Tom Humphries on how defeat to Switzerland was only the latest woe to befall an increasingly beleaguered Mick McCarthy. And his World Cup Diary has only added fuel to the pyre.

There are no second acts in a manager's life. The narrative of a career builds to a climax and the art is to know when to step off and start a whole new life. When Mick McCarthy looks back on this miserable time, he will regret not taking the advice of friends who advised him to walk away from the Ireland job with the warmth of the Phoenix Park welcome on his back.

Football and fate are fickle things and they are slapping Mick McCarthy around at the minute. It's hard to watch.

Wednesday night was a triumph of ugliness. The booing which greeted the full-time whistle, the chants of Keano, Keano, Keano, the peevishness of McCarthy's press conference words, all these things were the entitlement of their authors, but they were unbecoming. Irish soccer has lost its way badly over the past six months and the low points of this trough period have been plentiful.

This, though, was the nadir. No grace. No dignity. All parties diminished.

McCarthy has lost the PR war by virtue of sourly refusing to fight it. That's fine. He has always known what he re-iterated on Wednesday night, that football is a results business. During the excitement of the World Cup, even on the night of the recent thrashing of Finland, he could cloth himself in the old cliche about letting the football do the talking.

Now, though, the threadbare nature of our football leaves him shivering. McCarthy's greatest troubles have arrived like a winter virus. The central defence whose virtues he has traditionally advocated have let in six goals in two competitive games, the first on Wednesday the sort of howler which would provoke harsh words in an under-11 game in Fairview Park.

It was a gamble to leave John O'Shea on the bench on Wednesday night. When you give away a goal like that after a gamble like that, it's time to get up from the table. You're luck is gone.

On Wednesday, the centre of the Irish midfield seemed cruelly ill-equipped to deal with the Swiss diamond formation and the intelligent short passing of the visitors made Kinsella and Holland irrelevant for 70 minutes or so. If there's a department which McCarthy could do without coming under excessive scrutiny right now, it's the centre of midfield. Wasn't there a guy who used play there . . .

There were other worries. We lacked pace in the full-back positions. Damien Duff was played out of position again until that bizarre interlude when Kevin Kilbane was recycled as a centre forward. Poor Kilbane. Still haunted by his miss from three yards in Suwon and now generally lacking the confidence for the game at this level, he must have wondered if he weren't the victim of some cruel, practical joke.

All in all, Ireland looked like a team suffering from a chronic inability to think its way through the flimsiest of problems. We put together some good moves and some passionate play in the second half, but we were beaten by the Swiss for intelligence, for mental flexibility, for expertise in reading the game. Finally we went to three at the back and got sucker-punched, proving, as one journalist put it afterwards, that having Ian Harte at left back is actually better than having nobody there at all.

All these things, all these inadequacies, have been threatened with exposure for some time. Indeed, they have been exposed plentifully, our inability to defend a lead has been a trademark for some time, but during those calamities the options were limited and we didn't seem to be losing our way through mere perversity.

On Wednesday we had one of the best young central defenders in Britain sitting on the bench all night. Unable to close down midfield, we didn't opt to introduce the creativity and trickery of Stephen McPhail instead, or to redirect Colin Healy's energy to his natural position. And we persisted with the misplacement of Duff.

The disaster of this, the element which elevates a couple of mishaps to the status of a crisis, is timing. Having missed his exit cue when he was at the top, McCarthy's troubles this week have merely been sandwiched between other troubles. Last week's fiasco concerning the Sunderland job was prologue. The release of his World Cup Diary is epilogue. Or aftermath.

Inevitably, Roy Keane raises his shaven head here. Is there any point in running the comb over Saipan again? Not really, but because McCarthy's book does so, and because the words therein give us a picture of the manager's mindset then and now, it is worth talking about briefly.

With regard to Saipan, the most common feeling expressed these days by the sensible middle constituency of a fatigued Irish football public is that both McCarthy and Keane were wrong, but as manager, McCarthy bears more responsibility for the intransigence that has followed. In that respect, the book makes depressing reading.

A key part of McCarthy's job is man management, the recognition of the different needs of players and the anticipation of those needs. One assumes that generally he is better at that business than this book suggests.

One would have thought that on reflection, McCarthy would concede that it was a failure of management not to get the country's greatest player onto the pitch. McCarthy doesn't see it as such. A troubled player is a troublemaker. Even a trouble genius.

Was it a failure of management to call the fatal meeting to confront an obviously ailing human when logically there was nothing to be gained from such a meeting? Was it a failure of management to call a press conference immediately afterwards, sucking the breathing space out of the situation? McCarthy doesn't think so. Not then. Not now.

All those things would be forgivable in a manager willing to learn and grow. After all, in Saipan, for a man who claims (remarkably) that he had no idea that his best and most influential player didn't like him, all these things must have come like bolts from the blue. McCarthy was making decisions under extreme stress. To note now that he made a couple of bad calls would ameliorate the situation considerably.

The current difficulty is the absence of reflection and McCarthy's refusal to address the issue for the benefit of the Irish public until his book arrived. The gamble here was that we would have six points in the bag and McCarthy's account would be copperfastened by his popularity. Instead, his refusal to

speak about Saipan in the months between the incident and publication looks like an attempt to cash in. It won't have gone unnoticed that the subject of Keane, tabboo in press conferences for months, was played for laughs during the Irish managers recent appearance on They Think It's All Over.

The flap copy of Mick McCarthy's World Cup Diary suggests in comically unpromising prose that the book will tell us, at last, about that week "when McCarthy lived and worked under the glare of the world's publicity" .

It was a time which, the flap tells us, brought about "his epic transformation from Ireland manager to one of the most respected men in world football".

Maybe so, but the manager's personal growth seems curiously stunted and a large portion of the book is a prolonged whine. McCarthy wonders not once in those pages what personal demons could have been tormenting Roy Keane to the extent that he would want to leave a team he had poured himself into. The "epic transformation" seems to have robbed McCarthy of some of his innate decency. When it is confirmed in Izumo, that Keane won't be coming back, McCarthy pronounces himself "ecstatic".

A look at the record of calamities which have befallen McCarthy's team in Keane's absence would have suggested that a more sober response would have been appropriate.

The observation that what goes around comes around has to be made. Roy Keane paid the price for Saipan during the summer and beyond. The last settling was in Bolton on Tuesday when the English FA put him out of football until December 7th.

After that, apart from the regrets, he gets back to business as usual. The bill is arriving at McCarthy's table just now.

Characteristically, he feels that the media has been busy charging items to him. McCarthy's protestations about his treatment at the hands of the Irish media should be brushed away quickly. There has been some over-the-top tackling, but McCarthy's continued claims (especially if the ear he is talking into happens to be English) that he is continually being splashed with battery acid is nonsense.

Some of the criticism of his tenure has been unjustified, but most of the those who write about Irish football have been scrupulously fair to him and, besides, criticism comes with the territory and the wage packet. Unfortunately McCarthy's media face has nevertheless always been contorted by churlishness and self-pity and it is in that respect that he lets himself down most often.

When it comes to the media his blind spots are considerable. When he writes about his mystification concerning Roy Keane's alienation, the irony of the fact that his ghost is the same man who successfully encouraged a Lansdowne Road crowd to boo Roy Keane never seems to dawn on him.

On Wednesday night, when asked inevitably and unavoidably about his future as manager of the team, he was spiky and rude. McCarthy's attitude was defiant. Why go?

Well, why stay? At international level, when the X factor vanishes, it doesn't come back. When Jack Charlton's grip became unsteady you knew it was over. No second act. Those are the facts of life at this level. You don't have the players with you every morning, you don't turn things around through daily repetition, you don't ratchet it up by infinitesimal increments.

Why stay? Despite the embarrassment of the Sunderland business, there is every reason to believe McCarthy's stock remains high in the offices of most Premiership chairmen. It is hard to see how his achievements and the esteem in which he is held personally wouldn't earn him a decent management job in the near future. The smart money might suggest either Glenn Roeder will be sacked by West Ham or Alan Curbishly will be pried away from Charlton in the near future, thus creating the sort of opening which would mean a short commute for McCarthy. He could get back to dealing with players on a daily basis and to working in a football environment where if your best man doesn't like you, well you can transfer him and buy another one.

The alternative is to stick bitterly with the Irish job through the remainder of this campaign and in all likelihood fail to qualify for a tournament which just weeks ago people were talking about us perhaps winning. Such a course of action would be hugely damaging to the manager's reputation and would also deprive any successor of a valuable time in the careers of the emerging generation of players.

And then there is McCarthy's own happiness and peace of mind. He wears the stresses on his face these days and it is awful to see. Perhaps the most poignant aspect of the fall-out of Saipan has been the personal impact. To see old friendships like that between Eamon Dunphy and John Giles sundered over the issue is shocking, to watch Roy Keane and to wonder about the headful of regrets he will always have about missing the World Cup as a player in his prime, well it makes one fear for him.

And McCarthy? For all his peevishness and paranoia, he is a decent, straightforward man who has been beaten up by events. He walked into the propellers of a controversy and he has been shredded. He's not enjoying this job that he once dreamed of any more. He should have walked away with the cheers from the Phoenix Park ringing in his ears. Instead this whole experience will leave him more scarred than anyone.

He once said that he'd know when it was over and when that time came he'd walk away and he'd go swim with the dolphins.

Sensible words. Fungi is holding on line one, Mick.