New beginnings, same old faces

By the time Giovanni Trapattoni finished reading out his 23-man squad for next month’s World Cup qualifiers against Germany and the Faroe Islands yesterday, 17 of the names had been on duty in Poland during the summer.

Shay Given and Damien Duff have since retired, Darron Gibson is in exile and Stephen Hunt has fallen from favour so, all in all, hardly what you might label a major turnover in personnel after such a traumatising experience.

And yet, Trapattoni was keen to talk about new beginnings yesterday.

“We must forget what happened months ago,” he said. “Kazakhstan, Serbia, Oman, we can forget that (too). There were mistakes made in the emotion of the European Championship against Croatia and Italy but let’s start again. It’s another 90-minute game.

“After Kazakhstan I was too critical with my players. In the first 50 minutes we could have scored a goal. After their goal we lost a bit of trust. But after that we went in the right direction and we deserved to win the game.

“In the friendly game against Serbia (in August) we were missing five players but we played very well. We didn’t lose our attitude and mentality and maybe now we can create our new experience.”

Trapattoni admitted immediately after the game in Astana that Ireland had been lucky to claim all three points but he has been offering an increasingly upbeat assessment of the side’s performance on almost every occasion it has been mentioned since.

Managers and players rewriting history is nothing new, of course, but the hope must be that he has seen enough from the competitive fixture in Kazakhstan and Poland before it to know that new beginnings must mean a new approach.

The Italian pondered the possibility of adopting a 4-3-3 system in London earlier this month, both before and after the friendly win against Oman, and he teased his media audience again yesterday without coming to any concrete conclusions.

“We talk about changing the system, but the system is the player,” he said when asked about James McCarthy’s possible selection in central midfield. “We can change because we can play with two or three in central midfield. The European champions, Spain, play without a striker.

“In Ireland, that would be the end of the world. It’s possible because we are deciding what is the best thing to do. Maybe after an hour, we can switch. Against Germany, why not think about three midfielders, for example?”

What he did admit was that, injuries aside, he knows 10 of the 11 to start against Joachim Loew’s visitors at Lansdowne Road on October 12 but he plans to dissect Austria’s performance in their 2-1 defeat to the Germans in Vienna before making a call.

Trapattoni was at a Euro 2012 review for coaches in Warsaw earlier in the week and spoke with Loew about their looming appointment in Dublin and insisted the German would still be wary of the Irish challenge despite the host side’s disappointing display in Poland last summer.

“We know he has a very strong team but you know he was my colleague in Germany,” said Trapattoni. “He has a difficult situation because they had difficulty against Italy (in the semi-final of the European Championship).

“Germany is strong, they have a system with strong players. I know they have a lot of respect for us and we have respect for them. They have Klose, Gomez, Poldolski, Ozil!”

Overcome that lot and it really would be a new beginning.