Walters gets rub of the green
With Kevin Doyle suspended, Shane Long injured and doubts over the availability of Leon Best for a combination of reasons, Giovanni Trapattoni will be looking to either the Stoke City striker or Simon Cox to partner Robbie Keane in Tallinn on Friday.
Second-guessing the Ireland manager is a fool’s errand — understanding him has been hard enough — but the Italian talked positively and at length about Walters at yesterday’s briefing, which makes a change for a player that had become accustomed to the international wilderness.
Even his debut against Norway 12 months ago failed to ignite his Ireland career. Only two caps have been earned since, the latter an impressive cameo against Armenia in Dublin last month in his first competitive appearance, and he admits it has been a source of annoyance.
“I’ve had a bad time of things,” he admitted last night. “I’ve been desperate to join up at times and then go and get bad injuries and have to pull out. It’s so frustrating because you are trying to push on and get more minutes.”
His future in green never looked more uncertain than last May when he was one of a handful of players — the others being James McCarthy, Marc Wilson and Anthony Stokes — whose absence from the game against Northern Ireland was the source of some confusion.
Trapattoni railed at the no-shows at the time but Walters’ alibi wasn’t a bad one. Having played with a fractured shoulder since the New Year, he took a well-earned break to heal a bone that was chipping away and requiring injections every week.
Another Irish mystery has yet to be solved as Walters still doesn’t know what happened an U21 career that began with two goals in the 2-0 win over Switzerland in 2003 and ended the same night after Don Givens failed to call him back.
“That was a strange one,’’ Walters, who was at Hull City at the time, said. ‘‘I honestly don’t know what happened with that. I have asked so many people and you would have to ask somebody else apart from me. I played one game and scored twice and my wife was pregnant at the time.
“The (Hull City) lads were off to Marbella because they got promoted (from the Third Division). I said look, ‘I don’t want to go because I’ve got an U21 match’ and stayed back with my wife.’’
As a result it appears Givens deemed that Walters was unfit to be selected given that he had not been training due to the fact his teammates were in Marbella.
He wasn’t the first or last young Irishman to fall out with Givens, but there are no such issues at the Britannia Stadium where he is a regular under Tony Pulis despite bigger money being spent on Peter Crouch and Kenwyne Jones.
He has scored five times in 19 appearances this season — three of them from the penalty spot — and has shown a useful versatility that saw him pop up at various points across the midfield during the defeat to Bolton last weekend.
As a striker, he has been used as a more deep-lying influence behind a main target man and therein lies a potential problem. Keane has always claimed dibs on that particular role for Ireland but Walters is confident the two could get along.
“Why not? I have played in the past two years with five or six different strikers and when I was at Ipswich it was the same story. I have adapted to each player.”
Cox has said before that he sees himself as a facsimile of Keane which may also be in Walters’ favour. More proof, perhaps, that things are finally falling into place for the man from Merseyside who, at 28, is overdue his rub of the green.
“I know I’m not getting any younger. That was one of the big reasons why I wanted to leave Ipswich and move on to Stoke. I wanted that chance to play in the Premier League and establish myself as a Premier League player and it is no different here.
“I’m 28 but I’m playing well at the moment for Stoke and whether you are 18, 21 or 33 if you can play well for the team then you should be playing.”
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