“By 1969 the set-up had finally caught up and we had an actual manager in place as Mick Meagan became the first of his kind having stepped up from playing.

“We were still miles too late and you can’t help feeling that we’ve been catching up ever since.”

Almost 50 years ago, it was public apathy and a Dalymount Park crowd of just 17,000 for a glamour visit of Hungary that triggered Meagan’s appointment, the first Ireland manager to have autonomy of selection, who wasn’t forced to work with whatever tools an FAI committee handed him.

We have asked a lot of our managers since.

The anthology of football writing, The Aesthetics, Poetics, and Rhetoric of Soccer, attempted to sum up the load on their shoulders.

“Even when managers were given this authority, the challenge of professionalism persisted.

In addition to a catalogue of bad luck and near misses, the Irish team’s ongoing failure was due to constant issues with transport, equipment, facilities and remuneration.

The efforts of managers from Jack Carey in 1955 to Eoin Hand in 1985 to inculcate professional standards and a ‘good playing style’ can be characterised as well-meaning, belated, and doomed to limited success.

The book uses a Niall Quinn quote to encapsulate that pre-Charlton era of Irish football: “Beautiful, skilled losers”.

Questions about professionalism and playing style lingered long after Jack Charlton, exploding in the great Saipan civil war that divided the nation. Later, Giovanni Trapattoni cemented the idea that Irish players are capable only of the ‘primitive’ football Denmark’s Thomas Delaney suggested we played last Saturday.

The Irish football public may have long ago given up on beauty. But while it finally takes for granted professional standards, and expects that the bibs and balls and isotonic drinks will arrive on time, it now craves the one thing Charlton could deliver, and the one thing demanded of the modern football manager — a philosophy.

In this respect, Jack was ahead of his time, especially in his ability to encapsulate a philosophy in a catchphrase that would almost have worked as a hashtag. One of our presidential candidates is still using it, vowing to put ’em under pressure.

Jack’s philosophy wasn’t for everyone, of course, though most people warmed to the idea of Ireland as ugly winners on the international stage, or at least drawers.

Interestingly, the leading peddlers of philosophy in modern football partially base their playing styles on a game Charlton claims he invented.

As Jack once put it: “It amazes me that with many of the European teams now, there’s a terminology called ‘pressing’. We were doing that in 1986, but now it is considered a good thing in the game of football to press. The Irish were pressing teams in ’86. We invented the game.”

As apathy once more surrounds Irish football, it may be the greatest disappointment of all that Ireland appear to have abandoned that one great invention. That one aspect of the modern game that should have best suited our players; with their hearts on their sleeves and the 110% in their locker, and their willingness to run all day.

Just two years ago, Jurgen Klopp was reportedly ready to turn to the best presser in the Premier League to spearhead his philosophical revolution, before he perhaps considered other factors, such as goals, and decided against signing Shane Long.

Ireland have Long but are recently isolating him in a more passive gameplan, a “safety in numbers” approach, as Martin O’Neill described some of our play yesterday.

Acknowledging the growing restlessness, O’Neill did suggest he will urge more adventure tonight against Wales.

I do think that we can try to push out and get up the field a little bit so that the distances between the centre-back position and midfield is not that far and so getting the team further forward. But that’s sometimes easier said than done.

And it just won’t work as a hashtag.