They call it The Impossible Job.
Three Lions on their chest, the burden of a nation’s hopes on their shoulders.
Yet look closer. It isn’t the England job that is unworkable but the Ireland one.
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No matter who is in charge, Stephen Kenny or Giovanni Trapattoni, romantic visionary or cold hearted mercenary, an Ireland manager has to contend with both high expectations and a shallow player pool.
We could pick any weekend to make our point but we’ll settle for the most recent one. Last Saturday and Sunday, just two Irish players, Evan Ferguson and Nathan Collins, started a Premier League fixture.
That’s two out of a possible 220 and that's before we mention the absence of any Irish player from the starting X1s of a Bundesliga, Serie A, La Liga or Ligue 1 team.
In contrast, Gareth Southgate was able to cast his eye over 11 English players at Manchester City’s Premier League coronation against Chelsea.
Impressed yet? Well, wait. Only two of the 11 English participants in City’s 1-0 win over Chelsea were called up to Southgate’s most recent 20-man squad.
And out of those 20 players, 19 are Premier League employees, the exception being Borussia Dortmund’s Jude Bellingham, regarded as the Bundesliga’s most exciting prospect.
So you get the picture.
Yes, his job is difficult, the demands excessive. But once there is talent available to the manager, there is the possibility of something special happening.
And so we move on to Kenny.
He’ll say he also has the tools at his disposal to write his own miracle and that’s part of his appeal, his reluctance to talk the team down the way Trapattoni or Martin O’Neill did.
The truth is Kenny can sound a bit populist at times, this belief that Ireland can match any visiting side on technical terms, an impressive manifesto on paper, not necessarily one backed up by actions.
But at least he has a vision and it is evident the majority of Irish fans share it because in Kenny they see a manager who is prepared to risk results, and by extension his reputation, on a new system of play and a new batch of players.
There is a lot to like about an Irish squad containing Ferguson, who is 18, Collins who is 22, Gavin Bazunu, 21, Andrew Omobamideli, 20, Tom Cannon, 20, Troy Parrott, 21, Michael Obafemi and Adam Idah, both 22.
The flip side to all this experimentation is that these players are learning on the job, and that inexperienced footballers are more prone to inconsistency than streetwise ones.
Still, by changing a culture and blooding in a younger generation, Kenny is building something for tomorrow. And this is where the job is impossible.
People want change but also results; and in sport long-term strategy is rarely married to short-term needs.
So much so that should Ireland lose to Greece next month, should they bomb out of contention for next year’s Euros, then the chances of Kenny being around to reap what he has sown will be greatly reduced.
We don’t like to admit it about ourselves but expectations have been unrealistically high in Irish football since the Charlton era, not just because of those unforgettable days and nights in Stuttgart, Genoa and Giants Stadium, but also because of another, largely unremarked upon sequence of results.
From November 1988 through to October 1993, Ireland didn’t lose a single World Cup or European championship qualifier. That’s what prompted the chant, ‘you’ll never beat the Irish’.
Because for five years and 22 competitive qualifiers no one did. Not Spain in their visit to Lansdowne in 1989 or when Ireland travelled to Seville three years later; not the European champion Danes, not England, Poland or Turkey.
And in a sense that memory has never faded, that nostalgic yearning for the past.
Meanwhile it has been a tough watch for so long. Under Trapattoni and O’Neill there were some memorable results, Trap getting draws away to Italy, France, Russia, Slovakia, Bulgaria; O’Neill securing wins over Germany, Italy, Bosnia, Austria, Wales.
Yet each victory was a grind. You got as much joy out of watching Ireland play then as you did out of a visit to the dentist, the one difference being that no one at the Aviva was polite enough to place you under anaesthetic.
That’s essentially why Kenny got the job because there was something different about the way his teams played and more importantly the way he spoke.
Not for him a lament for the past, for a ‘27-year-old Robbie Keane’, a youthful Paolo Rossi or ‘some of the other famous players I used to manage’.
Instead he told the fan base what they wanted to hear. That we could match the French by playing the game on our terms, that we could have a glorious future not just a past.
But can we?
Well, two goals from last weekend showed us what is happening underneath the surface.
The first was from the Irish U17 team in their European championship finals game against Wales, when a rat-a-tat-tat sequence of one-touch passes saw them move the play from their goalkeeper to the opposition net within seven seconds.
It’s worth checking that goal out on YouTube and once you’ve finished doing that then click on Dayle Rooney’s effort for Drogheda United against Shamrock Rovers with your next site visit.
Again, this was build-from-the-back stuff, an eight-pass move from a team who are eighth, yes eighth, in the League of Ireland's Premier Division.
“We’re playing a different way now in this country than we used to,” said the Drogheda manager, Kevin Doherty.
“I know the FAI gets bashed for a lot of the stuff (that John Delaney did when he was in charge) but at grassroots level, they’ve educated the coaches really well.
"Our kids are getting coached way better than I was when I was a schoolboy player. There is a revolution going on. We are seeing benefits now but I’m telling you we’ll see more in the future. We just have to wait for the kids to come through. We just have to be patient.”
Are Ireland’s fans and FAI board members prepared to show that patience, to put up with yet more inconsistency from Kenny's Kids in the hope of a brighter tomorrow?
So far they have been but the underlying truth is some influential figures within Irish football want instant results, mixed with entertainment, from a set of players who, for the most part, play outside the Premier League.
And once you place those demands on any manager, whether it is Kenny or whoever comes after him, you’re asking for the impossible.
Like it or not, Southgate has an easier job spec.
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