D'yeh hear me? Your f**king fault."

He was short and he was seething and yeah, everybody heard him. A Serie D player called Manuel Marani had just drawn San Marino level and in a ground as empty as the one in Serravalle that night in February, every voice was amplified and every grumble megaphoned. In the eight minutes between that and Stephen Ireland's winner, the abuse from the green-clad members of the crowd was vicious and, uniquely, much of it wasn't directed at the players or at the manager. The FAI delegation was sitting in a roped-off section of the stand, a couple of dozen of them in crisp white shirts and supersmart blazers, and since they couldn't have stood out more obviously had those blazers been luminous, the supporters found John Delaney without any great hassle.

Anyone looking for a point at which Delaney's reputation turned needn't sleuth a whole lot further than those eight minutes. Whatever about Nicosia, that night in San Marino gave everybody a glimpse at just how hopeless this whole Steve Staunton situation could become and it's no accident that the days following it were the first time we started hearing phrases like "world-class management team" and "Board of Management appointment". In those dog days, when Bobby Robson was going in to bat for the association on Liveline, Delaney's name became mud pretty much for the first time since he took over the job.

Through it all, through the calls for his head he's endured since, he's always made sure to appear composed, assured and always, always certain he was right and everyone else was wrong about Staunton.

Partly, as he has admitted this week, this was because he had no choice. But those who've known him for as long as they've seen him make decisions are in little doubt that as recently as the Germany game, part of Delaney still believed there was a chance this all might just come good.

He was wrong and he accepts now he was wrong. In time, Tuesday night will likely come to be seen as just as crucial a turning point in the Delaney career as San Marino was. For the first time, he allowed it be known in the wider world he was wrong, that he was fallible and that he'd made a hames of a crucial decision. And more than that, he also made it clear the whole affair had shown him up to be deficient in a specific area and that to avoid something similar again, he would leave the next appointment to others.

"I see my skills as an administrator and I think I have proved that, " he said on Tuesday. "I have proved it to the board and to people within the game. I can now get on with my job as an administrator in the manner in which I have done, I think, quite well over a number of years and building on those successes.

Football professionals will go and deal with the appointment of our next manager.

That's the way it should be and that's the way it will be."

This and other statements admitting he was wrong have been greeted by some as just another layer of spin. And to an extent, perhaps it is. Certainly, the accepted wisdom that he has done so much for the association that is unseen has largely come from FAI sources and, since one of the first of his objectives upon taking the top job was to eradicate the culture of negative leaking, those sources that remain would be broadly supportive.

But like it or not, there is still any amount of hard evidence to support his self-proclaimed success as an administrator.

To take a simple and very crude one to begin with, there's the money. The fortunes of the team are at their lowest point in generations and yet the books of the organisation that runs it have never looked better. You can argue it has floated on the general rising tide of the economy and you would be right to an extent but nobody needs telling that long before there was a property boom and a technology boom, there was a soccer boom and the people running the FAI still somehow managed to come out with one arm as long as the other.

Contrast this with the money that has flowed in over the past half-decade. When he took over, loud and hollow came the echoes from the decidedly bare FAI cupboards after the various stadium sagas had drained funds away.

But when they made 1.5m from block-selling tickets to the Brazil, Czech Republic and Romania friendlies in 2004, it was under Delaney's watch as treasurer. It was quite a coup . . . and one he is trying to repeat through negotiations with the Brazilian and Argentinian associations.

In the years since he succeeded Fran Rooney, he has aggresively chased new sponsors. It's true that once the FAI committed to providing 60m towards Lansdowne Road, he had no choice.

Nonetheless, the value to the FAI of their sponsorship deals has risen from 13m in 2005 to just short of 30m. The association signed six deals in 2006 alone with a combined worth of 20m, including its largest ever deal with Umbro worth over 2m a year for eight years. The upshot of it all is that they will end the year with something in the region of 30m in the bank.

Beyond the money, he does hold a genuine popularity among people involved in the grassroots of the game. That's not to say you won't find people with a bad word to say about him . . . indeed there are definitely sections of the Eircom League who would struggle to find a kind word . . . but on balance, he and the association he leads is well enough got, especially and increasingly outside Dublin. It wasn't Delaney who came up with the Player Pathways idea that has led to an increase in young players from Down The Country getting breaks but it is being administrated under Delaney's watch and at a time when an international team can take the pitch with players from six different counties . . . as it did in Bratislava . . . the fruits are there to be seen. He is also well-appreciated for his commitment to taking the women's game here seriously for the first time ever.

To dismiss all this as stuff the public doesn't really care about has a basis in truth but only up to a point. No, people don't care about the redevelopment of Lansdowne Road as much as they care about qualifying for Euro 2008 but if the whole thing collapsed because Delaney and his association didn't hold up their end of the bargain with the IRFU and the government, there'd be plenty of folk screaming blue murder. And no, not everybody gives a stuff about whether or not some club in Cavan can get a league to play in but small pockets of dedicated football people do and whatever else you want to say about Delaney, nobody denies he's one of those.

If this all sounds like an obsequious kow-tow of a piece, it isn't supposed to. Delaney has provided plenty of cause for concern even among those who support him with his increasingly mealy-mouthed defence of Staunton. What never quite clicked about the appointment was the fact it is well-known that since arriving as chief executive, he has been utterly ruthless in his dealings with those who work for the FAI. "John's problem is that he wants everything done yesterday but that isn't always possible, " said Milo Corcoran a few years ago and no one among the 140 or so staff there would be inclined to disagree.

What he generally also wants is for things to be done his way. It's a long-held truism in football that when you're replacing a manager, the man coming in is invariably the polar opposite of the man leaving. Inasmuch as Staunton vowed to bring the fun and passion back, Delaney would have been impressed.

What has been overlooked though is the fact Staunton also said from that he had no intention in involving himself in the nitty-gritty of how football was run in Ireland. Brian Kerr always said he felt the association would rather he stuck to making sure lads knew who they were supposed to be picking up at corners and leave the running of the game to them. When he said association, he meant Delaney.

And he wasn't wrong.

Delaney had to climb down last week when the Board of Management, angered by the RTE interview in which he distanced himself from the appointment, reminded him in no uncertain terms that he was the only one of them taking home a paycheck every month from the association. It will have done him no harm to have been stung into doing so and the guess here is that we'll see him retreat into the background much more once the next appointment is rubberstamped. He says his role will be little more than the formality of being part of the board that approves whoever the recommendation is and while you'd have to suspect he'll have a slightly stronger hand than that, the slightly sheepish humility he brought to proceedings on Tuesday night is to be welcomed.

You can fire the manager and everybody has an opinion on who to replace him with. But to get rid of Delaney, as plenty have suggested repeatedly should be done, leaves the very real question of what to do then. Until and unless there are names in the wind to replace him that are as credible or as capable as his is, it's all just talk and of no consequence anyway.