Will Trap finally pay for his arrogance?
Four of the last five competitive games under Giovanni Trapattoni have produced, one, the worst ever performance by any team at a European Championship and, two, the biggest ever home defeat in the country’s history.
In the other match, Kazakhstan were mere minutes away from becoming the lowest ranked team to ever defeat Ireland.
Even though Trapattoni eventually got out of jail that night, it is a sign of how bad things have got that there is a very evident fear we may well see a repeat situation, or even worse, in the Faroe Islands tonight.
Should that happen, though, the exact circumstances would provide an oddly appropriate context for what would be the undeniable end of the Trapattoni era. If the Kazakhstan match is anything to go by, we should see a depressingly familiar pattern: a group of increasingly aggravated players who no longer believe in the manager attempting to implement a system not suited to play the specific opposition.
And this, really, is the key point.
Whereas Trapattoni used to be an Ireland manager who pragmatically but successfully played the percentages, he has very suddenly become one who is actually decreasing the team’s chances of getting results.
This is why the arguments about the undeniable quality of Croatia, Spain, Italy and Germany don’t really wash when it comes to defending a drastically poor series of performances.
It wasn’t that Ireland lost to any of these teams, which was always acceptable. It was, as John O’Shea said, how they lost.
The Germany game distilled the problems with one side of the team: the defence. As exceptional as the quality of their goals were, they were given an embarrassing amount of time and space to execute them. The illusion of this Ireland team’s supposed main strength, their solidity, has evaporated once and for all.
Tonight’s game, then, looks highly likely to illustrate the problems with the other end of the team: the attack. Due to Trapattoni’s troubling lack of belief in a group of largely Premier League players to attempt anything other than the most reductive style, there is a painful lack of invention.
All added up, you don’t exactly have a team built to nick results anymore.
There are a number of reasons for that. The biggest, though, is undoubtedly the fact Trap has lost much of the dressing room. Despite Robbie Keane’s inevitable impassioned defence of the manager yesterday, there are simply too many stories to the contrary. A number of players are diplomatic in public but perplexed in private.
While Trapattoni’s almost insulting lack of faith in them is one significant factor in that, another is the series of bizarre and often illogical choices.
Friday provided a perfect illustration. Whatever about the merits of either decision, what kind of thought process leads Trapattoni to think, in the space of just four months, that Stephen Kelly is good enough to be picked ahead of Seamus Coleman for the Euro 2012 squad but then not good enough to start ahead of him against one of that competition’s best teams? Yet, as irritation with the inconsistency of such decisions grows, so too does the apparent arrogance of Trapattoni himself.
On Friday, he angrily told one group of journalists “you have no idea about international football”.
Trapattoni himself apparently knows enough, that, by Sunday, he still hadn’t asked the Faroes’ last manager, Brian Kerr, absolutely anything about their team.
Such single-mindedness fits an overall pattern. Trapattoni still retains this outdated belief he has simply achieved too much to be criticised in any way by a country that has achieved so little. The irony, of course, is if he was still the same manager who achieved all that, he wouldn’t be managing Ireland.
It can’t be denied that, from the first few years of his reign: such assurance helped mend a team and make history in the right way: a first qualification in 10 years.
That team requires change now though. So far, there has been absolutely no evidence Trapattoni is equipped to oversee it.
Instead, the hope is that he doesn’t see another historically bad result tonight. That’s what it’s come to.
