The man from the Herald would have long finished his shift by the time there was anything to report but for the two lads with the cameras . . . Davy Maher and Donall Farmer from the photography agencies Sportsfile and Inpho respectively . . . any haul was going to be long and it was going to be trying.

And sure enough, when the television news on Wednesday broadcast snippets of the FAI press conference that eventually took place at 1.15am, there the two snappers were, kneeling down in front of the top table to record the details of another deadof-night FAI to-do and no doubt wondering to themselves for the bazillionth time why it always has to be this way when the soccer crowd have business to conduct. Can you imagine for a second the English FA sacking Steve McClaren and telling the world about it at 1.15am? Of course you can't. Because they'd look like fools. But as we all know only too well by now, that ship sailed on the FAI a long, long time ago.

The week began with Staunton making it clear . . . on the off-chance anyone thought otherwise . . . that he wasn't of a mind to slip meekly away, not without a heavier back pocket anyway. Hefty and all as the 800,000 pay-off he would eventually receive sounds though, this wasn't all about the money. Staunton is easily the wealthiest man ever to have held the job of Ireland manager and can live comfortably for the rest of his life off his considerable property interests alone.

No, it was more to do with Staunton's black and white view of the world. Against all available evidence, he genuinely thought his four-year contract would (or at least should) save him. When, in the course of three phone conversations with John Delaney . . . one the day after the Cyprus game and two over the course of last weekend . . . it became more and more obvious that his days were numbered, his sense of propriety was offended, naive and all as that sounds. Beyond that though, it's exceedingly rare that a client of Michael Kennedy's has walked out of a meeting feeling short-changed.

The whole business could have been dealt with on Monday were it not for the fact that Delaney and Michael Cody . . . along with the association's legal advisors Sarah O'Shea and Paul Gardiner . . .

travelled to Zurich for the day to meet with the IFA and FIFA over the eligibility bother involving Darron Gibson.

What had been shaping up a few weeks ago as a potentially combustible row ended up as a rather meek compromise.

The FAI got to keep Gibson but relinquished the hold they had assumed was granted under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement over future-players born in Northern Ireland. Afterwards, the delegation returned to Dublin to prepare for what would be a tough day to come.

That day was given the needless scent of high farce by the rigmarole the FAI went through in booking multiple rooms in three different hotels near Dublin Airport. At the heart of the caper was the fact that Staunton was to be given a chance to come to Dublin and talk directly to the 10man board and both he and the board were to be spared the apparent indignity of a gauntlet of camera flashes lighting him up as he arrived and left. In that at least, the FAI succeeded as there hasn't been a single photograph anywhere to document the time he spent here and nor have the newspapers been splattered with pictures of Eddie Murray, Jim McConnell and the rest. The price for the association, however, was the scorn that rained down from the media as a result.

The whole country knew what was happening on Tuesday. They'd known since before the weekend. To go to such diligent lengths of subterfuge to throw the media off the scent of a story that had already been as good as written anyway served only to show just how deep into the mire of spin and shadow the association has sunk itself these past few years. They might well be clapping themselves on the back for pulling the old switcheroo by having anyone and everyone with a laptop sitting in the Crowne Plaza in Santry while they were in Bewley's in Swords but to the public at large, they just look like eejits now. Eejits who for some reason always seem to have their meltdowns in the most higgledy-piggledy, disorganised way. That the chaos was pre-planned on this occasion brought a low humour, as if the association was parodying itself to save everyone else the hassle.

It all just seemed so petty and stupid and self-defeating, not unlike the time Staunton himself held that 38-second press conference on the Monday after the Wales game in March. He, like the association, seemed to think he was somehow punishing the press by giving them nothing to write about when actually, the opposite was emphatically the case. Hence your Wednesday newspapers were full of stories about some poor woman being mistakenly mobbed by photographers as she got out of a taxi and an FAI official being trailed out to Santry after being spotted buying chocolate in Dublin city centre instead of the actual business of the day.

Anyway. Delaney, Cody and FAI President David Blood met in the Radisson shortly after three o'clock to decide the order of things for the evening. Staunton, Alan Kelly, Kevin MacDonald and Pat Devlin arrived around 4.30 to fight the manager's corner. In the course of the meeting, MacDonald's argumentative demeanour is believed to have annoyed Cody but all present agreed to try and keep thing as cordial as possible and it was arranged for Staunton and Kelly to make their case to the Board of Management in Bewley's at 8.30. Despite the fact that the tide was against them, they did still have some supporters on the board although it is thought unlikely that anyone's opinions would have been swayed at that late stage no matter what Staunton and Kelly had come up with in their address.

They left shortly after 9pm and although there were some dissenting voices in the room, the board agreed to terminate the contracts of Staunton, Kelly and MacDonald. All that was left were the various payoffs. Negotiations on those took the best part of two hours but business was done by 11.30.

Delaney then put together a statement to take with him when he faced the media and after much fiddling about with it . . . he put it down on the table in front of him at one stage and it was visibly pockmarked with phrases scribbled out and others added in . . . went over to the Crowne Plaza where, with FAI Communications Director Gerry McDermott apologising for the late hour, he declared the Steve Staunton era over.

In one final piece of spin, he said it was by mutual consent.

Makes you wonder how low Staunton would have had to bring Ireland in order to get sacked.