Trap’s tough task starting Ireland’s cultural revolution
Why do you think most planes drop from the sky, plough into a hillside or land on the runway upside down? It’s the pilots, stupid.
Up until a few years ago, one Korean airline’s record was scarred with more crashes than Lewis Hamilton’s. They couldn’t figure out why exactly they occurred despite ripping out engines, checking every mechanism turned the way it should, changing bulbs and recalibrating meters.
Then, crucially, they listened back to a black box recording of the conversation within the cockpit taped just moments before one particular jumbo went through a mountain for a shortcut.
As the passenger jet careered towards this inevitable collision, the second officer was heard quietly saying to the captain: “Sometimes it is not so easy at this airport to see the runway in inclement weather.”
Obviously, he should have been roaring, wild-eyed and spittle-lipped: “Horse, look out for the f**king mountain!”
It turned out that in many cases in this airline’s streak of disasters and near misses, the co-pilot was actually well aware of his boss’s crucial piloting mistake but didn’t — as he was supposed to do, clearly — speak up. Apparently, in the strictly hierarchical society of South Korea, this was no easy task.
It’s just their culture — and something that had to change in order to succeed in this particular endeavour.
I have to say I thought of Korean co-pilots and a nation’s hardwiring when Giovanni Trapattoni opened his first press conference this week with a seeming non-sequitur reference to Irish players’ drinking.
Liam Mackey wrote in this newspaper of how Trap volunteered information about a team meeting he called before the recent friendly against Croatia, in which he ‘asked’ the squad to be more responsible about their alcohol consumption.
This pow-wow was prompted, the Italian added, by newspaper reports of a late-night row involving players and a member of the backroom staff at the team hotel in Portmarnock following the Carling Nations Cup game against Scotland back in May.
“Up until that point, I had trust in my players but when I read about this once, twice or three times I said, ‘uh oh be careful’ because never in Italy or Germany have I had this situation,” said Trapattoni.
“I told the players ‘ask me and I can allow you out and at 11 o’clock you can come back. We can look each other in the eye and speak openly, we don’t need any sneakiness’. They don’t need to hide and go behind anyone’s back.”
Isn’t sneaking out to the pub or down to the residents bar while Trap is upstairs in his slippers just what we expect from young Irish men? Isn’t this us flying silently, upside-down through the Korean night?
Perhaps. But presumably Trap thinks he needs to change our culture if we’re ever to land safely in Poland and Ukraine next summer.
It’s clear to me though, that it’s our eating habits about which he should be more worried. Though we know he thinks — like an old wife — that mushrooms are the work of the devil, I’m not sure he’s on the cutting edge of carb-loading, super-fruit, nutritional science.
If, in north Dublin this week, he was watching Sky Sports’ 30-minute study of our rugby skipper Brian O’Driscoll, he’d have spat his boiled chicken across the room in surprise.
“This is going to be an obnoxious amount of food,” BOD said to the camera as he hopped into his SUV and turned it in the direction of his local branch of a well-known chicken restaurant. And my god, it was obnoxious.
Drico seems to have done more to deplete the chicken population than the pillow-manufacturing industry. As the World Cup dawns however, his fighting weight is lower than ever, I read elsewhere this week; so piri-piri must not be so bad, kids.
Just 24 hours later, should Trap have been in the same seat to watch a little prime-time TV, let’s hope, for the sake of the lads in Malahide, that he didn’t catch Conor Niland’s collapse against world number one Novak Djokovic. I did. And like millions, couldn’t believe that the Limerick man’s biggest day — the highlight of his career — ended because of what he explained was dodgy ‘pork or salad’ from an unnamed New York restaurant. For our rugby side’s sake, I hope there’s not a branch of that certain spicy chicken place in New Zealand.
The following day when our other tennis hope (Irish grand slam participants are like buses) at the US Open Louk Sorensen pulled out in the fourth set of his Flushing Meadows showdown, John McEnroe in the TV commentary box had one explanation: the two Irish guys drank too much beer. Trap has his work cut out to change that particular perception, if not the culture.
*Bear with me, I’m going to try to tie this in with Irish sport’s culture. Let’s see if I manage it.
*Adrian@thescore.ie *Twitter: @adrianrussell
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