WHAT CAN you say about this game? It seems entirely unreasonable to consider the prospect of Ireland dropping points and a little absurd to offer an opinion on how we should win it. The truth is that there should be no question of us not over-running a side of Liechtenstein's quality. Afterwards, when we have done it, there will still very little room for any self satisfaction.

In so far as it is practical, the players that did so well in Romania should retain their places this evening, although it is unthinkable that we would go into this game without a second striker up front. After that, it shouldn't matter what system or precise line-up we play. We may be short of the sort of quality we had a few years ago, but we surely have enough to overwhelm a team of part-timers on home soil.

Whether we play wing backs or wide midfield players is academic. But whichever approach we adopt, we must ensure that we do not fall into the same trap that we did against Iceland. In that game, we failed to get behind the visiting side's defence once. Although they were a somewhat more accomplished bunch of players than we will come up against tonight, a repeat of that shortcoming in this game can only have the effect of making things difficult.

Otherwise it should just be a case of reflecting afterwards on how well we converted our scoring opportunities. If we convert enough of them (at least three), we can reclaim second place in the group and put the worst of our form safely behind us.

If that happens, I still firmly believe we can win our remaining away match in Iceland, beat Lithuania, home and away, and wrap up second place in the group. If we get that far, then qualification for France will be very much up for grabs.

If it doesn't, then the FAI and the Irish fans will have paid the price for the neglect of the Charlton years. While the senior team enjoyed so much success during that decade, virtually no attention was paid to the development of our up-and-coming talent. The under-21 team was looked upon as no more than an inconvenient distraction. Nothing was done to integrate our better youngsters into the senior panel.

Mick McCarthy has done a great deal to rectify that situation. The appointment of Ian Evans, and the emphasis he has placed on the under-21s, has already started to bring rewards, while the appointment of Brian Kerr is also a welcome investment in the future.

The pity of it is that these steps were not taken a very long time ago. It is remarkable that the FAI - in a country like ours that in the natural course of things cannot expect to produce that many players of real quality - has not taken a more active role in development in the past.

Had the underage structures been taken more seriously they could have helped not only to bring players directly through to the senior panel, but also to secure transfers to bigger clubs for promising youngsters by improving them as players and enhancing their reputations.

Instead, Mick McCarthy finds himself having to condense what should have been a fairly long, drawn out process into a couple of years with the result that, on more than one occasion, in important games he has had to throw some desperately inexperienced players in at the deep end.

Unfortunately for McCarthy, he, like any other manager at any level of the game, must be judged on the results that he achieves during his time in the job. When the position became vacant following Jack Charlton's departure it was widely observed that the time to get the job would be a few years down the line.

Nevertheless, McCarthy had a very good idea of what lay ahead when he expressed an interest in the job and, having been given it, he must have known that while talk of us finishing ahead of Romania was misguided, anything short of second place in this group would be seen as a significant failure.

With this in mind, any talk of negotiating an extension to the contract between the FAI and McCarthy would strike me as being premature. As I say, I still believe that his team can win four of the remaining games and take something from the fifth, at home to Romania, to finish in the play-off spot. However, the results against Iceland in Dublin and Macedonia in Skopje have raised doubts about his team's ability to put away poor teams.

Second place, therefore, is still quite a way short of being a foregone conclusion. Until it is secured, we should all sit tight. The McCarthy era has so far been interesting to watch, even if the results have been a little erratic. Until the last game, however, he appeared to suffer from the same lack of flexibility that undid his predecessor.

More recently I've have seen a willingness to change things around and as he heads into a vital run of four games, there seems every reason to believe that he will have drawn the conclusion from events in Bucharest that 3-5-2 is not necessarily the way to play in every international encounter.