A quantum leap for Sammon

ASKED if Robbie Keane would come back into the team for the World Cup qualifiers in March, Giovanni Trapattoni yesterday gave one of his patented long rambling answers which left none of his audience any the wiser.

There was a bit about careers in journalism, a lot of talk about experience and mention of James McCarthy and Robbie Brady before, finally, he was brought back to the question in hand – would Robbie Keane return to the team for March? “Yeah sure,” said Trapattoni, with untypical brevity, as if there was ever any question to answer.

It was an unintentionally humorous moment but the laughter it provoked couldn’t mask the comment’s significance – Trapattoni, it seems, will largely revert to the tried and trusted for those crunch games against Sweden and Austria next month. At most, he allowed, there would be perhaps “one of two” changes and, to reinforce the point, he recalled how, when he was managing Juventus, he once won a title with a side which contained a couple of players who, just a year previously, had been playing third-tier football in Italy.