It's been obvious for a long time now that Staunton has entered that place where everything he does just serves as an irritant to those who want him gone. You know things have come to a pretty pass when there is hue and cry over the absence of Andy O'Brien's name from an Irish squad announcement, as happened during the week just gone. Andy O'Brien. The Andy O'Brien. The one who had to be taken off in Nicosia less than a year ago to spare him the embarrassment of playing on against a Cyprus side that had actually taken to targeting him specifically. The one Staunton jettisoned soon after. The one Portsmouth left to rot in the grim half-light of reserve-team football for the last six months of last season.

It's true of course that Ireland will take the pitch against Germany next week with only two eligible centre-backs available to them but really, castigating Staunton for not shining an Andy O'Brien-shaped Batlight into the sky seems more than a little petty. It's not as if O'Brien has been reinvented at Bolton these past few weeks. He's playing for one of the worst teams in the Premier League who, in the three games he's started, couldn't manage a single clean sheet against Derby, Birmingham or Tottenham. They kept one on Thursday night in the Uefa Cup but it was against Macedonian side Rabotnicki, a team who could be backed at 12-1 before the game.

O'Brien was never anything more than solid for Ireland and, in all honesty, he was frequently less. And nobody, surely, believes he is the future.

But it's almost Pavlovian at this stage when it comes to the Irish manager and his decisions. He's made such a hash of them in the past that most folk naturally assume he'll continue to do so at every turn. It's beyond parody now that he doesn't help himself when it comes to defending his thoughts in public but surely at some point it has to be conceded that not every move he makes is hopelessly misguided.

The Kevin Kilbane business is a perfect case in point. Here . . . rightly or wrongly . . . is the most capped midfielder in Irish soccer history. In all that time, through all those caps, never once was it suggested that his willingness to track back and cover meant that he should be reinvented as a left-back.

Not even through all the dark days when the only thing keeping Ian Harte in the squad was the sniff of a free-kick goal. Not once was it laid out anywhere as a serious option.

But then Chris Hutchings takes a gamble and plays him there for Wigan and all of a sudden it's apparently an outrage that Staunton persists with him in midfield against the Czech Republic and doesn't bench Stephen Kelly, an actual career fullback who should be playing for Ireland for a good half a decade after Kilbane has retired. In a game where injuries had left Ireland running so short of defenders that Staunton didn't even name one in the substitutes, it somehow became gospel that Kelly should have been dropped.

We've got to the point where people almost refuse to believe that Staunton is capable of doing anything right. It's hard to see how, in any fair analysis, the Ireland manager can be castigated on the one hand for appearing to have no coherent plan for the future while on the other he can be criticised for not picking players in positions where they could do a job but only in the short term. It's farcical to suggest that anyone looking a year down the road to the first qualifier for 2010 sees O'Brien at centre-back and Kilbane at left-back and yet that's the logical conclusion of the argument against Staunton in both cases.

Not that the derision aimed at him isn't understandable by now. Of course it is. It gets wearing, though. There just seems so little point in picking away at tiny loose threads of supposed missteps like O'Brien and Kilbane in the vain hope that it will all unravel. We know for certain that as it stands there's no chance of him walking away from the job and just as little hope that he'll be fired. A tonking from Germany next week might change that but there have been tonkings in the past and they've had no effect.

For what it's worth, they should avoid that particular fate next week. Germany are strong . . . maybe the strongest in the competition, as it happens . . . but they come to Dublin without Michael Ballack, Miroslav Klose and Philipp Lahm, all missing through injury. Thorsten Frings and Tim Borowski look likely to pair up in the centre of midfield and while Frings has a definite dynamism about him, Borowski can sometimes be just as louche and scatty as he appears.

As for who'll line out for Ireland, so much depends on who gets through today's Premier League programme unscathed. All going well on that front, pretty much all the positions outside of the midfield pick themselves. That said, Robbie Keane and Kevin Doyle haven't always looked handin-glove through this campaign and Ireland's two best performances have come when either Andy Reid or Stephen Ireland has been playing off one of them. Doyle's goal in Bratislava was his only one so far this season and the further he gets into October with a statistic like that against his name, the bigger a problem it will become. But for now, he's a cert to start.

Germany don't need to win this but won't turn down the chance to do so if presented with it. Ireland don't really need to either . . .

let's be honest, there won't be any consequences if they don't . . . but it would be jolly nice if they did. And it would save Staunton having to defend himself against the small and often spurious arguments that dog his every move. Turn the results around and those arguments go away.