Having served his time as assistant to the former England manager Graham Taylor, Lawrie McMenemy should know that in the career of every sporting fall guy there comes a defining moment which suggests that the end is very near.

Taylor's came during England's ill-fated World Cup qualifier in Rotterdam in 1993 which, to his eternal embarrassment, was preserved in all its gruesome glory by a prying television documentary crew. With a strange kind of symmetry, McMenemy's defining moment as manager of Northern Ireland was also played out in front of a television camera last Tuesday night at Windsor Park. At the final whistle, the Northern Ireland manager shuffled away from the carnage of a limp 1-1 draw with Canada, heading for the sanctuary of the short flight home to England. But media needs had to be met and McMenemy was wheeled out before the waiting cameras and journos.

The previous few days had been fractious with McMenemy visibly bristling at press conference queries about his future and accusing particular writers of having been unnecessarily critical of his lacklustre tenure.

In the weeks since the drab goal-less draw in Moldova the football scribes here have had the scent of managerial blood in their nostrils and as McMenemy squared up to some more cross-examination he looked like the hunted coming face to face with the hunted.

The first, reasonably vague question about his disappointment at the poor performance softened the Northern Ireland manager up. He played it with a straight bat and seemed to settle down for another one of those cosy, non-confrontational television interviews that football managers have come to know and love. Then came the bouncer. "Some of the supporters out there will say it was getting a bit embarrassing out there. What do you think?" Three or four seconds of the most uncomfortable television silence you have ever heard (or seen) then ensued.

McMenemy stared blankly into space as if searching for some way out but seldom has an international manager looked so out of his depth. "The lads did their best," ran the first platitude. "I think you have to give some of them a little bit of credit," was the next to the trundled out. Then came the finale and what have come to be the bywords for McMenemy's time in charge here. "We're not scoring goals and if you don't score goals you're not going to win games." And you thought the new punditry era of Gullit and Dunphy had blown away all this empty cliche and bluff. Silly you.

By reverting to type and to what he does best, the Northern Ireland manager did manage to salvage something from what had looked at one stage like a pretty desperate situation. Towards the end he was even able to throw in a glib joke about what the fans may or may not have been singing to him from the Windsor Park seats and terraces. At least he could be sure of one chant they definitely weren't singing: "Please stay for as long as you want because you have been such a success so far."

After all that he was gone, leaving behind the inquests and the growing clamour for his managerial head. None of which was surprising given the embarrassment that was last Tuesday night's dismal showing by his side. In mitigation, there were 11 squad members unavailable for one reason or another and so McMenemy was forced into playing four debutantes on the night. Not surprisingly, this was one of the first things he mentioned in his post-match utterances. Teams with a superior pedigree would struggle if they were to lose mid-fielders of the quality of Keith Gillespie, Michael Hughes and Neil Lennon, so the excuse offered is valid up to a point.

But the malaise clearly runs much deeper and has much more to do with motivational techniques and tactical awareness than it has with deficiencies in personnel. In all the recent internationals, McMenemy's players have appeared uninterested and listless. Billy Bingham may have had his faults but he seldom sent out an international side that wasn't single-minded in pursuit of a win. There was respect for the manager and for what he wanted from them. All that is conspicuously absent from Lawrie McMenemy's Northern Ireland side.

There is a degree of sympathy for the situation in which he finds himself. Top-class or even middle-division international sides are not fashioned out of players from Chesterfield, the reserve side at Norwich City, Glentoran and Linfield. But a manager with even a modicum of tactical good sense can organise a side so that while they may not score goals, they are at least more difficult to beat. The 1999 Northern Ireland vintage exhibit no such signs of organisation. At times they seem to amble through games as if they've just been introduced to each other in the dressing room half an hour in the great tradition of Sunday morning games in the local park. And to think they sacked Bryan Hamilton for this.

But it's clearer now than it ever was that Lawrie McMenemy is now the IFA fall-guy. And it is those soccer mandarins who are now paying the price for the short-sighted and unambitious appointment of a man whose best managerial days were clearly behind him years before he got the IFA call. In the wake of Bryan Hamilton's dismissal much was made of the exhaustive search that would be carried out for a "top-class" international manager. All the usual, hopelessly unrealistic suspects were wheeled out - including, most bizarrely Johann Cruyff - before they eventually settled for someone who had been in the football wilderness for years.

But that seemed to matter little. The big plus point was that he was affordable and the IFA purse-strings were never going to be stretched enough to accommodate a manager with the credentials and credibility to make a difference here.

There will always be problems in attracting someone from the international top drawer but if the financial package is in place, it then becomes a matter of hard persuasion. But without the money on the table, all the talking in the world won't take the IFA much past the Lawrie McMenemy's of this world.

With qualification for next year's European Championships little more than a distant dream and a grounds-well starting to swirl against him, it looks like the end of McMenemy's era is near. The visit of the world champions France in August could hasten his demise. Another scenario is that he may jump or be pushed before the end of the Euro 2000 qualifying campaign. That would give a new man the chance to stamp his mark in a competitive setting rather than in a series of meaningless friendlies.

Change looks inevitable because without it the free-fall will continue and Northern Ireland will be left to scrap it out with the Moldovas and Canadas of the footballing world.