It was midway through the long flight home from the 2002 World Cup that David Walsh, then of the Sunday Times, sat down beside Tom Humphries and myself to recount some alarming news.

I didn't get all of it because, while he was talking, David was sitting on a big red bar that formed a key part of the mechanism for opening the emergency exit door, the nearby location of which had resulted in The Irish Times being afforded additional legroom for the 12-hour flight. This was no longer looking like quite such a result from our point of view and so, as David spoke, I quietly checked that my belt was buckled and that, for all the good it would have done me, I knew where my oxygen mask was going to spring from at 30,000 feet up.

What I suspected David was relating was the tale of how the English press corps divided angrily down the middle after half obtained advance information of what team Sven-Goran Eriksson would field in his side's opening group game and the other half received irate calls from their bosses back home demanding to know why they had not been in on the action. It all turned pretty ugly, with one prominent reporter trying to break down the hotel room door of another in the early hours of the morning.

Anyway, it turned out that David, a highly talented writer with a strongly-held sense of journalistic ethics, had in fact come to recount an entirely different breakdown in discipline amongst the English hacks many of whom, it seemed, had committed the enormous faux pas of openly celebrating one of their team's goals during the early stages of the competition.

Although we obviously didn't 'fess up, this caused Tom and myself a little discomfort for we were no strangers to such momentary lapses of self control. Along with every other Irish journalist present we had celebrated with some abandon Robbie Keane's late equaliser against Germany. His penalty against Spain and Duffer's goal against Saudi Arabia were other occasions on which standard protocol had been dispensed with.

Obviously it helps if the Irish goals come early enough or the deadline for copy is far off enough off that no radical rewrite under pressure is required. In Amsterdam 18 months earlier I found myself being stared at by a good many local supporters as I jumped around an aisle in the press box after Jason McAteer had put Mick McCarthy's side 2-0 up.

And it's hard to imagine there were many Irish reporters in their seats in the press box when McAteer scored the winning goal against the Dutch a year later. We may even have lost some of the local radio lads over the front of the West Upper.

I mention all of this because international players have a habit when things go poorly, as they did in San Marino last month, of mentioning that they are first and foremost fans who desperately want the team to win.

The implication, it sometimes seems, is that journalists want nothing more than another disastrous result that they can feed off during the days, weeks and months that follow.

Managers in trouble often go one step further by explicitly accusing their own press of wanting the team to lose so as to hasten their demise, little realising that if even we were all utterly indifferent to the fate of our national side, there is nothing in this world that most football correspondents dread more than the drawn out uncertainty that surrounds the appointment of a new international manager.

For this reason alone a significant number of those enjoying the legendary opulence of the Croke Park press box over the next week and a half will be hoping that Ireland can somehow hammer out a couple of wins and Steve Staunton's future is, for a while at least, settled.

Though his appointment essentially came as a disappointment to those who had expected somebody with more proven ability and his performance since has done little to win the sceptics over, a good many more will hope the games go well for the Louthman because of how sad it would be if his international playing career (covering 102 games) was to be overshadowed by his failure to look the part in what might yet be a spell in the dugout lasting just 10 matches.

Most, though, want the team to do well even if, because they are paid to take a dispassionate view, it does not necessarily read that way afterwards.