr era, the idea that Stephen Kenny would be an improvement is insane. That isn't a reflection on him as much as it is on the players.

Kenny is a thinker, a video and statistics kind of guy, pretty much exactly the sort of student of the game the players rejected in Kerr. There's a fair chance at least half the squad have never even heard of him. John Aldridge? Most of the squad weren't shaving the last time he managed anyone.

Beyond that, it isn't as if there was a very long queue lined up outside Delaney's door back in early 2006.

Staunton is the only show in town just now. He shouldn't have been given the job but he was. He should have been sacked after either Cyprus or San Marino but he wasn't. In the months since, morale and form have improved and Ireland face into the qualifying draw for South Africa 2010 with an improved seeding and a fresher squad.

Nobody's saying he's going to lead them to the World Cup but unless there's a complete meltdown in the remaining games of this campaign, it seems only fair that he be given the chance.