Tom Humphries/LockerRoom: Once in the long ago when Mick McCarthy's management of the Irish team was still a novelty I was sitting outside a café beneath a mountain in Liechtenstein

I was taking morning coffee in the company of another sports hack. Double espressos to kick-start the day. Liechtenstein is a picture postcard sort of gaff and in anticipation of us viciously avenging a goalless draw in the principality at the end of the Charlton era a large crowd of Irish fans had travelled.

Indeed they rounded the corner just as we were about to get caffeined up. There were a few dozen of them and while chanting in unison they were describing their attire and their attitude. "We are green, we are white," they noted, "we are fucking dynamite." They segued nicely from this explosive but sartorially aware ditty into an extemporaneous piece of advice about the correct fundament into which a non-monarchist might shove "your Queen of England". Consent wasn't an issue.

And finally they congregated outside the little café where we were sitting and they serenaded the local late breakfast crowd with a beery but candid analysis of their psychic state. "You're shit and you know you are, you're shit and you know you are." I remember only that the choirmaster, the Charlotte Church of the piece, was a rotund redhead who had been shrink-wrapped in an Offaly GAA jersey and that all the locals were pure terrified. Our lads might have thought they were charming the pants off the people. They weren't.

It's not always like that of course. There's a hard core of seriously good-natured punters who go to games and make friends with locals and go off and see the sights. Their friendly nature covers for the fact that most foreign people can't distinguish between a large crowd of drunks from England and a large crowd of drunks from Ireland. They just don't find it pleasant to be hosting the large crowd.

So Saturday afternoon in Lansdowne had its funny moments. Brian Kerr, who has lived his life among ordinary football people, is anxious to get more noise and excitement into our fixtures. I imagine Brian will need to hand-pick the attendance if he is to succeed long term.

Let's face it - we're not the greatest fans in the world. We're the greatest liggers. We're the greatest lovers of the big day out. We love success. We'd have an open-top-bus parade for the winner of a frog-jumping contest if he had Irish roots.

Saturday's attempts to artificially stimulate the Irish fan base seemed a little cack-handed if well intentioned. Despite all the self-congratulatory guff down through the years about the unparalleled greatness of the fans who showed up when success showed up we are actually the people about whom the allegation that they only sing when they are winning was minted.

We are the people who within the space of a few years booed Roy Keane in Lansdowne Road and then caterwauled his name at Mick McCarthy to signify our displeasure with him. We like big occasions and grand days out. That's all that unites us.

It's a long time since Irish fans have been a homogenous group of true soccer lovers. There are those, the ordinary shammers, as Brian Kerr has identified them, who were locked out of the good years and would swear the late great Jackie Jameson was the best player they ever saw in the flesh. Maybe half a dozen of these go to Ireland matches.

There is the massively bloated corporate sector who like to gently encourage the "goys in green" and then there are all the children of Rupert Murdoch who would only truly get excited and make noise if they saw a Manchester United jersey disported in Lansdowne.

You have the Continuity Celtic brigade who consider Celtic to be the sporting and musical wing of the Provos and the Irish team to be a farm club for the Hoops. And then you have those who occasionally come across tickets and wander along just hoping to be entertained, enthralled or seduced. All and sundry left with their ears bleeding on Saturday. That freshening wind which Ireland felt on their backs in the second half, by the way, was generated by the late Phil Lynott spinning quickly in his grave after what was done to The Boys Are Back In Town at half-time. The boys won't be coming again after the mauling they got.

Lansdowne on Saturday sounded like Ibiza any Friday night. The attempts to use Europop and old Status Quo numbers as a cattle prod to stir the somnolent crowd into life (let alone loyalty) were bravely resisted by the Irish team, who offered the footballing equivalent of a lullaby and Horlicks for much of the game. The crowd were as quiet as a grave for long stretches.

Afterwards, it was deemed a form of purgatory to have watched the full hour and a half. Brian Kerr noted that sufficient unto the day was the win thereof. There were few takers for that. Indeed the reaction to Saturday revealed much about our deficiencies as fans.

When Kerr was appointed there was a belief among a sizeable sector of the population that handing him the job was worth a punt because we weren't going to qualify for Euro 2004 anyway and he might sort things out. Three competitive games on and we actually stand a decent chance of winning the group.

Partly that's down to the fact that there are no outstanding teams in the group and partly it's down to good management. Four points off Hans-Peter Briegel's Albanian side is as good a haul as anyone will manage. The win in Georgia was a feat which both the Swiss and the Russians failed to pull off. Kerr has managed this whilst taking over a side with low morale and one which since we played those heady qualifiers against Holland and Portugal had lost Roy Keane, Niall Quinn, Steve Staunton, Alan Kelly and a few other key personalities who just aren't around these days.

So Saturday wasn't beautiful and in the end we were lucky. It was a poor performance at the end of what for several players must have seemed like a never-ending season. So what? We've lost lots of games in jammy circumstances like that. Winning one was nice.

Wandering around Lansdowne afterwards and talking to people on Saturday night it was difficult to believe the criticisms that a bad day at the office can bring. Take Robbie Keane. Any game in which a striker scores a goal can be chalked as a good game. Robbie Keane was denounced widely for coming back too deep and taking too much out of the ball. He's not 23 years old yet. He's scored 15 goals for a nation whose all time goalscoring record is 21 goals. Take Damien Duff: greedy, should be on the left. David Connolly: waste of space. Holland and Kinsella: past it.

And so on. Like a bunch of curmudgeons from the press box. Only nobody ever mollycoddles us. Wait and see. An easy win on Wednesday and the greatest fans in the world will be back. Loving it. A fortnight in Portugal next summer. They'll love that team till they die.