Faroes game last chance saloon for Trapattoni?

We love our ‘eras’ in football.

If it isn’t the start of one it is usually the end of another but there was, of course, no mistaking a sense of the guard being changed at the Aviva Stadium last night where sightings of Richard Dunne, Robbie Keane and Shay Given were reserved to the reverential banners hanging from the stands.

Keane and (hopefully) Dunne will be back, so will Glenn Whelan and Sean St Ledger, but here was the admittedly forced glimpse of the future everyone had hankered after as soon as Giovanni Trapattoni’s side went down to Italy in the second of the three group games in Poland and it was educational to go back to when it all began for Trapattoni.