Group 10 Managers' reactionThe Saturday afternoon commuter trains roar by overhead, shaking us into a state of near deafness in the stuffy little bandroom. Brian Kerr pauses and smiles to himself every time a rattler interrupts. People making their way home from work. Life goes on.

This wasn't a result he wanted but he knows his side have walked the line between disaster and mere disappointment. His unbeaten run as an international manager survives and so does the possibility of progress to Portugal. Enough. Just about.

"I'm disappointed that we didn't win," he says. "All round was it disappointing? For me personally, you know I like winning, so it was disappointing for me. It wasn't a bad day in many other ways. A good crowd who seemed to enjoy it. That's life. That's football."

It is. Life. Football. All the bends in the road. All the dips in the days. On Saturday we scored a goal fabricated out of Damien Duff's genius and the blessing of a deflection. And then we were assailed by irony. Brian Kerr's teams are nothing if not organised when handling set-pieces. It is like a badge of honour, a symbol of professional nous. They came undone in the cruellest of ways.

"The goal," he says, a little dejection in his tone, "I'm disappointed, yeah. We don't concede too many of them like that and the timing of it was poor as well. Shay was a bit unlucky. He was blocked off when he came for it and his punch didn't get far enough. We didn't react quickly enough then, we didn't get away the second ball. Ian (Harte) had just come on and we were a little unsettled. From their point of view I'm sure they thought it was a great goal."

So we do a quick head-count for the future. We try to see Basel. Who will play. What will happen. Robbie Keane? Yes. John O'Shea? "John jarred his knee when he stood on the ball trying to play it back to Shay. Then he got a kick. Not serious." And Kenny Cunningham. The captain succumbed to the peril of yellow cards. He'll miss the finale.

"Yeah. Kenny has been a smashing captain, good player. Quite solid. In previous campaigns we have lost key players though. We have another game on Tuesday. We'll use some of the players who didn't start today. Of course Kenny is a loss but we will survive."

Apart from that we are at the mercy of the Premiership. A month of combat will deplete us further no doubt. The mood in the bandroom is downbeat.

"Were you disappointed with the strikers, Brian?" "Ah no, not disappointed with the strikers. It's not always up to the strikers to always create. They (the Russians) were happy enough to defend. Two banks of four with one of the front men dropping off. You have to create a bit more yourself and we didn't today. I thought for the substitutions that we needed to change it. The majority of the players will feel we could have done a lot better today."

We struggle to find the right tone with the questioning. That Kerr should be in this position at all, where a home draw with the Russians seems disappointing but not the end of the road, is a tribute to his own extraordinary talents. He has almost scaled Everest while wearing boots made of lead. There's no real feeling he needs criticising. He senses the mood.

"I said, if you think back to last October, that everyone would be pleased if we could get to a play-off. There is a peculiar set of permutations left. The only thing we are in control of is our own game. The likelihood is we have to go there and win.

"The Russians can win their last two home games. I said again and again that it was a smokescreen about their difficulties. Scored four in each of their opening home games and have two home games left. We have a lot of players coming back from injury pre-season. We're not in control of whether they play every match. They are considerations. We have to weigh up all the alternatives. It's earlier in the season and the squads are getting bigger."

He finishes with some short lines. Home truths."We need goals in Basel," says somebody. "Not many," he says. "We need to play better. We didn't create many chances. Rhythm didn't quite come for us. I was concerned early in the match. There didn't seem to be a crispness to our passing and decision-making."

He seems grounded in the humbling reality of the afternoon. We didn't deliver. It's not fatal.

"We can't do anything about today's result. The next game gives us an opportunity to keep the team in the competition. I believe we can go there and win if that's what it takes. There is a combination of results which could still see us winning the group."

We go off to do the maths still shaken not so much by Brian Kerr's chary words as by the earlier visit to our bandroom by Georgi Yartsev, the charismatically-challenged Russian manager.

When the Russians beat us in Moscow a year ago Valery Gazzayev conducted his press conference in a busy, happy bar and caught the mood himself. As an antidote the Russians have gone back to the old school. Yartsev looked like he'd just been lifted from a Red Square viewing stand.

He spoke with a guttural solemnity, his face that of a character from Chekhov, his words precise but abstract.

"You know me," he said when he sat down, ramrod straight. "I know you. I understand your willingness to write about the game and just do your job. In the short time I was given for this key game, however, I have spent a lot of time visiting offices and newspapers instead of doing my job."

We the yellow-spined running dogs of the Irish media are delighted with this. Our Russian counterparts are being chastised. We're in the clear.

"It is not an easy task to give you my perception of the game," said Georgi, hitting his stride with the humorous patter. "I ran out of time to keep everything in place, to arrange everything."

No need then to ask him the question the bartender asked the horse when he strolled in. Why the long face? Georgi just can't let it lie.

"We have a lot of problems, just five days for the preparation." And yadda yadda yadda said the translator, rolling his eyes.

Not really. There were injuries. Or abductions. Who knows?

"We lost those who could run the game and go to the goal," he said mournfully. "Some of them were ill, some of them were injured."

Who will qualify? we asked, hoping to cheer him up a bit.

"Prognosis is not my job," he said. "Oh," we said, "right." And having established that there was little basis for a lasting friendship, we went our separate ways.