Here’s a piece of new news for our wily Italian

Patrick Kavanagh’s poem about experience, Advent, was probably really a poem about depression. Not everyone who has “tested and tasted too much” feels as bad about it as Kavanagh seemed to do.

Yet most of us can recognise ourselves in his lines about how much more fun it was to look on the world through the eyes of a child. We know what Kavanagh means by “the newness that was in every stale thing when we looked at it as children”, even if we don’t still pine for “the luxury of a child’s soul”.

Kavanagh might have been quite envious of Giovanni Trapattoni. Last week, a German journalist asked Trap how he felt about becoming the oldest man to coach a team at the European Championships. Trap replied with an aphorism he attributed to an unnamed general, that “the man is old who is not curious about the new news. I am curious about the new news.”

Trap says he feels about 20, and he plainly is a person of remarkable energy, physical and mental. He bounds up flights of stairs like a mountain goat and even his English is really rather good, considering he started learning the language at nearly 70 years of age.

Whatever Trap says about how young he feels, he is also the most experienced man in Irish football and it’s worth thinking about what that means.

Experience is the process of learning the patterns of existence, of working out how things are and internalising that knowledge to save yourself the mental effort of working it out all over again. Soon the simple ideas become automatic, freeing your mind to learn more complicated ones.

This is the process that enables us all to learn and become more sophisticated, and it’s the process that eventually makes us all hopelessly old-fashioned.

Trap is “curious about the new news”, in that he remains a man of action, a performer who is still driven to be at the centre of things. Yet it is hard to believe that there exists any titbit of new news capable of significantly altering a view of the world that has been shaped by more than 50 years of professional experience.

Those 50 years have taught Trap that in football, there are certain fundamental truths. Among these is the principle that young players cannot be trusted in high-pressure games. Trap’s view — and who are we to argue — is that the older and more experienced the player, the more likely he is to perform.

This came up on Monday during a discussion of whether it might be time for Ireland to use James McClean. Trap suggested that throwing him in against Croatia or Spain would be asking too much. “When there are senior, experienced players in this situation, maybe there is tension. You can understand how much more tense a young player can be. It’s important we give them the quiet opportunity. Not when we need their performance, under pressure. It’s a heavy weight on his shoulders.”

We all know the counter-examples. Wayne Rooney was brilliant for England at Euro 2004, Michael Owen was brilliant at 18 in the 1998 World Cup. Robbie Keane was nearly a year younger than McClean is now when he scored three goals for Ireland in Japan and Korea. Duff was the same age as McClean then and he was our best player.

Trap would probably argue that these exceptions prove the rule; for every Rooney, Owen, Keane or Duff, he’s watched a thousand young players anonymously crash and burn. His principle remains sound.

It’s when your principles are so well developed that you end up making decisions that less principled people — which, compared to Trapattoni, is practically everybody — find rather strange.

In the same conference, Trap explained why the only squad in the tournament with four left-wingers ended up playing Simon Cox out of position on the left wing. He used Cox because he believed he was more likely to score than our wingers.

It’s true that Duff, McGeady and Hunt are not prolific scorers: they’ve scored 11 goals between them in a combined 187 international games. But no player in the Irish squad scored more club goals in 2012 than James McClean. Six goals in 29 matches for Sunderland does not make him Lionel Messi, but it’s better than Cox’s one goal in 21 games for West Brom.

Is McClean’s goal threat from the wing a piece of new news that has escaped Trapattoni’s notice? More likely, the resistible force of McClean’s little goal collection slammed into the immovable object of Trap’s half-century of experience.

Trap knows you don’t trust inexperienced players in big matches. He knows it. If the evidence suggests that the inexperienced player might actually be the most likely to score, then you ignore the evidence.

In Trap’s view, if a young player like McClean walked out onto a stage like Euro 2012 and played like a champion, it would be something close to a miracle. Which happens to be just what Ireland need.