System failure, but Trap won’t change philosophy
Is Trapattoni a footballing fossil whose prehistoric tactics are holding back a gifted generation of Irish players? Or is he a perceptive, principled pragmatist who, if he hasn’t quite made a silk purse of a sow’s ear, has at least managed to stretch the ear into a serviceable if unappealing shopping bag?
After the chaos of Steve Staunton’s regime we needed clarity, and Trapattoni provided that.
Staunton had no footballing principles beyond some vague aphorisms learned at Liverpool about passing and moving.
There was no consistency of tactics or selection, and the team blundered from game to game making it up as they went along.
Trap, by contrast, has distilled the experience of more than 50 years in the game into a simple set of principles that he sticks with under every circumstance. He knows what he values — experience, personality, organisation, discipline — and he selects the players he thinks will deliver what he is looking for.
Whether or not people agree with the decisions he makes, everybody can see the internal logic.
Making sure that everybody knows what is expected of them is vital to establishing a sense of collective purpose, and in that sense Trapattoni has succeeded.
However, it is reasonable to wonder whether too much of Trapattoni’s belief system may have crystallised before the last decade or so, in which the game has changed in certain obvious ways.
The clearest example is the shift towards formations that use three central midfielders and one striker. That was evident at the World Cup, where most teams played 4-2-3-1.
Unlike most international teams, Ireland persist with two strikers and two central midfielders. In doing so we keep running up against the same problems that have caused most managers to abandon 4-4-2.
The most basic of these is the difficulty of keeping possession when your opponents outnumber you in midfield.
Liam Lawrence noted last week that even in the Championship, his Portsmouth team had consistently been beaten by inferior sides who used an extra man in midfield. The obvious comparison was with Ireland’s defeat by Russia, when their three-man midfield ran rings around our two.
If Trapattoni remained faithful to the system after that painful experience, there is no chance that a win against Macedonia, no matter how unimpressive, will prompt him to rethink.
Yet the sight of such a weak visiting team dominating possession in Dublin is a warning sign that he should be learning from. He has to do something about Ireland’s inability to keep possession and play the game in the opponent’s half.
The match against Uruguay gives him the opportunity to look at one possible solution. The emergence of James McCarthy fills a gap in the squad that has existed since Stephen Ireland’s departure: a creative player with the ability to link midfield and attack.
Using McCarthy as the most advanced player in a three-man central midfield would make it easier for Ireland to keep the ball, because besides being a good passer himself, McCarthy understands how to support the man in possession. If you watch him playing for Wigan you can see that one of his best qualities is the way he is always in position to receive the ball.
An extra man in the centre would also reduce the defensive burden on the wingers, giving them more freedom to make things happen in attack.
The only reason we might have the chance to see how this formation works in practice is that Robbie Keane has been allowed to leave the squad to concentrate on recovering full fitness with West Ham.
In one sense Keane is the Ireland squad’s greatest asset, the only man who can be relied on to score. He has scored as many international goals as the rest of them put together. Yet might part of the reason for that be that with Keane in the side, Ireland cannot play the kind of football that would enable other players to work out regular scoring chances?
Keane can’t play as a lone centre-forward, but he doesn’t work particularly well as a link player either — his improvisational style wrong-foots his team-mates as often as his opponents.
He is a pure finisher and these players are increasingly rare in the modern game.
As long as Keane is in the team, Ireland will play 4-4-2 and as long as that happens we will not be able to keep the ball. But Trap has proved he doesn’t care about possession. You could see that as he whistled to Kieron Westwood and ordered him to boot yet another clearance down the pitch. When Keith Fahey came into the middle of midfield and kept possession against Norway, his reward was to be dropped from the next squad.
If Trap tries a system with a single striker and a three-man midfield, the match against Uruguay could offer us a glimpse of the future. But assuming Robbie is fit and ready for the rest of the campaign, it will be just a glimpse, and the game against Macedonia on June will see a return to the same philosophy that has never quite worked and perhaps never quite will.
