Work, rest, or play the ultimate balancing act

Enough was enough.

The players had decided.

Their first game of the tournament was just days away and they had been putting the pedal to the metal morning and afternoon day after day. Training camp was one thing but they were in Poland now and the workload was taking its toll.

Giovanni Trapattoni may insist that it was his idea to give the Republic of Ireland squad a day off on Wednesday but there was no disguising that it was a restrained display of player power that earned their Polish counterparts a slimmed-down schedule.

“The players felt that the game against Andorra was a hard workout,” said Poland’s media officer Tomasz Rzasa after coach Franciszek Smuda ran his squad through another training session at Warsaw’s Municipal Stadium Polonia earlier this week.

“On the back of a hard training camp in Austria, the players asked for the afternoons off and the coach agreed to this so up until the Greece game we will only have one training session in the morning. Then in the afternoons the players can rest up, meet their families and have some free time.”

Poland and Ireland haven’t been alone in rowing back on the prep work. Far from it. The fear of burnout, mental as much as physical, is uppermost in every player’s mind after a long and arduous club season and coaches desperate to tick all boxes in the limited time available to them have had to recognise as much prior to tonight’s opening ceremony.

Each team is different but so too is every player. Czech coach Michal Bilek cancelled plans for an afternoon training session earlier in the week and allowed his players to do what they wished with the free time. Most decided to rest or play but 10 decided to work and organised a five-a-side training match at their Municipal Stadium Oporowska training ground with Bilek himself joining in.

England and Greece handed their squad two days off at the start of the week, Holland, France and Sweden downed tools for half that, as did Italy’s players who were told to take stock of the 3-0 defeat to Russia in their own time. Zlatan Ibrahimovic used his liberty to launch a new edition to his autobiography and a handful of Les Bleus opted for the painfully stylish surroundings of Roland Garros to watch the French Open. What never dims is the spotlight.

Laurent Blanc railed against the French media’s reports on Patrice Evra who reportedly rushed to Paris to be at his wife’s side as she went into labour. “I don’t want to know what they’re up to and I hope you don’t either,” he said. “Leave them alone … Above all, I want them to make the most of the break because they’re going to have to work hard when they return.”

The teams have been arriving in dribs and drabs all week. The Czechs thumbed their noses at convention by avoiding the aerial route and arriving in Wroclaw on a high-speed train decorated in the national colours and named after the famous Golden Ball winner Josef Masopust. Even that minor break with the norm served its purpose for players numbed by the monotony which Aiden McGeady has carped about in recent weeks.

“Some of us went to relax and have a nap in the sleeping carriage, some watched films, some played cards,” tweeted defender Theodor Gebre Selassie. “It was a pleasant and comfortable journey and it was also good to see so many fans waiting for us at the station,” said the defender Roman Hubník.

For the Czechs, it was a journey unencumbered by excessive expectation and you would imagine Greece to be in a similar situation were it not for the words of the pilot who ferried them from their economically-ravaged homeland to Warsaw before boarding a bus decorated with the slogan ‘Born Fighters’.

“I wish you a good tournament and, when you step onto the pitch, may your eyes see only sky blue and white,” said the flyer. “We Greeks need it.”

No pressure there then but here again individuals differ as to the benefit or detriment of such expectations being loaded onto, or lifted from, the shoulders of young men.

Ukraine coach Oleg Blokhin decided that it could only be a good thing to take his team away from the mounting crescendo of tournament fervour in his home country for a training camp in the isolated surrounds of the Austrian Alps but the lack of attention met with mixed emotions from his players.

“Look at Russia,” said Andriy Voronin who plays for Dinamo Moscow. “Every time any of their players raises his hand there is an update in the media. By contrast, there are no Ukrainian media here in the camp. Maybe that’s down to a limited budget, but there is a feeling we are forgotten out here.”

Can they change that?