LockerRoom: There's an old story about Brian Kerr taking a team to an important match up in Dundalk or somewhere and outside of Dublin the team bus broke down, but, typical of Kerr, he had a fleet of cars following behind. I'm sure Brian thought of it on Tuesday.

For those who were in the Carlisle Grounds, getting to watch the Irish team train on the morning before a friendly international was a rare treat. The team seem to have grown away from us in the past few years and the affable accessibility of yore is viewed with horror by today's professionals.

Happy though the morning was, you could tell that the players had a little collective pout on about things. Nothing strange there. As a rule of thumb the pout is the default setting for the modern pro.

In their dream world the slightest fleck of impurity can assume the dimensions of an obese bluebottle squatting in the ointment of their happiness.

The rumours of discontent in the Irish camp last week are interesting in what they say about the past and the present. The players have apparently been grumbling because they find the Kerr regime a little too taxing on their concentration, involving breakdowns of their own performances and the Kerr tendency to pack as much useful information into a day as possible.

Tuesday apparently brought things to a head. No great fissure in the squad but the sound of whingeing audible. Makes you wonder.

On Wednesday night Kerr's team handed in a performance that had the manager's trademark all over it. Tidy, thoughtful football. Great passing. Good heart. We looked nothing like the team which went so meekly into that dark night in Basel. The team at last is bearing the maker's mark.

You wonder if, as a group of people, they have reached the tipping point yet, where the majority of players accept that the world of the international week has changed forever. It took the players who grew up with Mick McCarthy a while to get over his passing. That has been one of the problems facing the new regime. Roy Keane may have left Saipan but the irony is that things are being done now the way he would have liked them to be done. At Sunderland, meanwhile, a good week was proceeding apace. McCarthy has done a fine job in the land of the makems. It has been pointed out often he inherited a losing team and and from that he sold a minibus full of name players.

Without detracting from the achievement, one suspects those conditions suited Mick's way of operating. He inspires a loyalty which is at it's fiercest when players feel their backs to the wall, when they suspect their reputations are in question, when they feel they are fighting through something together.

That was the twin legacy of Saipan, the group which remained behind welded together and battling fiercely like men under siege. The manager's odd mix of paranoia and defiance sparking their performances.

It's the sort of motivation that can only last so long. When they came together in the autumn they were notoriously flat when they had no windmills to tilt against.

The players' performances against Switzerland and Russia signed McCArthy's p45 for him, yet as he shuffled away his players continued to blame an array of imaginary foes (mainly with seats in the press box) who had manipulated the mood of the country. At Sunderland they've been through the fires of hell as well. Right down to that game against Preston when they were about to claim sole ownership of the losingest record in history.

When a team are in that position McCarthy has a gift for getting them out of it. He did it at Millwall first and the "nobody likes us and we don't care" school of motivation could in fact claim him as its dean. When it comes to gritted teetth and clenched fist McCarthy is a wonderful motivator. He has firm beliefs about football too and will always be in demand in the game. What made him a good Irish manager was his understanding of the terrain. Gritty defiance and a talent for working against the odds has been the Irish way of doing things for a long time. If blithely happy Americans are handed lemons by life only to go on and make lemonade, well we usually trample a domestic shambles and make champagne.

We crave being written off. Love the underdog tag. Our most heroic and passionate performances have been when we are proving a point. Or when we are stealing a point when we have been a goal down. Asked to just go and win a match that we should win and we panic. In major finals from Egypt to a 10-man Spanish team, that's been our wont. In qualifying we've rattled Romanians and frozen against Icelanders.

There comes a time, though (and this is quite unIrish) when you have to stand up and announce that because of the players you have and the work you are doing you expect to succeed. You have to put yourself under that pressure.

That it seems to me is what the Kerr era is about. No more kick-and-rush. No more passionate losers. No more gathering every negative press cutting and banging a fist on the table and saying let's show these bastards. It's about saying 'here we are, we're the best we can be, let's play'.

Roy Keane once balefully described the best thing about Irish trips as being the popcorn and Minstrels he'd be given when the team went off to the pictures on Monday nights. Others relished the licence to go and get well jarred in the company of people from a similar income bracket. Playing for Ireland has always been fun punctuated by football. We have never evinced a conviction that we should be aiming higher.

Better than expected. Better than the Brits. Not great but good enough. Pats on the head all round. You can't imagine that washing at Manchester United, Arsenal, Real Madrid, etc, etc.

Keane learned a different culture at Manchester United. He outgrew the boys'-night-out culture, came to see his career as a journey towards personal excellance and fulfilment. In sport that's the only journey worth making.

This week was interesting. In all likelihood the rumours of discontent in Killiney are exaggerated, but it would be interesting to know the true extent of the disenchantment that the culture shock of the Kerr era has produced. One imagines that those pouts say a multitude.

It was interesting to note at the end of the controversial training session in Bray which were the players who got up and cantered most happily towards the fans, there to sign autographs. They were Kerr kids. Players who understand.

On the field the team are looking as if they understand what their true potential is. They have a manager whose reaction to losing a lead in the Stade de France would be the same as was Keane's reaction when we lost a lead in the Amsterdam ArenA.

Saipan will influence Irish football for a long time to come. We move forward with surprisingly little affection for the old way of doing things. We'll surprise ourselves if we believe in ourselves and demand more from ourselves. Wednesday night proved that to anyone who had doubts.

Time to demand more than passion. Time to scrap the pout and postures.