So the emperor has no clothes after all. Lawrie McMenemy has achieved precious little during his 18 month spell in charge of the Northern Ireland football team but the comments he is reported to have made at last week's Labour Party Conference have ruffled more than a few feathers here. This was Northern Ireland's wake-up call and it was understandably very poorly received.

McMenemy was speaking at a Labour fringe meeting, the intention of which was to address some of the more pertinent issues facing British football at the end of a decade of almost continuous change. Now the first surprising thing is exactly how the Northern Ireland manager found himself in a situation like this. Anyone who has had the dubious pleasure of attending any of his press gatherings would have realised that McMenemy is a man who specialises in the anodyne and the banal. But as his side has lurched from one poor result to another over the past year something seems to have happened to McMenemy. His public utterances in the run up to and the fall out from recent defeats by Turkey and Germany had already tended towards the surreal. When asked about his team's deficiencies he said: "Unfortunately it's not like golf and we can't get a handicap start of a goal or two against these better sides."

So the signs were already there but last week in the clearly intoxicating company of the assembled politicos, McMenemy cut loose completely. Windsor Park, Northern Ireland's international home was, he said, a disgrace and he felt "almost ashamed to bring visiting teams here". Alleluia. The fact that the facilities at Windsor Park are on a par with an average Second Division ground in England with a little bit of rabid sectarianism throw in for good measure has been obvious to the dogs on the street here for years. But no-one even remotely connected with the organisation of Northern Ireland football has had the courage or conviction to stand up and say it. Instead hundreds of thousands of pounds have been poured into misguided schemes to develop Windsor Park into an international quality stadium.

But like the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale who tells the suppliant people that emperor is in fact naked, Lawrie McMenemy has cast himself in the position of the purveyor of the cold, uncompromising truth. Never mind that there have been commentators on the sidelines saying the same thing for years. This was the man in the top job talking and no-one had any choice but to listen.

The reaction was predictably shrill and depressingly defensive. Linfield, who as the owners of Windsor benefit most from the national side's rent for the use of their facilities, were the most vocal arguing that money had been spent on improving the much criticised pitch. The club's chairman also made the point that in the absence of government funding the room for manoeuvre in terms of improving the facilities for both players and facilities was severely limited.

The good gentlemen and gentlewomen of the Fourth Estate were even less kind. Deprived of the free trips and expenses jamborees that go hand in hand with qualification for a major Finals for almost 20 years, they had already decided that the McMenemy era offers little prospect of a return to the good old days. The proposed extension of the manager's contract had prompted a collective sharpening of knives and this latest perceived slight had the journos practically slavering. Interestingly, many of them picked up on McMenemy's Englishness and the fact that he wasn't "one of us" as evidence that he had failed to engage with the game or the people here and served it up as an explanation for this latest piece of disloyalty. This was all the proof the embattled manager needed of how the wind has changed since he took over the Northern Ireland job in a blaze of publicity 18 months ago. Back then amidst all the enthusiasm and the euphoria, his status as an outsider was paraded as a positive boon and regarded as a decisive break with the introspective past. How things change.

So why has McMenemy enmeshed himself in this row and why did he choose now to do it? Presumably he has been around enough to realise that what he said was bound to attract attention. Significantly one voice raised in his defence in the press at the weekend was that of Jim Boyce, President of the Irish Football Association President. All but alone among his peers in officialdom, Boyce has been a progressive voice in football here and generally prefers reasoned, rational argument to the more prevalent school of knee jerk reactions to even the suggestion that perhaps things could be done a little differently.

Boyce's response to all that McMenemy had said was characteristically shrewd. Rather than allowing himself to be drawn into a direct comment, he instead deflected the argument away from the deficiencies or otherwise of Windsor Park and towards the parallel issue of the building of a national stadium here.

There has already been a lengthy consultation period with the IFA as one of the interested parties and any highlighting of the problems with Windsor inevitably throws the national stadium issue into sharper focus.

A national stadium, so the argument went, would be a positive symbol of the changes within the political structures and might help propel some of the local sports organisations out of their torpor. Even as the pace of political progress has slowed to a standstill, the national stadium project has survived. Funding is the inevitable stumbling block. Initially it was felt that all the hard lobbying would have to be done within the confines of a new assembly which would have its fingers on the purse strings of a project like this. But as the prospects of an assembly and an executive in the near future recede, so that avenue of finance may be closed off.

So is it beyond the bounds of possibility that Lawrie McMenemy's indirect case for a new international home for Northern Ireland was a gentle reminder to Kate Hoey, the Northern Ireland-born Sports Minister. Have Jim Boyce and the IFA made the calculated assessment that whatever his clear deficiencies as an international manager, Lawrie McMenemy could be exert a forceful and persuasive influence as some tough decisions about the national stadium project are made?

If there is a sense that on the field, at least, Northern Ireland are in a long term period of decline, this shift in emphasis towards structures and away from the playing side of things may be the sole course of action open to Northern Ireland and the IFA. The only way is up.