Welcome to the year of the Trap
In case you hadn’t noticed, that would be the World Cup in which Irish involvement was conspicuously absent, owing to a certain incident of hand to ball by a pesky Frenchman coupled with a frankly chronic failure of imagination on the part of the blazers which meant that poor Paddy couldn’t even go to the party as a ‘plus-one’.
Aye, and let’s not spoil the fantasy by mentioning all those points dropped in qualifying or the host of chances squandered in the Stade de France.
No, much better to recall this time last year when nursing a still raw sense of grievance kept us going through the first cold snap of 2010, confirming that, whatever about the old footy, we’ll always be global contenders when it comes to wailing on behalf of victims’ rights, notably our own.
And yet, come the summer’s festival of football in a faraway land, we still pressed our little noses to the TV screens in our hundreds and thousands, pretty conclusive proof, I would say, that when push comes to shove the world game will always put the club version back in its box.
Then again, I see where, in these pages just the other day, my friend and colleague Mr Allan Prosser was celebrating the fact that there would be no international tournament this summer to foul up his football year.
Normally, I would take serious issue with this point of view but, in mitigation, I fully recognise that Allan is a proud Englishman and therefore entitled to view any World Cup or European Championship finals with deep-rooted fear and loathing.
Come to think of it, that’s one of the big differences between us and them: your Irish supporter has learned to bemoan the fact that his country doesn’t qualify for finals whereas your English supporter has learned to bemoan the fact that his country does.
I wonder would they mind swapping roles with us by the end of 2011?
With this summer’s World Cup, we marked the point where Irish football was officially absent from the two biggest international stages for the longest period of time since Jack Charlton (and, okay then, Gary Mackay) first helped us break our duck by qualifying for Euro 88.
Two years after that, we were at the World Cup in Italy, four after that at USA 94 and then eight more years elapsed before Mick McCarthy took his side — or most of it, at any rate — to the world finals in Japan and South Korea.
Now, it’s already another eight years and counting, and should these coming 12 months not conclude with qualification for the European finals in Poland And Ukraine in 2012, Irish football will by then have racked up an imperfect 10 as international outcasts.
So the hope, if not necessarily the expectation — as ‘Woy’ might say — must be that this year Giovanni Trapattoni finds a way not only to make up lost ground in the current qualifying campaign but, if it ain’t too much to ask, to spare the nation the dubious pleasures of yet another November night of sudden death play-off drama.
It has to be acknowledged that the year just ended was not exactly full of promising portents, what with a drubbing by any other name at home to Russia, failure to maximise advantage in Slovakia, setbacks in friendly games and the ongoing and very worrying reality that a host of established Irish players are currently either persona non grata or reduced to playing bit-parts for their clubs.
And the manager himself has hardly helped to lift glum spirits, revealing feet of clay in his bizarre admission that he’d seen the Russian invasion coming at the Aviva and then stubbornly wasting a perfectly good opportunity to give one of our genuinely bright prospects, Everton’s Seamus Coleman, an educational workout in an otherwise largely meaningless friendly against Norway.
Yet, New Year’s Day is meant to be a day of resolution as well as reflection, in which positive glass-half-full spirit, we feel duty bound to point out that Ireland are still nicely placed just two points behind Russia; that Slovakia have already shown that Dick Advocaat’s team are by no means invincible in Moscow; and that with the Russians still to play tricky Armenia away, Ireland’s hard-earned win in Yerevan — the undoubted high point of the team’s year — could yet prove to be worth its weight in points.
The rumblings of discontent notwithstanding, it would be foolish to deny that Giovanni Trapattoni has brought a lot of good things to the international set-up in his time in charge.
But, crucially, it’s what he and his players bring to bear over the coming year which will decide if his management of Ireland is going to be forever defined by the heroic failure of one mad night Paris.
Like our long suffering neighbours, we can worry about the finals if and when we ever get there. From the vantage point of a new day on a new year, the dream of earning an invite to the party will do for now.
Which is why, for good or ill, 2011 is destined to be the year of the Trap.
