The Irish players, presumably, could have guessed what the response of the supporters would be to Saturday's calamity in Nicosia, but two young fans, in Celtic and Bray Wanderers shirts, at Larnaca Airport on Sunday night seized the opportunity to offer their opinion on it all, face to face, as the squad walked by.

"Shite! Shite! Shite," they shouted, forefingers jabbing in the players' direction.

Brutal, perhaps, but the players were hardly in any position to put up a defence; they hadn't, after all, put up any against Cyprus.

Alan Lee thought he was being offered a handshake by another supporter, but when the Ipswich striker extended his hand in return the man in the Irish jersey withdrew his own, instead thumbing his nose in the player's face. Boozy bravado, presumably. If Lee was, say, Roy Keane the supporter might well have been taken to a Larnaca hospital on seven stretchers.

As a 72nd-minute substitute Lee was hardly amongst the night's chief offenders, but those intent on venting their fury appeared eager to send a message along the lines of: "You lot humiliated us on Saturday, it's our turn to humiliate you."

In recent enough times Irish players, often serenaded with applause, had to be shepherded through airports to stave off the mass ranks of autograph hunters, Sunday night in Larnaca showed us where we're at. There were a few shouts of encouragement, a couple of insults, but mostly the supporters were silent as the players passed.

Whether they'll remain silent at Lansdowne Road tomorrow night if the team picks up from where it left off in Cyprus, well, we'll see.

Thus far John Delaney, the chief executive of the Football Association of Ireland, has backed his man, but if Steve Staunton endures an evening similar to Mick McCarthy's last game in charge, against Switzerland, when the crowd so vocally turned against him, you'd have to assume the end will be considerably more than nigh. If the performance resembles the one we saw on Saturday then more than a few of the players should go with him.

On the flight home from Cyprus two films were shown, both comedies, but there was no laughing from the seats in first class. Suggestions were made that the players should have been compelled to watch a tragi-comedy, something along the lines of Cyprus 5, Ireland 2, but the flight was only five hours in duration, there'd hardly have been time to pause and analyse each Irish howler before we landed.

They should, though, at some point, be made to endure what their supporters had to endure, by having to watch all 90-plus minutes of that. Maybe then they'd understand the post-match analysis of the fans in the Celtic and Bray Wanderers shirts.

"Where are you coming from?" asked the airport taxi driver. "Cyprus." "You weren't at the. . . ". "I was." "Jeeeeeeeeesus." And that's how it's been. Bewilderment. How could it have come to this? As Ciarán Fitzgerald, the former Irish rugby captain, once asked of his team-mates, "Where's your f*****g pride?" It's a question, you'd imagine, Lansdowne Road fans will be asking tomorrow night.