A league of their own

When Giovanni Trapattoni said, on more than one occasion, that Ireland was a country without a league, it prompted an apoplectic backlash from players, managers and supporters in the domestic game.

You could understand the reasons for their dismay — it was a highly inappropriate and, for a foreign audience certainly, misleading choice of words — but that didn’t mean you had to condone the added spin all too eagerly supplied by his critics, which sought to portray the Italian as being so out of touch with reality that he wasn’t even aware there was senior competitive football being played in the country whose national team he managed.

The truth is that everyone really knew what Trapattoni was getting at: that the Airtricity League isn’t on a par with the elite leagues across Europe from which the continent’s big international guns draw their playing firepower.