It could all go horribly right
Brian Kerr predicted Irish legs would be run into the ground come June: “It troubles me to see us play such reactive football at home and against a team that would struggle to live with Croatia, never mind Italy or Spain.”
John Giles accused the manager of treating talent like a nuisance by leaving James McCarthy, Seamus Coleman and Shane Duffy on the bench and giving James McClean only the briefest of cameos. Trapattoni’s refusal to experiment with his system and the players who helped Ireland qualify was “foolish and stubborn”, said Giles.
But, as ever, it was Eamon Dunphy who let loose the heaviest barrage. Trapattoni is “amateurish and almost arrogant”, seems to think he is “managing Mongolia” and is perpetrating “grotesque mistakes”. The way he has the team playing is a “disgrace”. And, stirring up echoes of his infamous on-air eruption after Ireland played Egypt in Italia ’90, he concluded: “If we play like this [at the Euros] we will be humiliated.”
Well, the old qualification honeymoon didn’t last long, did it? Then again, there’s nothing that was said by the critics this week that hasn’t been said before of Trapattoni’s Ireland.
But do you think Trap is listening? Actually, I know for a fact the manager is aware of what’s said and written about him in the Irish media because he gets the gist of it translated for him (an unusual case in point being his public response yesterday to coverage of his press conference on Thursday). But that’s not to say he pays it any heed.
I’ve noted here many times before that the similarities with Jack Charlton’s management of Ireland are striking. Like Big Jack, Trap has devised a low-risk system of playing which he believes is the one best suited to what he perceives to be the strengths and – one suspects, rather more to the point — the limitations, of the Irish team. Jack used to say that since we couldn’t play them at their game, we’d make them play us at ours. Trapattoni’s “show is show, result is result” pretty much amounts to the same thing.
One difference between them, however, is that you could get a rise out of Jack, as Eamon Dunphy well knows, the tone having been set at Charlton’s very first press conference as Ireland boss when, at one memorable point, he invited the Dunph to step outside.
We know from his record that Trapattoni too is capable of blowing up but, in truth, we haven’t ever seen him come close to going postal since taking charge of Ireland.
In part, I suspect, that’s because he finds even the piranhas in the small pool easy to ignore, after all those years of swimming in the shark-infested waters of the Italian game.
But, more importantly, I would suggest it’s because Trapattoni, again drawing on all those years of competing at the highest levels in world football, genuinely believes he is right and everyone else is wrong. And, if it’s just about the facts, ma’am, he only has to point out that, when he came along, the Irish team was on its knees, the country had gone 10 years without qualifying for anything and, now, with a couple of months to go to the European finals, his side are on an unbeaten run.
But how much better could Ireland actually be? Given we don’t draw our players from the best teams in the Premier League, let alone in Europe, there’s a compelling case for saying Trapattoni’s critics are as guilty of overstating the possibilities as he is of underestimating them.
No-one questions the courage, heart and prodigious work rate of the current team, but I’m pretty sure, with an imaginative use of all the player options available, Ireland could enjoy success playing at least a moderately more expansive and attacking game than Trapattoni’s rigid system generally allows. After all, we’ve seen glimpses of it in various matches, especially away from home, and, obviously, we saw a sustained display of it three years ago Paris.
But the irony of Paris – and don’t think for one moment that it’s lost on Trapattoni – is that a display which is rightly held up to be one Ireland’s best in many years and, furthermore, one which showed what the players could do if the managerial shackles were loosened, actually ended in heroic failure, with what turned out to be a rapidly disintegrating French side going off to the World Cup instead of Ireland.
And so it remains Trap’s way or the highway. The debate will rage on but it won’t make a blind bit of difference to how the manager sets his stall out in the summer. And, yes, given how little of the ball Ireland see in so many games, there’s a real danger it could all go horribly wrong against the likes of Spain and Italy.
And, not to put a hex on anything, but I would also note Ireland have never lost an opening game at a tournament – and there is always a first time for everything.
Alternatively the Trap way could yet prove to be the right way – as it has done so far in terms of ending that long, long wait for a place at Europe’s top table. To paraphrase Jack again: it hasn’t been pretty but it has been effective.
So, yes, it could all go horribly wrong. But who’s to say it won’t all go horribly right?
