THERE'S always a right time and a wrong time to take a job in this life and if Mick McCarthy's first three games in charge of the Irish team point to anything, it's that he's appeared on the scene at a considerably less opportune time than his predecessor did.

Obviously it's still very early days, far too early to be anywhere near conclusive, but there has been, something of a pattern to his first few games and it's not exactly the pattern that McCarthy would have been hoping for when he took over at the helm.

Three games played, nine players given their debuts,, three defeats and, most importantly, not a single goal scored against teams which, while good, will have been treating their outings with out any great urgency.

As if all that weren't enough, McCarthy appears to have a considerable problem in the form of a growing Keane factor with the Manchester United mid fielder showing an alarming lack of desire to commit himself to his country.

Through much of the first hall, though, it looked to be quite a bright performance from the Irish side. Granted, for the first 15 minutes or so some of the players looked like they were still getting acquainted but, after Given had made a couple of decent saves to allow his team to get settled, there were some encouraging signs notably from David Connolly and Gareth Farrelly (although the latter overshadowed many of the positive aspects of his performance in the first period with a more careless showing at the start of the second which led to his replacement) while the whole team seemed to benefit from some good support on the part of the crowd who remained very patient through some of the game's slower spells.

There's probably a couple of reasons for that. For one thing there were a lot of new, or fairly new, players out there and the Lansdowne Road crowd are, always generous to new comers but, perhaps more importantly than that, what the supporters have been reading about Roy Keane's tactics over the past few days will have made theme appreciate the efforts of those players who do make the effort to represent their country.

For McCarthy the fact that the crowd appear to be willing to bear with him at this stage is a very positive factor because he knows as well as anyone, having enjoyed the Captain Fantastic stuff in his day, that they, were only too happy when the Irish team was putting the ball into the back row of the stand if that's what it took.

Now he faces the task of reeducating them into appreciating his style of football and, if success isn't quick to come as he rings in the changes, he'll need them to show a lot of patience.

The underlying fact, though is that at the moment there are no points at stake, no World Cups to be missed and no great embarrassment if it doesn't all come together in these friendlies. Come the autumn all of that will change and McCarthy will be disappointed that at this in point of time things aren't going better for the side.

Of course he will look to point out the brighter factors in each game, but in his heart he will know that, when pus comes to shove, there will have to be a fast improvement in the way the team is performing our forthcoming competitive campaign is to prove a productive one.

These friendlies have certainly afforded McCarthy a useful chance to give new players a run out and to experiment with the line ups, but he must, have hoped that the sides he has assembled would have performed with more purpose, that, they would have adapted to the shape he decided upon and the tasks he set them with greater aplomb.

There are a few factors that have influenced this but, while most of the others are minor, I still believe that the root cause of McCarthy's difficulties is his insistence on employing a system with which the personnel at his disposal are uncomfortable.

At this level of the game the adoption of a system with three central defenders demands certain things from the players involved if it is to have any realistic chance of succeeding. The players in question simply must be comfortable on the ball (possession is, after all, nine tenths of the law), they have to be able to make ground for their team with their passing rather than simply pushing it across the pitch one way and then the other, and they have to be able to give support to their midfield when there is no defending to do. It still doesn't appear that we can regularly call upon players who can live up to these criteria.

It's one thing to expect it of the players who are being allotted that role week in, week out at club level, but with the likes of Kenna, Cunningham, Daish and Keraaghan, the system is alien to them and is only posing additional problems in an already difficult situation.

Of course, as I've said, it still is early days. The time to judge the performances of the new players that McCarthy has brought in will be at the end of the summer by which time they will have had a more reasonable amount of time to adjust to the differences between club and international football.

That adjustment is tricky enough coming from the top flight of the English League, but it's important not to forget that some of these players are having to make an even greater leap than that.

On top of all of that Connolly has the added difficulty of being looked upon from the time he sets foot on Lansdowne Road for the first time as being the answer to all of our striking problems, and although he has certainly done enough to indicate a lot of promise he is still a long, long way from being the finished article.

For him, as for some of his new team mates, the road ahead may be long and hard just as it might prove to be for their manager.