The quest for life after death

The inquest has begun, the tribunals of investigation have been convened and, already, there’s a whiff of cordite in the air.

All of which feels a little unseemly with one game still to play in Euro 2012, sort of like performing an autopsy on a corpse in the full knowledge that it is required to get up and walk again in a couple of days’ time.

If Giovanni Trapattoni and the Irish team can do the resurrection shuffle against Italy in Poznan on Monday, the feat will be as welcome as the prospect right now appears unlikely but, of course, it will make no material difference to the fact that Irish dreams of an extended stay at Euro 2012 have already turned to ashes.

On which point, with hindsight now a much abused commodity, it’s probably worth noting that, for many observers, an early exit was always on the cards, right from the moment when the draw in Kiev last December disclosed the Himalayan nature of the exercise in mountain-climbing which the Irish were going to face in Poland this summer.

Certainly, your present correspondent was hardly alone in forecasting that Trapattoni’s team would not escape Group C, but what I didn’t imagine, in even my darkest visions of how easily it could all go badly wrong, was that after two games the table would show Ireland with a stark and depressing record of zero points, seven goals conceded and just the one scored.

Of course, it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that the result against Spain had the distinct mitigating factor of being, well, a result against Spain.

Prior to the match, Trapattoni had said he and his players were in no mood to “give presents” to the opposition. Yet, with the early concession of a goal for the second game in succession, that’s precisely what the team did.

And, just for bad measure, a couple more were proffered too. Yet, while Shay Given helped in gift-wrapping one of those — when his poor clearing punch fell to the twinkling toes of David Silva — it was only thanks to a series of terrific saves by the keeper, allied to some heroic last-ditch defending by the players in front of him, that Spain didn’t add another two or three to their tally.

Spain, let’s make no bones about it, were spectacular, operating at a dizzyingly high performance level which even the very best teams in world football would find difficult to contain. By way of a comparison, Brazil’s champagne demolition of a decent Scottish side at the 1982 World Cup came to my mind in the PGE Arena. And it only remains to be seen now if the Spanish can avoid the fate which ultimately befell Zico, Socrates, Falcao and company that year, a strange fate which decreed that they would come to be almost universally regarded as the best team — above even the Dutch of ’74 — never to win the World Cup. So, Spain handed out a hiding, yes, but you could hardly brand the result a disgrace from an Irish point of view.

Even the already raging debate about selection, tactics, individual player performance and the manager’s crucial role in much of this, ought to be muted by recognition of the fact that, up against a team of Spain’s supernatural ability, even an Irish side managed by a combination of Trap, Jose Mourinho and Jesus Christ, and permitted to field all 23 squad members at the one time, would probably still have come off second-best.

In truth, the match which really proved terminal to Ireland’s hopes and ambitions at Euro 2012, was the first one, against Croatia.

Again, even a point was never going to be nailed on in that one, but the salient features of the manner of the 3-1 defeat — the lapses in concentration, the cruel timing of the goals, the total failure to inhibit Luca Modric, the below par performances of the some of the team’s bigger names and the manager’s baffling substitutions — all contributed to deepening the sense of despondency.

Trapattoni’s responsibility in all this is already coming under severe scrutiny. And rightly so. After all, he is the man who has explicitly set the terms for how he should be judged — and that is on the cold facts of the final scoreline. Show is show, as he has often told us, result is result. On that basis, his management of Ireland at these finals has been a failure.

Yet, the calls for the Italian to go now can’t be allowed to simply drown out the more muted argument for his retention, an admittedly nuanced case but one which has a wealth of evidence to back it up.

Not least, of course, is the fact that Ireland reached these Euro finals in the first place, on top of having failed, by only the narrowest and most heartbreaking of margins, to reach the last World Cup.

Considering that Ireland had been 10 years in the wilderness and were at probably their lowest ebb in all that time when Trapattoni took charge, his achievement in restoring credibility, self-belief and a proven ability to eke out critical results, especially away from home, is not to be lightly dismissed, even now.

Yet, his inflexibility tactically remains a problem, especially when one is obliged to note that he still has not come up with an effective solution for the basic three v two problem in central midfield, which was first so rudely exposed by rampant Russia in Dublin in October 2010.

So what’s to be done? Looking long-term, there are a number of imponderables which cloud the vision and make it difficult to offer a definitive judgment at this point.

Questions like: will there be retirement by one or more senior players at the end of this tournament? At 73, is Trapattoni the man to embark on a team rebuilding project if that is what is required? He clearly believes he is, but a further query is whether his tactical and selection conservatism will ever allow him to extract the best from the likes of James McClean, James McCarthy and Seamus Coleman, or even permit the widening of the talent net sufficient to accommodate fresh talent as well as players who, thus far, have been almost wholly ignored, like the Norwich pair of Wes Hoolahan and Anthony Pilkington.

But for those calling for his head, another pressing question needs to be answered too: if, for some as yet undetermined reason, Trapattoni was not to stay on, what other candidates might be available to the FAI of whom it could be said that they would have even a reasonable prospect of doing any better?

The bottom line is this: as these Euro finals have confirmed, all too painfully, the limited options available to Irish football in terms of outstanding player talent, mean that voodoo economics remain the tall order of the day: somehow, the whole must always be made greater than the sum of its parts.

Individual talent has its place in that, of course, and so does a system designed to maximise its potential for the greater good. But sheer hard work and a bit of luck remain vital to any Irish team’s chances of punching above its weight. In Poland, we got the hard work, to be sure but, after that, many of the players had very little else left in their lockers.

Right now, everything seems to be up in the air again except, sadly, the date of Ireland’s departure from Euro 2012. Yet, there’s still another testing match to play, this time against an Italian side fighting for its own Euros future and, as ever, the indefatigable Green Army will be there in Poznan to cheer the Boys in Green to the very last. The cynics can scoff all they want, but it was a real lump in the throat moment to be inside the PGE Arena on Thursday night when The Fields Of Athenry sounded the retreat from Gdansk.

It would be good if Trapattoni and the players could reward that loyalty with at least one performance to remember from their short stay in Poland.