Ireland fan Andy Pollak on the good, the bad and the ugly days of the Mick McCarthy era.
For a people who are supposed to have long historical memories, we Irish forget some things very easily. Before Jack Charlton arrived in the mid-1980s the Republic of Ireland team had been in the boondocks of international soccer for most of the previous 60 years.
There are some of us who remember seasons passing without seeing a single home victory from the shabby terraces of Dalymount Park. There were players, such as Eamon Dunphy, who passed almost their whole international career without experiencing such a pleasure (Eamon played 23 times for Ireland between 1965 and 1971, and was only on the winning side twice. Was that when the bile entered his soul, I wonder?).
The Charlton decade has become the stuff of legend. What I have seen scant recognition of in the past week is that when Charlton left at the end of 1995, his team's glory days were well behind it, and Mick McCarthy had to start almost from scratch with an unpromising mixture of ageing has-beens, untested young things and Roy Keane.
Once again a big, straight-talking north of England man made a group of not particularly talented Irish footballers into a combination that could take on the best in the world. He made lots of mistakes along the way. One of the appealing things about McCarthy was his very human tendency to make mistakes and then his courageous ability to pick himself up and try again to do better.
So the Irish headed to Japan and Korea, rated as the 15th best team in the world. And their boss, determined to enjoy his first World Cup as a manager to the full, found instead the personal hell that was a showdown on a Pacific island with Roy Keane.
McCarthy handled that situation badly: dressing down the famously volcanic Keane in front of the whole team was a huge error of judgment. Psychologists everywhere must have shuddered as they read how McCarthy's "clearing the air" exercise had quickly turned into the verbal annihilation of the manager by his captain.
But again he picked himself up, struggled to face his personal demons (he called them journalists) on a daily, sometimes hourly basis, and somehow managed to prepare his depleted, rudderless team for their greatest challenge.
And how they rose to that challenge! This was a team with an error-prone defence and a second-rate midfield, still shell-shocked by the vicious and endlessly reported row which had lost them their only world-class player. Given what they had gone through, they could have been forgiven for collapsing against Cameroon, the much-fancied African champions, in the first 45 minutes.
Instead they came from behind against Cameroon, Germany and Spain. They played attractive football and scored more World Cup finals goals than Jack Charlton's 1990 and 1994 teams put together. If McCarthy had not ignored the need to practise penalties - another of those very human errors - they could have beaten Spain and emulated Charlton's great feat of reaching the quarter-finals.
McCarthy has not been given the credit he deserves for the extraordinary way he clawed the team back to success after the Saipan debacle. And what about the media's role in the whole affair? There seem to have been an awful lot of journalists involved at various points along the way: Eamon Dunphy, Cathal Dervan, Tom Humphries, even RTÉ's Tommie Gorman.
Tom Humphries tells us the media were not responsible for McCarthy's demise as Irish manager. Maybe Tom isn't completely objective on this one, and it's time for some brainy young journalist or academic to pen a series on "The role of the Irish media in the events at Saipan and after".