KEN EARLY: Come clean Trap, time to be positive about your negativity
The Mister got out and looked around the ample car park set amidst curling service roads, motor showrooms and petrol stations. Maybe he stepped into the nearby Holiday Inn Express for a carvery and a pint. Maybe he didn’t.
Sometime around 3pm, Trapattoni sat down and maybe pulled his coat a little tighter. The Britannia has open corners that lets the wind whip across the exposed pitch and whistle through the stands. Stoke were about to play West Brom. The temperature was a couple of degrees above freezing. It was the day before his 74th birthday.
Who knows what thoughts drifted absently through the imagination of Trap as he struggled to concentrate on the scuffle taking place before him. The past is a constant companion, Platini and Boniek never far from his mind. Maybe he dreamed of the nights he marked Pele, Eusebio and Cruyff, or the Tokyo night in 1985 when Juventus beat Argentinos Juniors and Trap became the first manager to win every international club competition...
Or maybe, in defiance of all reasonable expectation, Trapattoni was deeply absorbed in Stoke 0 West Brom 0. A chilly seat at the Britannia might seem like no place for one of the most decorated men in football history to be spending the afternoon as he prepares to embark on his 75th year. That, however, would be to ignore the fact that for Trapattoni, a trip to Stoke is a kind of pilgrimage, a journey to one of the last places on earth where he can see football played the way he apparently thinks it should be played.
Stoke have 10 goals from open play all season, which is four fewer than the next-worst team in the Premier League. They have among the lowest figures in the league for possession (43%, above only Reading), pass completion (70%, above only Reading) and shots on target per game (three, above nobody).
These statistics don’t matter to their manager, Tony Pulis, because they don’t have any relevance to his vision of how football should be played. Pulis believes that it’s position, not possession, that counts. Football is a simple game which is about increasing the distance between the ball and your goal and reducing the distance between the ball and your opponent’s goal. Keep the ball in front of your team and you are unlikely to concede.
The best way to score is through a set-piece, because the opponent is powerless to stop you massing your players in their goalmouth and delivering the ball to within a couple of yards of the goal line. Stoke have more set-piece goals than any teams in the league except Manchester United and Norwich.
So far, so familiar to anyone who has watched Trapattoni’s Ireland in the last few years. Few would have realised it until recently but Trapattoni and Tony Pulis are kindred spirits.
Pulis would probably describe himself as a pragmatist, but he seems to be the opposite of that: a dreamy romantic who is in love with the idea of himself as a pragmatist, while pursuing an extreme stylistic ideology out of keeping with what actually works in today’s football.
Arsene Wenger once sniffily compared Stoke to a rugby team, and while he was probably referring to the physicality of their play (58 yellows and three reds mean they lie second in the disciplinary table, behind only Villa), the comparison also made sense in terms of the rehearsed, methodical, set-play-oriented nature of Stoke’s strategy. The Stoke fans wore the rugby label as a badge of pride, gleefully serenading Wenger with “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” when Stoke beat Arsenal 3-1 a few seasons ago.
Lately there are signs the team’s struggle to score is causing some of them to rethink. Pulis insisted on Saturday he doesn’t care if some haters in the crowd get on his back. If Stoke keep averaging three shots per game, it won’t be long before the haters are the dominant lobby.
That already seems to have happened with the Ireland football team, many of whose supporters have given up going to the matches. Trapattoni genuinely doesn’t care what the haters over here think, but does he care about his own legacy to the world of football? Yesterday he joked about all the long balls he’d seen up at Stoke — “you need an umbrella to take the ball!” But that’s exactly the football Ireland have played for five years. If you replace Kevin Doyle with Conor Sammon, it’s not because you are thinking of playing fewer long balls.
Trapattoni responds when people say he is a defensive manager, seeing “balance” where others see negativity. But there’s little balance the way his Ireland team plays. The priority is the clean sheet and goals are a bonus; we don’t need the ball as long as we don’t make a mistake. If Trap is to be judged on actions, not words, the last five years have set the seal on his legacy. Trap football is Pulis football. Time to stop arguing and be proud of what he really believes.
