Nothing about Stephen Staunton's time at the helm is comparable to the reigns of his immediate predecessors, argues Tom Humphries.

Come to our bracing desert,
Where eternity is eventful
For the weather-glass
Is set at Alas
The thermometer at Resentful
- WH Auden, For The Time Being

Alas. Alas. Alas. We have three games left in this European qualifying campaign and nothing left to look forward to but Stephen Staunton's seething resentments of all and any criticism which comes his way. Nothing left but the uncomfortable and unfamiliar spectacle of an Irish team playing out fixtures for the right to finish third, fourth or even fifth in a group.

That's what happens when you appoint an international manager on the basis of impressions rather than credentials. Nobody, even those among the besuited posse who led us to think that they were engaged in the search for a world-class manager, ever believed that an assistant at Walsall ever fitted the bill.

There was an impression out there, though, that Stephen Staunton, who was a heroic player and a nice enough fella in the years when he played, might somehow grow into a job he was clearly too small a fit for.

He hasn't. The appointment smelled of decentskinmanship, that debilitating old condition of which the FAI has never quite cured itself.

Ultimately, though, the business has been cruelly unfair, if lucrative, to Staunton. He has been asked to submit himself to on-the-job training under the klieg lights of intense public scrutiny. He obviously, and painfully, isn't ready. It is time to end his misery.

It has been said this week that Staunton is the latest in a line of rinky dink or yellow pack managers and that he needs to be the last. It has been claimed also that there must be a measure of consistency from those of us who felt that Brian Kerr was shabbily treated in the manner of his departure but who feel that Staunton should be cut free at this stage.

Neither statement stands up. The appointment of Stephen Staunton, whose managerial experience was so minimal as to be essentially zero, was a wild gamble far more reckless than the appointment of Mick McCarthy, who had tasted a little of everything at Millwall, or of Brian Kerr, whose coaching qualifications and long-term contribution to the future of Irish soccer made him a viable candidate.

There were calls all the way through Mick McCarthy's first campaign as Irish manager for him to be cut loose, particularly after high-profile incidents involving Roy Keane and John Aldridge, but the FAI, justifiably, resisted the temptation to reach for the knife because the improvement between McCarthy's opening experiments and nights like the Romania game in Bucharest suggested a facility to learn. Ireland reached a two-legged play-off against Belgium in that campaign, and, although there were blips and the final Saipan debacle, McCarthy grew steadily in authority and confidence.

In the aftermath of Prague, the FAI's decision to bolster Staunton's standing with references (prompted no doubt by Merrion Square's squadron of spin doctors) to France's situation in the years between winning the European Championship in 1984 and winning the World Cup in 1998 seems designed to invite ridicule.

The French analogy also leads us to Brian Kerr, this country's most assiduous student of the French underage system and the man best placed to implement its applicable lessons.

At the end of Staunton's first campaign, is his position directly and precisely comparable to what Brian Kerr's was at the end of his first full campaign? Those of us who believed (and still do) in Kerr would argue that, as Irish manager, he was attempting to bring us to a new level of maturity and technical appreciation on the pitch. Whether the players under his tutelage had the habits, the intellect or the talent to operate at that level is a moot point: several seemed to find being asked to think about the game to be an unwarranted intrusion on their sparse intellectual property. Yet Kerr took over a shattered team and presided over just one loss (to a stunning Thierry Henry goal) in 16 competitive games.

Critics missed the up-and-at-'em style of Charlton and McCarthy teams, fans yearned to watch Irish sides who had obviously just been exposed to some top-class table-thumping in the dressing-room. But if we were ever to evolve into a side playing the sort of cerebral football which the FAI claim this week to be building towards, then Kerr was moving us in the right direction.

Unfortunately the comparisons with Staunton's reign are thin. The last seven days have brought the eighth and ninth competitive matches of his tenure and we are dead in the water as regards qualifying from a group which looked less than daunting.

More critically, team selections are incoherent, substitution policy is baffling and the legendary motivational skills have been exposed as nothing more than a prolonged exercise in entrenched siege mentality.

It isn't necessarily true that what is being squandered right now is the future of a golden generation of young Irish footballers - the evidence to hand suggests some solid and committed talents but nothing world-class - but those players have the right at international level to expect the best coaching and the best management available.

The Irish squad are at a stage where they need a coach who can make them more than the sum of their parts. In that respect, Scotland, to whom we collectively advised just three or four years ago to stick to kilts and shortbread and give up on soccer, would have been a better example for the FAI to clutch for this week. With decent management Scotland top a qualifying group which contains France and Italy.

We, on the other hand, face Germany at home, a Cypriot team who dismantled us in uniquely distressing circumstances and an improving Welsh side in a run of games which though essentially meaningless could see us finish fifth in Group D.

Since the grim comedy of our loss in Cyprus, the run of results which the FAI claim presages the dawn of a new era include the landmark farrago against San Marino, a win over an abysmal Welsh side, two draws in the Mickey Mouse tour to the US and the late surrender of two points to a mediocre Slovakian side last weekend.

The names that linger from this campaign are not just those of young players like Aiden McGeady and Paul McShane, both of whom have shown enough flaws to suggest that at the moment international football is too much too young, but also names like Caleb Folen, Sean St Ledger and Joe Lapira. Meanwhile, this week's soap opera with Stephen Ireland leaves Staunton in an embarrassing and further weakened position.

The FAI have bought themselves a manager who shows little sign yet of knowing what his best team is or being able to think on his feet when the nature of a game changes. His changes against that dismal Welsh side worked in Croke Park. But on evenings in places like Nicosia, San Marino, Bratislava and even Prague (when change for the better was forced upon Staunton, not instigated by him) he showed a faltering hand.

There is the lingering difficulty, too, of Staunton's inability to talk a good game, a handicap which would be less distressing if results suggested a greater fluency within the dressing-room. And there is the memory of his embarrassing sending off for petulance in the game against Germany.

With three games remaining it is unlikely that those calling for Staunton's dismissal are doing anything other than talking into a vacuum. The Irish squad face a year of friendly games when this group campaign is over, and, if there is a lesson from both the Kerr and Staunton eras, it is that our glittering record in friendly games is meaningless when it comes to what happens in qualifying groups.

We will head into a World Cup qualifying campaign led by a man who needs to learn far, far more than he can learn in the next 12 months. He won't have his Uncle Bobby Robson to hold his hand. We will fail under him, and it will be the qualifiers for Euro 2012 before we have the wit to employ a manager who has done his learning elsewhere and who can bring that learning to the job. Poland brought in that sort of expertise when they employed Leo Beenhakker last July. They top Group A.

Alas, the FAI isn't an organisation which can move with enough alacrity to remove Staunton in time for a replacement to be in place before the end of this series.

In fact, the FAI won't be sacking Stephen Staunton at all because John Delaney's future is intricately bound up with the fate of the man he hand-picked on the basis of his several weeks experience helping out on the Walsall training ground.

C'est la vie, as they say in France. Alas. Alas. Alas.