Trap and the Pressing game

THE biggest surprise about Eamon Dunphy’s hatchet job on Ireland’s performance against Italy last week was that anyone was surprised.

After all, it was just more of the same from Irish football’s foremost hurler of abuse on the ditch, a man who seems incapable of mounting a perfectly reasonable argument — that Ireland’s brand of football is often far from uplifting under Giovanni Trapattoni — without expressing it in the shrill, self-righteous tones of an insufferable pub bore.

But, considering all the gaiety he brings to the nation, we wouldn’t really have it any other way. And especially not in a slow week ahead of a dead rubber game, when Dunphy’s latest descent into self-caricature was the straw which broke the camel’s back as far as Stephen Hunt was concerned.