There he was, lying on his hotel bed with Miss World on one side, a bottle of champagne on the other when the bellboy, delivering another bottle of bubbly to the room, quite innocently asked the former United winger, "Where did it all go wrong, George?"

We're certain there was no such paraphernalia in Eddie O'Sullivan's room on Friday night in the Sofitel Pont de Serves, but as he looked at himself in his bathroom mirror before meeting the press early yesterday morning, he must surely have asked himself the same question.

Where did it all go wrong?

If it remains a bit of a puzzle as to when exactly the worm turned, at which exact moment the malaise truly set in, there's a myriad of interweaving explanations as to why it happened. The catalyst, it would seem, was the four-year contract extension handed to O'Sullivan, a move that not only reinforced this era of no consequence in Irish international rugby, but legitimised it. Here was a coach being rewarded for being average, a coach being granted both a new term in charge and a pay rise when he'd done very little to deserve it.

At this point, and because of the squad environment, or more precisely "team" environment O'Sullivan went about creating during his near six years in charge, all of a sudden you not only had a team who realised they could play poorly and nobody was realistically going to take their place, you now also had a coach who knew no matter how poorly his side performed at the World Cup, he was still going to have a job for another four-and-a-half years. In the case of the players, we're not trying to suggest for a moment that they sit down at night and think to themselves that they can afford a poor display next time because the other guy in their position was holding tackle bags for the 70th team session in a row. It's a far more latent process than that. Human nature being what it is, most of us are designed in a such a way that we need a hot poker in the backside every now and then to keep us on our toes but O'Sullivan seems to think his players are unfeeling machines, unaffected by such a strong emotion as complacency.

Not that all this comes as a surprise. The man himself has admitted in past interviews that emotional intelligence isn't exactly his forte, but on his own list of what characteristics a good coach should have, he probably has it down there near the bottom. For us, it's something that should be near the top and the past three weeks have helped to prove our thesis. The Irish coach appears to believe, going by his press conference answers throughout this tournament, that fostering and promoting squad spirit has nothing whatsoever to do with him. When quizzed on how the players outside the 22 were coping with not being involved, he stated that they were all professionals and they'd simply have to deal with it. All questions surrounding this topic of the disenfranchised have prompted similar "they'll have to get on with it" type answers. His attitude is very unfeeling.

One of the key skills of good man-management is the ability to put oneself in the shoes of others and come within an ass's roar of how they might be feeling. If O'Sullivan believes that his back-up players are simply happy to get on with things in this Irish set-up, he has drastically misread the situation. They're all ambitious players and they all want to play for their country. For many of them, though, what's almost as important as actually playing is knowing that they have some chance of taking the field if things don't go well in any given game, but O'Sullivan has been completely negligent in this particular area.

During the past week, one player revealed that not only were the starting 15 untouchable come match day, they were hardly, if ever, rotated in training either. Not only, then, do these fringe players not get an opportunity to state their case during a game, they can't even catch the coach's eye in training. The whole psychology of the setup is plain wrong. It started from the moment that O'Sullivan demarked 15 players for special treatment by allowing them to rest during Ireland's summer tour to Argentina.

Thus, when the players on duty in Santa Fe and Buenos Aires had their holiday and came back for pre-World Cup training, the first 15 were already weeks ahead of them in the gym. Not only that.

When 45 players headed to Spala in July, the size of the facilities in Poland dictated that the group had to be split in three for training purposes. Guess how they were split? The first 15, the next 15 most likely to be in the squad and 15 who just might slip into the squad if somebody got injured. Talk about showing players their place in the food chain. It was abysmal man management but then again, that's not all that much of a surprise considering the man in charge. This, after all, is a coach who had the simple task of ringing up a player before last summer's tour to Argentina to tell him he wasn't going on the trip but instead managed to confuse the player in question to such an extent that he actually believed that he was on the plane. The player only found out that he wasn't going on tour when he picked up the paper the following morning.

Then there's the coach's treatment of certain players, guys like Bob Casey, Trevor Brennan and indeed David Wallace, before he miraculously found favour. And of course let's not forget Geordan Murphy. There's no doubting that the Leicester player's omission from the 22 to face France was down to the fact that he and O'Sullivan just don't get on, which is a shocking way to go about business. If the coach does somehow manage to stay on after this feeble World Cup effort, Murphy would be entirely justified in making himself unavailable for international selection such is the horrific way he's been treated by the man in charge.

But if we blame O'Sullivan for the comfort zone within in the squad, sorry, the team, the IRFU brains trust, if that's not an oxymoron, deserve to be pilloried for creating the consequencefree coaching environment.

Noel Murphy, Pat Whelan and Neilly Jackson are the three principal men behind awarding O'Sullivan a new contract before the World Cup and we'd be shocked if any of their colleagues in the upper echelons of the IRFU allow them, in the future, to even decide upon what type of biscuits to buy for committee meetings at 62 Lansdowne Road.

Asking this threesome to decide whether or not O'Sullivan should get a new contract is akin to soliciting a retired surgeon to perform a new type of keyhole surgery.

The fact of the matter is that while this trio may have known their rugby inside out in the past, the game has changed immeasurably over the past decade and applying old-style logic to what is effectively an entirely different sport just doesn't stack up.

The IRFU need to have a serious look at their reappointment structures because this particular blunder, if they do find the necessary gumption to sack O'Sullivan, would cost the Union more than 1m.

So while this environment of no consequence has undoubtedly had the most serious effect on the mindset of this Irish party, there are a couple of other factors that come into play. Tactically, for one, Ireland have been all over the place. O'Sullivan attempted to argue the morning after the Georgia match that Ireland were struggling against the minnows because they were trying to play "high-risk rugby" but that just didn't tally, particularly as his players appeared to spend most of the game kicking the leather off the ball. What appears to stand for "high-risk rugby" in O'Sullivan's book is gaining go-forward ball off the backs rather than the forwards and it hasn't worked. It's a patently misguided notion and a man watching the sport for the first time would have seen that Argentina attacked Georgia up front first before shifting the ball to their strike runners outside Felipe Contepomi at inside centre. Why didn't Ireland, then, having had a decent precedent to work with, not employ the same tactics as the Pumas?

On Friday, there appeared to be a slight change of tack, but it didn't make much difference. There's no doubt that Ireland were far more accurate with ball in hand against France than they'd been in either game against the minnows in Bordeaux, and while their physical effort on the night certainly could not be faulted, they rarely looked like breaching the home side's defence. How the likes of Brian O'Driscoll and Gordon D'Arcy, wonderfully talented player, ended up being used as glorified battering rams is a tactical mystery, one of many from this World Cup.

As for selection, O'Sullivan may feel like he's damned if he does, damned if he doesn't in terms of making changes to his side but to have Peter Stringer, Geordan Murphy and Denis Hickie outside the playing party on Friday night was an absolute ludicrous decision.

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. If that's the kind of result that occurs from him making changes to his sacred 15, then maybe he'd be better off sticking with them all the time.

What it does show, though, is a coach simply not used to the mechanics of shuffling his deck. It's another damning indictment of a regime that surely must change.

So, with all that finally off our chest, here's our challenge to anybody with some balls in the IRFU. Once Ireland's World Cup is over . . .

and no matter if this side somehow perform a miracle next weekend and sneak through to a quarter-final spot in Cardiff . . . tear up this guy's contract into tiny pieces, give him whatever he asks for in terms of compensation and finally put a stop to this era of no consequence.

Otherwise, as the sheer volume of downright nasty, often bizarre and mostly untrue rumours being peddled by Joe Public about this Irish party appears to suggest, the people out there may not have any more interest in getting behind this rugby team for much longer.