Trial And error

So finally, it's done. Ireland's Euro 2000 campaign has ground to the miserable conclusion that we all knew was probably inevitable after the false dawn of our triumph over Yugoslavia.

It was hubris that did for us. Immediately after that game I got a sinking feeling, hearing Mick McCarthy talk about resting players for the tilt against Croatia. It was as if his name was Alex Ferguson, and he had players that he'd spent millions on warming the bench.

In fact he had Tony Cascarino.

Now I mean Tony no ill will at all. I always take pleasure in reading about his exploits in France. His name turns up on the scoresheet? Brilliant! Good for Tony. But he was never the most mobile of centre forwards - and at 37? Well, only a fool would expect to get a lot of running out of him.

For the game against Croatia, we lost Roy Keane and Denis Irwin through injury. And what did Mick McCarthy do? He left our next two best players, Niall Quinn and Robbie Keane, out of the team. And he also dumped one of our better attacking options, Mark Kennedy.

Why?

Because, he claimed, the players would find it hard to fulfil three fixtures in eight days, and we had Malta to contend with the following week. Malta!

This was crazy stuff. Professional footballers play three games in eight days all the time. Fine, the first two of these encounters might prove to be particularly intense. But we're talking here about the vital push in the Euro 2000 campaign, and presumably everyone would be completely up for it.

The obvious explanation is this - Mick McCarthy had decided that a draw would be enough against Croatia and also decided that the most likely way to achieve this would be to defend.

Bad call. We got a pummelling. We almost rode our luck ridiculously, only to be caught in the end by a Suker punch - a goal by the Arsenal striker, in the 94th minute.

Mick McCarthy's quote after the match was probably more revealing than he intended. "For 93 minutes in Croatia, I was being hailed as some kind of tactical genius. A minute later I was a bollox because of the way we had played. But that's football."

Well, he may have been a tactical genius in his own mind - but anyone worth listening to was appalled. It would have been a travesty had we got away with it. It was merely footballing justice that McCarthy didn't.

The final stages of the campaign were in fact littered with tactical blunders. Taking our most effective performer, Mark Kennedy, off against Macedonia; ditto Robbie Keane - a player who's always capable of producing something special even on a quiet day; and finally, disrupting the shape of the team entirely by bringing on Matt Holland to make his international debut three minutes from the end of what had become a torrid affair. Madness.

I take no pleasure in saying any of this. Mick McCarthy is clearly doing his best. But there's been so many irrationalities littering his selections that it just isn't funny any more.

He championed Ian Harte - as a central defender! - when he wasn't in the Leeds first team. Then when he was having an uninterrupted run there and playing particularly well, and scoring goals, McCarthy left him out of the squad for the game against Yugoslavia. It was probably a punishment for not turning up for a couple of friendlies - but if so (a) we should be told and (b) it was, anyway, a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Ian Harte is part of a Leeds team who know how to pass the ball, and more particularly to keep it. This is something that Ireland have not been doing, and in particular it's something Steve Staunton seems to have lost the knack of.

And then there was the equally inexplicable - and in the final analysis - inexcusable decision to leave Keith O'Neill out of the squad for the play-offs against Turkey. Bizarre.

The damage done in Croatia and Macedonia, only an arrant optimist could have hoped for a result against Turkey. The players battled honourably in both games but again we were undone by McCarthy's tactical naivety and the team's inability to keep any kind of tempo going. We were lucky we weren't whacked 3-0 in Bursa.

The cliché now is that we just don't have the players that we had in the Charlton era, and that this somehow excuses Mick McCarthy's failure. But people have short memories. In 1988, Jack Charlton had to do with the quixotic Chris Morris at right-back, Chris Hughton (then out of favour at Spurs) at left-back and Tony Galvin (never a fixture in the Spurs first team) wide on the left.

When Galvin faded, Charlton felt compelled to experiment with Mark Kelly, a mere strap of a 17-year-old, on the left side of midfield. He settled on Kevin Sheedy - a good player but certainly not a wide-player.

And we were always woefully short of strikers. Do the names Bernie Slaven, John Durnin or Mickey Evans mean anything? Or did anyone ever really rate Tommy Coyne? In terms of strength-in-depth, that golden era wasn't nearly as golden as people like to imagine. The point was that Charlton got the team playing his way, and they produced a result that was generally far greater than the sum of the parts.

The fact is that we've never had so many players playing regular premiership football: 17 Irish players are currently holding down first team slots, in a league the standard of which we're told is better than ever.

Between them, our two first choice strikers have scored 13 goals this year. Roy Keane, Rory Delap and Ian Harte have scored 17 goals. In Division One, Lee Carsley, Kevin Kilbane and Mark Kennedy have collectively scored 17 goals. And brilliant young prospects like Stephen McPhail, Richard Dunne and Alan Mahon have established themselves as first-team regulars. We have never before had as much strength in depth, especially with young players coming through.

I know that we don't have a Liam Brady. Or a Paul McGrath. But built on a spine of Alan Kelly, Kenny Cunningham, Roy Keane, Mark Kinsella and Robbie Keane (and Niall Quinn if he's still up for it), there is enough strength in depth to produce a team of real power and potential for our World Cup 2002 campaign.

The problem is that, based on his desperate mishandling of so many aspects of our Euro 2000 challenge, there's no reason to believe that Mick McCarthy is the man to shape that team, and to infuse the players with the discipline and self-belief that's essential to endeavours of this kind.

Which means there's only one option . . .