Mick McCarthy's exit doesn't solve Irish soccer's central problem. Tom Humphries believes its governing body desperately needs a major overhaul

Hegel may have had the FAI in mind when he noted that what experience and history teaches us is that people and governments never learn anything from history. People, governments, football administrators and journalists. Especially journalists.

This week, having allowed another successful Irish manager to sit in the hot seat until it became all too obvious that his backside was charred, the FAI once again presides over a succession race and the media begin the business of second guessing - behaving for all the world as if there were some sort of logic or principle applicable to the process of appointing an Irish soccer manager.

There isn't. There won't be. Getting an international manager is like getting a builder to extend your kitchen. You pretty soon give up on the idea of getting the person who will do the best job. You get the guy who is both available and affordable and try not to worry too much as to why he is so available and so affordable.

That's the best read on it. The worst is that the whole show will be an FAI Production, the comedy will be unintentional and black. If we get lucky and wind up with a good manager, probably that won't quite have been intentional either.

If we get really lucky, the guy who comes to build the extension will tell us that the main house is in pretty bad order, too, and that he can't start work until that is restructured. The FAI should spare the new man his ticklish task and reform itself imminently.

Meanwhile, paper, mercifully, continues never to decline ink and the speculation is feverish and silly season fun. No sooner has John Toshack, the candidate with the heaviest CV and the best poetry, opted out of the race in favour of employment with a team in the lower fathoms of Serie B than Bryan Robson is installed as favourite.

There haven't been many firsts in Robson's memorably undistinguished managerial career, but managing a side in which one player - Matt Holland, in the Kathy Bates role in the sequel to Misery - professes to have read his biography at least 20 times would be a new and somewhat eerie experience.

Long and fanciful will be the list of names linked with the job before it is filled. Short and depressing will be the line-up of genuine contenders. The process is critical because we have seldom had so much talent at our disposal when choosing a manager.

Talent and expectation are the key inheritances left from the McCarthy era. Those things and of course the FAI itself. The FAI are the best story in all this.

In the English media this week there has been the usual borderline racism in discussion of the entire matter. Roy Keane is a low-brow thug who has disfigured a noble game. Mick McCarthy is a decent man driven mad by the unreasonable natives, charming if irascible little goblins completely unmoored from reality. Ireland is a confounding puzzle beyond the reasoning of sane men. A chap gets them to the World Cup and, lo, they still aren't happy. Damn stroppy lot...

The sniffiness of our neighbours notwithstanding, we have a right to our expectations, though. We have produced youth teams of singular quality over the past half-decade and, in fairness to the FAI - do not adjust your sets, normal abuse resumes presently - we have invested in those teams with a foresight which our detractors have lacked.

We don't have a team of world-class players, but if available we have one world-class player (one more than England have, but that's scarcely the point) and we have a supporting cast in Carr, Finnan, O'Shea, Healy, Reid, Robbie Keane, Duff and Given, who are or will become top-class internationals.

We have a right to our expectations. Roy Keane isn't the prophet and the arguments over Saipan should surely be laid to rest now, but he had a point when he said that the days of sending ourselves self-congratulatory parcels of wine and roses should be over, that we have enough talent to allow ourselves to expect to win things, like moderately tricky away matches. We need to be harder on ourselves.

The most depressing aspect of the team's recent retreat from Moscow was the evolving view of the Irish management, which arrived in Russia stating boldly that we were favourites and that we would justify that tag, and left town asking loudly just when it was that people began expecting us to go somewhere like that and win. The fact is that we do expect it. Not unreasonably.

That expectation was the sum of what McCarthy and Keane and Brian Kerr between them produced over the past few years. Each is entitled to the kudos.

We have a young team of talented players now. By re-instating himself unambiguously, Roy Keane can make a massive contribution to that team's development over the next couple of years, but for now the question of whether he will play or not should be left aside.

It is demeaning to all concerned to be bawling the question across queues at book-signings - Mick McCarthy is gone, will you come back and play with us now?

McCarthy carried the can for what went on organisationally in Saipan and beyond. Rightly so, he should have railed against the creakiness of the FAI machine long before it spluttered to a halt at just the wrong moment.

Yet, by the time it comes to choosing a successor, the FAI must reform itself radically and become an organisation adept at handling multi-millionaire professional players.

All pleadings to Keane in the meanwhile are likely to be met with the characteristic, tight-lipped silence.

The extra layer of PR padding the association has recently added won't be enough. The FAI needs fewer people who see the senior international team as a giant coat-tail to be clung to and more who see it as a vessel which needs propulsion.

The team doesn't exist to provide jollies for men in blazers.

What strikes one in every account of the shenanigans of the summer is how little input or relevance the FAI actually had in any of the realpolitik surrounding its own team, its own manager and its own best player.

The association provided no buffer, no liaison, no respected third party. The team were left on an island in the Pacific like the boys in Lord of the Flies. Even a week down the road in Izumo it was left up to a player, Niall Quinn, to attempt to broker a peace. The FAI would scarcely have got a hearing among the players.

The imminent Genesis report should provide the association with an excuse, nay an imperative, to reform itself. That should be done smoothly, quickly, and while the search for a new manager goes on.

Saipan and l'affaire de Keano may be the beacons which warn off many serious candidates for the job, but it's not as if they are isolated aberrations.

Why, come see our stadium! Examine our credentials for the comical 2008 Euro bid! Listen to the anecdotes about various catch ha'penny schemes down through the years, wonder how the security officer responsible for the only abandoned international in our history became the chief executive of the association, hear the tale of how he was gotten rid of...

A relatively badly-paid job with constant exposure to the elements of expectation and a recommendation that one goes forth and opens lots of supermarkets is all that the FAI has to offer.

The successful candidate will be somebody who needs to have their faith and self-belief untrammelled by the pantomime of the selection process and by the growing realisation that confidentiality is something that most FAI members are morally opposed to.

The main differences between the FAI and the Titanic is that latter moved quicker and the former leaked quicker.

If even a modicum of success is to come our way, the candidate needs to be somebody who is untroubled by the prospect of tabloid intrusion.

If a modicum of failure is to be delivered, well the candidate shouldn't become unhinged by criticism.

And in employing the new man, it would be well worth remembering the main lesson of the McCarthy era. Namely that we still need passion.

Between Keane's promptings on the field and McCarthy's ability to stir the souls, especially those of ordinary players, Irish teams managed to retain the work-rate of the Charlton era and combine it with a more sophisticated style of play. We have talent now, but not sufficient to abandon that sleeves-up approach.

In that respect, the FAI might establish what they want and identify the credentials of the ideal candidate a little more smoothly than usual.

It shouldn't be a faux professorial bluffer in the Sven-Goran Eriksson mode. Eriksson pandered to the media - which then bit him anyway - by first making Beckham his captain and then picking him throughout a World Cup for which he was patently unfit. Significantly, his side exited the competition limply.

Nor do we necessarily need the sort of club name whose reputation has been built on being good with a chairman's chequebook. His stint at Millwall may have left Mick McCarthy with a thing or two to learn on the job, but at least it got him used to one of the facts of life for Irish managers - making do with a small panel of players the size and composition of which you can do little about.

The trick, as McCarthy realised early, is bringing some tactical nous to the party and being able to extract big performances from your team.

McCarthy's chief motivational method was loyalty. Largely it worked, but fatally it was an expression of vanity too.

Being loyal to the manager, or loyal to the team even, is the motivation for very few top professionals.

McCarthy's best performers were often those least likely, those poor souls whose after-match comments always included a thank you to the manager for sticking by them when they were sick, indigent, out of form and convicted of having two left feet.

McCarthy painted himself as besieged by the media and those players went out often and again and did the business for him.

Others are more complex.

Others drew their motivation from a mere desire to play well, to be the best, because they are good professionals, because they had things to prove to McCarthy, or someone else, because they enjoyed winning. It wasn't always about loyalty. That was the fatal mistake.

After all, McCarthy's best player functioned perfectly well for him for six years without respecting him or feeling loyal to him.

When it all fell apart and post-World Cup, the Sunderland debacle put Mick McCarthy's loyalty to the cause in question and the genie was out of the bottle.

McCarthy didn't leave the job because Keane wouldn't play for him The fact that McCarthy left the job doesn't make Keane right to have left the World Cup, or McCarthy wise to have confronted him back then.

The lesson of the Keane era has to be that the new manager can't be picked on the basis of who Roy Keane would find acceptable.

The new manager should merely be somebody with the flexibility to work with talented and often difficult players who bring their own sets of abilities and problems to the party.

It is vaguely possible, with Keane back in the squad, for the team to get to Portugal in 2004. Steve Carr at right back and possibly Finnan on the right of midfield, where he has played a little for Fulham recently.

O'Shea, whom most people think will be world class, is certainly Irish class by now and should be playing. Andy O'Brien alongside him. Left back? For all the criticism of Ian Harte, nobody presents themselves as a better option.

Duff needs restoration on the left. McPhail's run of appearances for Leeds have co-incided with a miserable run for the club and he may be a luxury which his club and country can't afford right now.

Healy or Reid beside Keane. Morrison and Robbie Keane up front, with an eye to developing a big man to give us the option we need.

That's an attractive daydream.

Yet, it would be impossible for an Irish side to do well without the support of a reformed FAI.

The brave and interesting choice right now would be to give Brian Kerr the rest of this campaign to prove that he is as capable as most of us think he is.

Being brave and interesting isn't what the FAI is about right now, though.

McCarthy was broken when the FAI's failings were added to his own. Next in line please.