ABOUT THE Irish soccer team only two things are certain. We have too many full backs. We have too many experts. If we could trade in either surplus for a good striker and a central defence perhaps the skies would be blue again.

The glut of full backs is something which Mick McCarthy will have to live with. The legion of experts whose number has grown in inverse proportion to the ever shrinking greatest fans in the world" may represent a more worrying threat. Fattened on success and good times there is an unhealthy clamour abroad for something to be done".

There is a seductive, easy logic to it all. The team can't just have all gone bad. If they have, somebody must be to blame. Prod Mick McCarthy until he walks the plank and everything will be fine.

Truth is that if Mick McCarthy has made mistakes (what manager doesn't) he has done so with probably the weakest pool of players to represent Ireland since the early 70s.

Look back at the snap shots.

For instance, when Ireland embarked on their campaign to qualify for the 1978 World Cup they did so with a team which included David O'Leary, Gerry Daly, Johnny Giles, Liam Brady, Steve Heighway, Don Givens, Frank Stapleton, Jimmy Holmes and Mick Martin. To win just one game of four was real under achievement.

For the 1982 campaign, the panel was backboned by the likes of Lawrenson, Houghton, Daly, Brady, Stapleton, Heighway, O'Leary, Givens, Moran. Close, but no cigar.

When Jack Charlton selected his first competitive team to play against Belgium in a European Championship qualifier against Belgium in September 1986 he had Bonner, Langan, Moran, Lawrenson, Hughton, Houghton, McGrath, Brady, Galvin, Stapleton and Aldridge, young and strong and on the pitch. Just to underline the luxury, Ronnie Whelan and Jim Beglin came on as substitutes and Kevin Sheedy and the declining Gerry Daly didn't play. How many of the our current Irish squad would have forced their way into that side?

It is time surely to examine the reality of the situation which Mick McCarthy finds himself in. The Irish team hasn't regressed to that time which is referred tremblingly to as the Eoin Hand era in much the same tones as old timers used to mutter about the black and tans.

Hand managed a high quality team to a series of narrow failures.

Mick Mc Carthy manages a squad in transition. Our pool of players is too small to make that transition smooth. McCarthy picks from a pool of about 35 players, most of whom aren't of international standard. Of those who have attained that standard or aspire to it, half a dozen or so are the wrong side of 30, some have just gone stale and the others haven't been granted the time to develop fully.

There is loose, saloonbar talk (prompted by the FAI's shabby treatment of McCarthy in giving him such a short contract and by his team's insipid performance in Skopje) which suggests that as soon as the current campaign is over, McCarthy should be shunted on and one of the long queue of top quality managers bursting to take over the Irish team given the job.

Time to wake up and smell the bullshit. There is no queue. There are no players. Not yet. If McCarthy is to stick to his reasonable aspiration of only picking players for Ireland who are playing first team football at their clubs, he will scarcely be able to muster a side next week.

Having being forced to cope with the suspensions of two first choice midfielders, McCarthy needed further depictions like a hole in the head. On Wednesday, he heard the wind whistle through his skull. Three players dropped out of his squad, two of them, Curtis Fleming and Alan Moore from relegation spooked Middlesborough, were expendable at a pinch, but the most serious parachutist was Keith O'Neill, whose absence severely depletes the manager's attacking options on a hazardous away assignment.

O'Neill, a wide player making the transition late in the season to a more central striking role, plays at a level below Premiership in a midtable Norwich side. He is 21 years old and has never played the full 90 minutes in a competitive international game. In three years he might be a great player. This week the apprentice's absence shouldn't be critical, but it is.

McCarthy is left with a squad of 20. None of his other strikers are automatic first choices at their clubs. Of his midfielders, one (Millwall's Dave Savage) plays two levels below the Premiership, another (Mark Kennedy, possibly the most promising of the bunch) hardly plays at all despite a glimpse of European action this week, and two (Ray Houghton and Andy Townsend) are winding down their careers and recovering from knocks and injuries.

With the exception of the fresh faced and inexperienced teenage giant, Richard Dunne, most of the selected defenders could probably do with a few hours on a therapist's couch rather than 90 tricky minutes on a pitch in Bucharest.

Gary Breen and Ian Harte aren't playing first team football. Ditto Denis Irwin, whose form has been on a slight dip this season. He has failed to make the last couple of Manchester United sides. Gary Kelly is struggling to locate the player he seemed to be two years ago. Terry Phelan's traumas with Chelsea, Everton and Ireland are well documented. Kenny Cunningham and Jeff Kenna are playing regularly and by virtue of that alone are almost automatic selections.

Defence, traditionally a strong point in the days when we had so many classy centre halves that we could afford to ignore David O'Leary and play Paul McGrath in midfield, is a hugely worrying weakness. Ireland have a plethora of moderate full backs waiting in line for an injury crisis (take your numbers and wait please Lee Carsley and Steve Carr), but near the spine, the team is in difficulty.

Proponents of a reversion to good old 4-4-2 fail to point out where the two central defenders will come from. Until such time as they emerge, McCarthy will probably make a virtue of necessity and play full backs in the back three and full backs as wing backs.

Paul McGrath, troubled and old, still looks like Mick McCarthy's best defensive option, but the difficulties which kept him away from Macedonia will probably keep him out of a green jersey forever. At 37, he no longer has the pace for anything but keeping house in a three at the back system.

Other players haven't made the sort of progress which might have been hoped for. Phil Babb's decline since his competitive international debut shackling Roberto Baggio in Giants Stadium has been so precipitous that this week the absence through injury of Steve Harkness and the ineligibility of Bjorn Tore Kvarme was insufficient to get him a Liverpool shirt. McCarthy's preliminary squad for Romania included a promising 17 year old from Everton ahead of Babb. His call up last night came as a big surprise against that backdrop.

Gary Breen, the most capped player of McCarthy's reign - he shares the distinction with Alan McLoughlin - looks as if his confidence is shot through just now. A turbulent year or so for him has seen him progress from Peterborough United to Birmingham City to Premiership football with a struggling Coventry side, just as his international care began to blossom.

Long term, he will probably cope with the acceleration but just now he is a player in need of a rest. His initial impact with Coventry City was positive, showing up as a fast and skilful player will ing to play the ball out of defence.

The month of March was an unmitigated disaster for the player, however, with Coventry letting in a total of to goals while losing three key games to Manchester United, Newcastle and West Ham. In the second half of the West Ham game, Coventry switched to a 4-4-2 formation and Breen found him so If out in one of the fall back positions. Then Breen travelled to Macedonia where things didn't get much better. Gordon Strachan decided that the rough end of a relegation scrap was no place for a young player to learn the perils of Premiership defending. Breen was dropped for the game with Liverpool on April 6th and hasn't played since.

McCarthy's other options for the middle of the defence stretch only as far as Liam Daish (injured) and Alan Kernaghan. Enough said.

The midfield on Wednesday will probably be driven by Roy Keane, Ray Houghton and Andy Townsend. It would be pleasant if Keane could he let loose to drive at the Romanian defence, but expediency will probably ensure that he sweeps up in front of his defence all afternoon.

Houghton's pass and go game will provide some welcome invention and, more critically, his abrasive personality should inject some life into a team which has looked weary and passionless in the past two games. Townsend, another of the over 30s, will need a huge improvement on his Skopje performance if Ireland are to survive.

McCarthy, who introduced his 3-5-2 system with the intention of having Mark Kennedy as the pivotal player behind the front two, must despair at the lack of progress his former Millwall protege has made. A change of club and some first team football are urgently needed if Kennedy is to develop as a key influence.

The picture at the business end of the operation is scarcely any more encouraging. Ireland are toothless and under the circumstances McCarthy may be tempted to revisit the 1994 World Cup formation of 4-5-1 if he can trust one of his players to do an adequate running and holding job.

After O'Neill of the remaining available strikers, David Connolly is still a Division Two player with bundles of talent but with a progress rate hampered by injuries and contractual difficulties at Watford. He has played a dozen games this season (scoring twice) and seems to have mislaid the confidence of a year ago when he broke through to the Watford first team and scored two hat tricks in close proximity at the end of the season.

Jon Goodman has two international appearances under his belt and has been off the pace (and the pitch) at Wimbledon for most of this season. David Kelly has dropped out of recent Sunderland teams, while Niall has just about made his way back in after a heroic struggle to overcome his second knee ligament injury in four years. That leaves Tony Cascarino an honest footballer who has his good days and his bad days.

To assess the depth of the team's plight it is interesting to speculate on what panel McCarthy would bring to France next summer should we qualify. By then Irwin, Phelan, Townsend, Houghton, David Kelly, Cascarino and McGrath will all be well on the far side of 30. That leaves only Staunton, Keane and McAteer as mature international players and, after his exploits in Skopje, perhaps the last named of that trio deserves only to have the term applied loosely.

Beyond McCarthy's problems, which mean inevitably that some square pegs must be slotted into round holes for the time being, what he will most be looking for this week is some leadership on the pitch. McCarthy's team has become infected by meckness, a deficiency not without its ironies for a man whose own playing days were as rough on his larynx as on his hamstring.

To escape from Romania on Wednesday with a point would be a remarkable achievement and a boost in confidence for a team which finds itself in a struggle for second place. The hosts have an unblemished record in five group gales, scoring 19 goals and conceding none.

April has been a bad month and now, at the butt end of the long English season, heroics of an unlikely dimension are called for from a panel which looks ill equipped for the task. Never has it been a better time to travel in hope than to arrive.