Tom Humphries feels Brian Kerr has not played tactically cute in his hard-ball game with the FAI

Remember Jack Charlton? Big, blunt Geordie whose tactical sophistication ran no further than giving it a lash? Wouldn't have known a spin doctor from a witch doctor? Well, scorn not his simplicity. Charlton understood two very basic things about the media.

First. Managers get paid not to take media too seriously or too personally.

Second. Editors abhor a vacuum. When you give 60-second press conferences, when you send in fringe players to speak to the media, you create a vacuum. It gets filled with speculation and opinion and conjecture. If there's one thing soccer people hate, it's media opinion.

And in the Irish papers this week there has been much media opinion. Six points left to play for and everyone was reaching conclusions. The evidence is still not fully submitted but the jury was issuing verdicts.

Times have changed since Jack strode among us, but the truths are eternal. The media is easy to satisfy. The media is not like Oliver, constantly wanting more. The media asks for sufficient.

If 60 or 70 media people gather in a room on the week of a World Cup game for a press conference, they expect to be speaking to somebody who will actually play in the game.

This week, the media, who have paid through the nose to come to Cyprus, were allowed to speak to Paddy Kenny, Keith Doyle, Liam Miller, Andy O'Brien and Gary Doherty. The Expendables, insufficient to the point of being an insult.

If the media goes to a training session in the expectation of being given a five-minute, pitch-side briefing, as per the official media guide, they expect the briefing to happen. On Tuesday it didn't happen at all. On Wednesday it lasted just over 60 seconds. Again, insufficient.

So, in the most important week for Irish soccer since the last World Cup, the media and the Irish squad were engaged in a phoney war which need not have happened. It has been distracting, dispiriting and disappointing.

Why did it happen? Why has media professionalism in the FAI never advanced beyond the old McCarthyite view of the media either being "in the tent pissing out or outside the tent pissing in". Why? Because nobody wants it to change.

The FAI this week were letting the media do the dirty work, as usual. You would think that after Saipan, after Genesis, after the messy end to the McCarthy era that lessons would be learned? They have.

When it comes to ditching a manager, it takes the pressure off if you let the media soften him up a bit first.

Brian Kerr's team play football tonight. The kick-off in Nicosia will put an end to one of the more bizarre weeks in the already quite bizarre recent history of the Irish soccer team.

Playing football will be a welcome return to business as usual, but Kerr will feel the bruises on his body and the burns on his neck. He was left dangling from a tree this week and he was beaten with sticks like a pinata.

After the week he has had it is important to remember that, whatever happens on the pitch over the next few days, and whatever goes down in the bloodstained boardrooms of the FAI over the next few weeks, Brian Kerr will remain potentially a great Irish manager. Whether he gets the chance to realise that potential depends largely on the convergence of several sets of circumstances.

Lie down. Imagine you are Brian Kerr. Go back in time a little way. Picture yourself approaching the final three games of a tense World Cup qualifying group. France. Cyprus. Switzerland.

Could you please list in order of horror which of the following you would need like a hole in the head. Best player and leader suspended and injured? Only decent striker pictured on the razz at 4am? Other half-decent striker suspended? Half of your team not getting regular football? Employers leaving you dangling over the issue of a new contract? War with the media?

On Wednesday evening at Larnaca Airport a member of the Kerr backroom team could be found musing aloud as he stood near the baggage carousel. "Am I mad?" he said, "or are we six points away from a World Cup play-off? Do we have an away game against Cyprus and a home game against Switzerland to make the play-offs? Is it just me that thinks that?"

He had a point, but if the message has got lost this week, a time which demanded the relentless accentuation of the positive, then it is not, for once, the media who are entirely to blame.

Brian Kerr, the FAI and the players handled things badly, and the entire tone of the week has been negative and defensive. From Le Meridien Hotel in Limassol there issues the scent of fear and loathing. The odd thing is that, if it all goes wrong this week, only Kerr will be paying the price.

Perhaps it will all come good. If next Thursday morning transpires, though, to

be a time for reflection and regret, it

would be best to divide all the circumstances which got us there into those which could have been avoided and those which couldn't have been.

It's important to remember that there are things which Brian Kerr can do nothing about.

He can do nothing about who gets to play in English Premiership teams. The paucity of our resources, though, was never better highlighted than during the ludicrous fuss which followed young Stephen Ireland having a good debut for Manchester City last week.

If a 19-year-old who seems already to have a record of placing petulance above patriotism (Ireland has apparently announced he will never play for Kerr) is hailed as a solution, well, then the problem is more crippling than we thought.

Brian Kerr can do nothing about the past. We have somehow arrived at a state of mind where we assume we have the right to be at every major soccer tournament. We don't have the right and we don't have the players.

Brian Kerr can do nothing about the psychological make-up of his players. He has some technically gifted footballers at his disposal. He has few leaders. He has few big men. He doesn't have anybody who will grab a game by the scruff of the neck and win it on his own.

That's the hand Brian Kerr has been dealt. Fintan Drury alluded to as much on the radio this week. Kerr was quick to point out that Drury wasn't speaking on his behalf at the time, but what Drury said wasn't nearly as big a deal as the space it occupied suggested.

Obviously, the wisdom of the manager's agent commenting on team affairs is moot, but taken as a contribution to the debate the point itself bears argument.

None of these guys are leaders. None of them are of the quality which persuades one that collectively they should grace any tournament of world-class players. We get to tournaments by punching above our weight.

To the list of things about which Brian Kerr can do nothing (at this stage) could be added Roy Keane's absence, the structure of his contractual arrangements with the FAI and the re-emergence of a clatter of world-class French players. He could add to his list of untimely misfortunes the recent regime change at the Irish Independent, which has seen a notable stiffening of the line on his stewardship.

Will all this be taken into account by Kerr's employers, or are they already rushing girlishly after some big man in a suit and looking to ditch Kerr regardless? How did the Irish manager come to be engaging in the sideshow of a major media bunfight in the most important working week of his life? How did he get to Cyprus with a World Cup play-off spot beckoning (the very route by which Mick McCarthy's long reign was redeemed) and find the clouds gathering over him, the mood sour and the Cypriots chuckling to themselves?

As Brian Kerr bumbled through his media engagements this week, the spotlight on him served only to emphasise the isolation he must feel.

Those who know Brian Kerr will say the job hasn't changed him much, that behind the tight public face he is still essentially the same likeable, genial character who took the job three years ago and was welcomed into the Shelbourne Hotel for his firstpress conference with garlands and palm leaves.

Those who know him lament, though, that he can't bring himself to perform for the media as if nothing has happened to alter that happy relationship. It's not, they say, that Kerr didn't expect criticism and pressure when he took the job, he just didn't realise it would hurt so much.

Kerr suffers a disadvantage not felt by an Irish manager since Eoin Hand's days: he lives in Dublin. He can pretend to ignore what is said and what is written, but it is all around him. He lives in and breathes the same atmosphere.

Much of what is written is penned by people he knows personally and has known for a long time. Kerr can't bring himself to pretend he doesn't notice.

Early in his reign, the first hint that his media hand would be less steady than other aspects of his talents came when he steadfastly refused to meet the group of English journalists who cover the Irish team for a get-to-know-you lunch.

His argument that they hadn't wanted to get to know him before he became Irish manager was dubious, at best, but if he decided to tread gingerly with the English media it was the home-based contingent he was failing to cater for.

Part of Kerr's problem this week lay in his inability to fake it. There was a smarter way to handle matters, but it ran against his grain. Also, he may have miscalculated.

Take the issue of the contract. There are some of us who believe no Irish manager should be allowed to go into two crucial World Cup games with the smell of death on him. It didn't happen to Mick McCarthy. It didn't happen to Jack Charlton.

It has happened to Brian Kerr. The manager didn't help his situation, however, by directly answering a question on the business last week.

His words, to the effect that he was trying to find out what was going on about his contract but nobody was telling him, were oddly chosen, but, one assumes, deliberately chosen. Yesterday, in Limassol, he defended his right to give an honest answer to the question, but as a manager he is sufficiently astute at deflecting questions to have known he could have batted this one off the agenda.

In the power-play between himself and the FAI, Kerr will have realised that shedding a little light on his employers hard-ball tactics will have upped the ante a little. The FAI, however, have remained inscrutable and left the media vacuum to be filled willy nilly. The issue blew up in the media and did collateral damage to Kerr.

The media response this week seems just a little pre-emptive and trigger-happy, but there has been a sense these last few days that the criticism has almost been licensed by the FAI's indifference to media matters and their willingness to let the Irish manager squirm without issuing the sort of statement of strong support which previous managers drew comfort from.

Kerr is an emotional man too. If he doesn't like you, it's not in his make-up to pretend that he does. If he is uncomfortable with questions, you don't have to examine his words to find how uncomfortable.

His face tightens, his neck stiffens and he rolls his head like a boxer before answering.

Nobody questions that he has had some bad luck, that he is professional and meticulous and has an honourable view of how Ireland should or could play football. But his inability to simulate emotions is his Achilles' heel, and his opponents and detractors within the FAI, men with lean and hungry looks, are easily smart enough to sit back and see him hoist upon his own petard.

Kerr's expression of bewilderment about his contract will have garnered some sympathy from a public which holds lots of residual goodwill towards him since his days as a youth team miracle worker.

How the contract comments played to the Irish players is another thing. Yesterday, in Limassol, his captain Kenny Cunningham was circumspect when offered the chance to step in and slug for his boss. He spoke of respect for the manager, but of players being essentially selfish beings. Watery stuff.

With Kerr's blood turning that water orange and then red, a media feeding frenzy has ensued. Not shark-like bites. Piranha-size nibbles.

Unfair? Probably.

Premature? Certainly.

Avoidable? Definitely.

If Brian Kerr pulls six points out of the bag in the next few days the entire view of his tenure will be up for review. When a team qualifies for a major competition the means to that end is forgotten about. If the team make a play-off, he will be judged almost exclusively on how the play-off unfolds.

In the interim, everyone, including the media and the FAI, is entitled to give their own answer when asked what they think of the show so far.

The FAI, however, owe a little more to their international manager and a man who has provided them with so much over the last decade. This week he was left unprotected.

The silence concerning his contact position was deafening. That the FAI see the role of public relations as being to indulge the petulance of the international team by protecting them from exposure to the scurvy media became clearer than ever this week. With nothing to write about and a very large bill to be paid for the privilege of coming to write, the house fell down on Kerr.

The odd thing is that in aping the media tactics of the English FA (who are otherwise without competition when it comes to the winning awards for most disastrous media relations), the FAI have gone further and refined the technique of withholding into one of calculated insult.

While Irish hacks were wondering what to do with five or six minutes of banal Paddy Kenny quotes this week, they were watching Sky News and seeing their colleagues with the England team speaking with Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher, Peter Crouch, Frank Lampard, Darren Bent and others.

To put that into context, this was an English team coming off a defeat to Northern Ireland, players who have been through the full tabloid mill and an English manager whose every peccadillo and venality has been blown up and magnified for the edification of the English audience. And there they were going about their business like professionals.

Deep down, Brian Kerr appreciates that two views of his tenure are possible. He concedes not everything has been peachy. If he didn't, he wouldn't be as smart a man as we gave him credit for.

His opponents and detractors within the FAI are easily as smart as we give them credit for, though, and must look on with thin smiles as Kerr immolates himself in front of the media.

Every instinct of Kerr's being must tell him that it would be smarter to play the game . . . And yet, in Le Meridien Hotel (where a cordon sanitaire has been erected and only paying guests are allowed past the front door this week) the view was indulged that it was unhelpful and unpatriotic for all these arguments to be rehearsed this week.

Nobody from the FAI did anything to fill the void, though. Instead, there were new and frankly ludicrous restrictions on TV crews and photographers at team training. There were no player quotes. No co-operation other than what was mandatory. The pressure on Kerr got ratcheted up subtly.

The harsh fact is that with players hiding or sulking, with Brian Kerr having put the issue on the table himself and with space to fill, practically all coverage this week was going to, at best, have the feel of an end-of-term report.

Every criticism gathered like a storm cloud over the manager's head. If you were holding Brian Kerr's new contract in a drawer in your desk, perhaps you'd smile too.

Kerr's isolation this week was awful and agonising to watch. He made mistakes and he paid the full price. That's been the way right through this campaign on and off the field. Somebody said to him yesterday that he used to have the reputation of being a lucky manager - did he still feel lucky?

He smiled tightly. Sometimes you have bad luck.

Sometimes you have bosses who play the game well.