Tardelli: It’s been a fantastic year for Ireland

When Marco Tardelli was asked yesterday if he’d be glad to see the back of 2012, there was nothing lost in translationabout the assistant manager’s emphatic reply.

“No, it’s been fantastic,” he declared, “for me it’s been a fantastic year.”

If ever there was a perfect example of how, when viewed from wildly different angles, the glass can appear either half-empty or half-full, it was Tardelli’s upbeat assessment of 12 months during which Ireland crashed and burned at the Euros and suffered a 1-6 thrashing at the hands of Germany.