Moving in ever decreasing circles

THERE has been much talk lately about the qualities required to be a successful Irish manager but, from my current vantage point here in grey and freezing Cardiff, not nearly enough about the importance of the new man having a decisive say in ensuring that a qualifying campaign concludes, if at all possible, in a balmy climate.

Never mind getting those tricky away games out of the road first and then hopefully finishing off with a couple of cast-iron bankers against the also-rans. That’s mere football talk that, and only of any use to anyone else if the minnows should happen to hail from somewhere a wee bit closer to the equator than Cwmbran town.

Oh yes, it’s all very well and good to talk about tactical nous, powers of motivation, vast experience and so on and so forth but, believe me, the dreaded meeja would forgive an awful lot from the man after Stan if we could just swap a few dark November days at home for some late summer sun and a pina colada or 10 somewhere warm and welcoming like, say, the paradise island of Cyprus. (I mean, what could possibly go wrong there?)

But here we are, shivering in our scarves and woolly hats, as we await a meeting with Wales in a half-empty stadium, while the Czechs are getting a nice, friendly home game against their neighbours Slovakia out of the way, before striking out tomorrow for a few days R & R and a little bit of footie in Nicosia. Nice.

Not that I’m complaining. But for the vagaries of the fixture list, it’s highly unlikely that I would ever have had to spend a year — or a day, in the purely temporal sense — in aforementioned Cwmbran town, where the Irish squad trained on Tuesday.

Now, as a seasoned traveller and a curious divil to boot, I’m always prepared to give anywhere on the face of the earth the benefit of the doubt. With the obvious exception of Kinnegad, of course. But perhaps I should not have expected too much from Cwmbran considering that, in advance of this trip, I had given it a bit of a Google and come across the following informational bombshell: “It is often joked that Cwmbran has the most roundabouts per square mile than any other town. Hence its nickname, the home of the roundabout.”

Write it down Hal, it’s a good one.

And, having sat in the passenger seat of a car while its addled driver played the wheel like a ship’s captain and made both our heads spin as we battled to find some vaguely legal way off the road and into the town’s sports centre, I can confirm that Cwmbran’s reputation as the roundabout capital of south Wales, if not the world, is well earned.

Imagine my shock then when, arriving up in Cardiff the following day, I open up the South Wales Echo to find an entire article devoted to the subject of roundabouts — no, seriously — but without so much as a single mention of Cwmbran’s legendary place in the annals of, em, roundaboutery.

Instead, I learn to my astonishment that there is a calendar called the ‘Best of British Roundabouts’ and that a “much loved” specimen in a place called Splott, “proudly holds the November spot” in the 2008 edition.

Bear with me, it gets worse.

Creator of the calendar and President of the UK Roundabout Appreciation Society (UKRAS), Kevin Beresford claims the colourful roundabout is like nothing he’s ever seen before. Kevin says: “It’s called the Magic Roundabout and it is pretty magic. Traffic islands don’t come much better.

So Athens has the Acropolis, Cairo has the Pyramids and Splott has a roundabout. I guess these are what you call the breaks. Now, I wouldn’t like you to glean from all this that today’s match — you know, Ireland v Wales at the Millennium stadium? — has not quite gripped the imagination, even if there is a definite temptation to view our Euro campaign under Stan as having gone around in circles and ended up back where it began, just like — well, you guessed it.

But that would be a cynical view and unworthy of a serious professional sportswriter such as myself. All I would say to the next man is that, come the final qualifying game of the World Cup campaign, please try to ensure that we finish up on a Mediterranean island rather than a traffic island.