The heart of the matter

It was Cesare Prandelli who got to heart of the matter after his team had overcome Ireland in Poznan on Monday night.

“Sides that play football can always go quite far in tournaments,” said the Italy manager. “If it’s just down to results, perhaps you can get there for a while, but in terms of European Championships, if you want to do well, you have to be a good football side.”

Despite the brutal evidence of their Euro 2012 experience, Ireland are not a bad football side. But they are an ordinary one. And when they come up against something out of the ordinary, as they did against Spain, there can only be one result.

That they came up short too against Croatia and Italy should not have come as any great surprise. Croatia have Luka Modric and Italy have Andrea Pirlo. Not one player in the Irish squad at Euro 2012 comes close to their mastery of the football. And, though I’ve always admired the guile and touch of Wes Hoolahan, there’s no Irish player out there I can think of who comes a whole lot closer either.

And, of course, Croatia and Italy are not one-man bands. From back to front, they exhibit a technical superiority, ease in possession and fluidity of movement which have long been alien to the Irish approach to football.

That Irish style is probably best characterised as about 80% perspiration and 20% inspiration, with collective effort a byword and gifted individuality a welcome bonus. For Ireland to bridge the gulf in class which was so painfully apparent at the Euros, a number of factors have to be in almost perfect alignment. Every single player needs to be on his game, every half chance exploited to the maximum and every bit of luck extracted from the gods. Oh, and it also helps if the other lot have a bit of an off-day too. None of which happened at the Euros.

Against Croatia, Ireland never recovered from the panicky concession of that early goal. Against scintillating Spain, they even managed to make life a little easier for a side which needs none of the help it can get. And against Italy, while it was pleasing to be reminded of what can be achieved by dint of big hearts and hard yards, there was a still a precise, clinical and confident quality to the Italians’ best play which, again, the Irish can hardly ever hope to emulate, especially when under the cosh from top-class sides.

Which is not to say that people were wrong to hope that Ireland might spring an upset at the Euros. After all, as Giovanni Trapattoni always likes to remind us, anything can happen in 90 minutes of football. The real disappointment of Ireland ’s Euro 2012 was that we got chronic under-achievement instead of heroic over-achievement, and that was mainly down to a failure to meet even the basic requirement of making life as difficult as possible for the opposition.

So where to from here? Well, despite the apocalyptic tone of much of the current debate, it’s hardly back to square one. At least not if you define square one as a hammering from Cyprus and a draw with San Marino, wounds which were still raw when Giovanni Trapattoni fetched up on our shores offering the soothing balm of wisdom, grand authority and a cupboard full of medals and trophies.

Mind, we didn’t stress his tournament failures as an international manager too much at the time, but we’re making up for that now. And he can’t complain too much. He has always asked to be judged on results, and zero points and nine goals conceded in three games add up to their own damning indictment. Yet it can’t be conveniently forgotten that it was only under his stewardship the team was able to scale that summit for the first time in 10 years.

The question now is if Trapattoni has taken Ireland as far as he can. One thing’s for sure: if the manager is to restore his and the team’s credibility as, at least, a fighting force to be reckoned with, then he will have to include himself in the agonising reappraisal which a dismal Euro 2012 has forced on Irish football.

He needs to be more flexible in his selections and formations and less committed to the rigid application of ideas that can get you so far but no further. But what the Irish experience in Poland told me more than anything else is that the quality of the talent at a manager’s disposal is still fundamentally more important than how the manager deploys it.

If we are now witnessing the twilight of some Irish gods — great players like Keane, Duff, Dunne and Given — then the process of evolving this team will be made that much more challenging. Yes, there are some exciting young prospects out there, like James McCarthy, James McClean and Seamus Coleman, but I fear that our tendency to over-hype the Premiership — see Swansea’s appearance in the current debate — means we may also run the risk of expecting too much too soon of players who still have plenty to prove.

Certainly, Trapattoni needs to cultivate these players now. Yet, even if he avails of the best talent currently available and, by his own lights, virtually reinvents the tactical wheel to accommodate them, I’m not sure that Ireland are guaranteed an any less bumpy road to Brazil than the one which took them to Poland.

Meantime, I refer you back to the opening remarks of Mr Prandelli, the apprentice who had the last word in his debate with the master.