AFTER A weekend of recriminations over the tactics employed against the Russians on Friday night at the Aviva Stadium and the way in which the players failed to match their opponents, Glenn Whelan seemed to stumble slightly during the past 48 hours before settling on where he reckoned the blame lies.

The Stoke City midfielder’s industry and effort has made him a favourite of Giovanni Trapattoni over the past couple of years and after appearing to suggest in a television interview on Sunday that the players are frustrated by the long-ball tactics employed by the Italian, the 26-year-old quickly fell back into line.

The Stoke midfielder now insists that Ireland’s problems on the night had more to do with poor execution by the players rather than flawed planning or any lack of artistic ambition on the part of the coach.

As a group, he insists, the team came up short in their biggest match in the current campaign so far and when it comes to individual performances, he is more than willing to hold his hand up.

“Look,” he said candidly, “I don’t need a paper or radio station to tell me if I’ve played well or badly. I know I’ve done badly on Friday but I can come through it; I know I can do a lot better than that and hopefully against Slovakia tomorrow night I can put that performance behind me.”

In the context of talk over the weekend of changes being made to the starting line-up, he maintained his place was under threat after a poor display.

However, it would be hard to imagine Whelan, who has won more caps under the current manager than any player bar captain Robbie Keane, being axed so quickly.

More plausibly, the 26-year-old is likely to be given a fair degree of responsibility for ensuring central midfield contributes a little more to proceedings in Zilina where a result, especially a victory, would help erase some very unpleasant memories from last weekend’s game.

And it is clearly to his credit that he recognises the scale of the difficulty in his department last time out although he insists that it was merely part of a wider problem on the night.

“It’s not just the wide players or midfield players,” he said when asked about Trapattoni’s suggestion that a similar tactical conundrum to Friday’s had been better addressed against Montenegro during the last campaign in part because Stephen Hunt had drifted inside to help out.

“I think it’s down to everybody in the team, defenders and strikers as well. You don’t win a game on the basis of individuals and you don’t lose one on that basis either. But I think collectively we can go out and do a lot better,” explained Whelan.

And rather than going out on Friday to hoof it long, he insisted, the Irish simply fell back on the tactic when a more controlled approach started to look beyond them against such high quality opponents as the Russians.

“On the international scene, they were probably the best team that we’ve come across, especially since I came into the side. We were disappointing Friday but I think you have to give credit to Russia too because they played really well,” said Whelan.

“And obviously it’s difficult when you’ve got five (opponents) in the middle to try and get on the ball and move it about but it is something that we wanted to do. We just couldn’t and then I think we sort of went to panic stations. But yeah, the fact that we went two nil down so early means that we did lump it a lot more to Kevin and Robbie which obviously didn’t work.”

That performance, as well as the result, he describes as a “once off” and the roughly 2,000 or so Irish fans expected to attend tonight will be hoping he’s right. At the very least, he insisted, they will give it their all as they chase a clear objective.

“Because of the result on Friday we want to stay at the top of the table and in with a shout of qualifying and if we want to do that then we have to beat Slovakia.”