On Soccer:Ireland's support role in Saturday's double bill at Foxboro is far from being the most embarrassing in US football history. A likely contender for that title might be the league game between Minnesota and Tampa Bay in 1986 when 52,621, more than five times the home side's average crowd, turned up on the basis that the Beach Boys would perform after the final whistle.

Still, it underlined the threadbare nature of the squad travelling with Steve Staunton during the past couple of weeks and the profile of the games they had gone to in America that only 1,000 or so supporters, many of then Bolivian, showed up at the home of the New England Patriots on Saturday evening.

The Ireland manager will be hoping now that the emergence of even a couple of young players as credible contenders for places in the team he will field in competitive games justifies the indignity of playing to mainly empty houses.

In terms of reputations enhanced, the three biggest winners last week were Darren Potter, Stephen O'Halloran and Daryl Murphy. Each did enough over the two games in the United States to suggest we will see them included in further international squads before the year is out.

In a sense, though, getting them off the mark at senior level for Ireland is the easy part for Staunton. He must now hope they, and the handful of others who provided real evidence of potential in the games against Ecuador and Bolivia, go back and establish themselves at club level, where most of a player's progress is always going to be made.

Potter's position looks to be the strongest on this front. Having played in the Champions League with Liverpool, the 23-year-old finally accepted last year he was not going to make the breakthrough he craved at Anfield. A season-long loan at Wolves was made permanent in mid-season and by then the midfielder had become an important player in Mick McCarthy's side that lost out in the promotion play-off semi-finals. He will return to the English midlands after the summer break confident of his status as a first-team regular and, though not yet in the top flight, he will have the opportunity to learn in a tough and competitive environment which should accelerate his recent development.

O'Halloran's prospects are less clear. The 19-year-old underlined his potential with a string of fine performances while on loan at Wycombe last season and played a significant role in the League Two side's League Cup run. The young Corkman featured in the win over Charlton as well as the battling defeat by Chelsea but missed the second leg of the semi-final against the competition's eventual winners because Martin O'Neill refused a request to extend his loan period. Instead, O'Halloran was brought back to Villa Park where he was given a senior squad number and spent the rest of the season training with the first team.

He has yet to make his debut in the Premiership for Villa but O'Neill is said to rate him highly and he is expected to be given first-team opportunities next season. How many he gets is likely to decide how far Staunton is prepared to go with integrating him into the international panel. Gifted left-sided defenders are a precious commodity, though, and Staunton won't be reluctant to bring him into the fold.

Murphy's fate, meanwhile, would appear to depend to a considerable extent on Roy Keane's ability to attract proven top-level talent to the Stadium of Light over the summer months.

The Sunderland manager clearly holds the striker in high regard, talking him up on several occasions during the closing stages of last season and handing him opportunities to impress which Murphy, to his credit, seized. It could be Murphy will continue to benefit from the manager's patronage regardless of who arrives but if Keane does bring in a couple of well-established stars the player's opportunities could be limited.

And if Murphy does get further chances to test himself in the Premiership - he played a handful of games there under McCarthy a couple of seasons ago - it still remains to be seen how Anthony Stokes and particularly Stephen Elliott (so far ahead of his team-mates at one point) fare.

To judge by his two displays last week, though, Murphy has both the strength and the technical ability to make the step up at this stage in his career and if he does it at Sunderland he could become a central figure within the Irish set-up.

"I have been happy with how I did," he said after Saturday's outing, "it was only my second game and hopefully there is plenty more to come." It's a sentiment all of the young or inexperienced players who featured at some point or other last week will share but then there are countless examples of players like Colin Healy, Stephen McPhail or Liam Miller reaching the point where they generated high expectations only for their progress to be stunted by setbacks of one kind or another at club level.

Nobody, though, will be more anxious to see this latest crop come through without a hitch than Staunton himself for his own fortunes are closely tied to his ability to inject new talent into the squad he inherited a little over a year ago.

If he succeeds then having played in front of 1,000 or so people more interested in the MLS scheduled for later in the afternoon won't be remembered as such a humiliation after all.