Class permanent in game for gentlemen

Sideline Cut"It's sad to see Roy Keane bullshitting." - Eamon Dunphy, RTÉ Radio

The Irishman laughs again: 'Never shit a shitter, Mr Clough.'- The Damned Utd

Mama mia! What a week for the garrison game. It began with the unusual sound of Eamon Dunphy chastising Roy Keane and ended on the surreal realisation that Ireland's football men had somehow secured the services of (probably) the best football management team in the world.

Somehow, everything you might want to know about Irish football seemed locked into those two stories.

Already, we are getting spoilt: yesterday's news that Marco Tardelli - he of the sublimely and inimitably cool World Cup goal celebration - would join the FAI/Terrifically Wealthy Football Fan/Tax Exile payroll as Giovanni Trapattoni's assistant was greeted with a welcome shrug of happiness. Bring on the Italians! Tardelli, Donadoni, Zoff - bring 'em all, we say.

What's Roberto Baggio at nowadays? Couldn't we fund a Charlie O'Leary-type role for him? At this point, it will be something of a disappointment if the FAI fail to secure Paulo Maldini as chief water carrier and Andrea Bocelli as the official warbler of Amhrán na bhFiann by the time the next qualifying campaign comes around.

The FAI have spent so long in the role of whipping boys and have listened so long to unfavourable comparisons to the country-Catholic cuteness with which the GAA conducts its affairs that nobody could begrudge the soccer men the right to enjoy this coup. Ireland and Giovanni Trapattoni! It's a bit like the resigned and solitary bachelor walking into his local pub with Jennifer Lopez on his arm. Mouths drop open. Who cares what happens afterwards? For that one moment in time, he is king.

And even if the worst days do return, even if Ireland do end up back in the nightmarish football underworld - losing 2-1 to some "minnow" in a play-off backwater and time ticking down - the sight of Mr Trapattoni will be a balm to us all. For in Trapattoni we trust.

That much is clear. It doesn't matter that most of us don't really know anything about the man. The record shows, as Ole Blue Eyes used to say. This was a man who was born in the year the second World War broke out, who looks like he could have been a leading man in a Fellini film had he not been brilliant at football, who played with and against and managed many of the gilded football names of the late-20th century. He has phone numbers for the Pope and Gianni Versace. He has wealth. And he has suavity. Let's face it: for all the Benjamin Franklins floating around this country, Ireland does not do couture fashion very well.

Even our so-called "style gurus" don't have a clue because they are just two generations removed from footing turf. It matters to the peasant lurking in us all that someone with an ineffable sense of chic and taste and class that no amount of money can purchase will manage us from the sideline. It pleases us that Mr Trapattoni lists a fine red, classical music and opera as his leisure pursuits. Man after me own heart, we say. Man after me own heart.

I guess it is fair to say Eamon Dunphy always believed Roy Keane was a man after his own heart. The intention here is not to hammer Dunphy, who spent all of yesterday on the dock in the Mahon Tribunal, a production that will soon be running longer than Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap. Let it be declared here that Eamon Dunphy is a national treasure. After all, there are only seven genuinely great living Irishmen.

Eamon may not be one of those but he has gotten good and drunk with them all. That takes a hell of a talent - not to mention a constitution. Dunphy is marvellous but there are times when you hear him broadcasting his thoughts and you shake your head, thinking, "You don't really believe that, Eamo. You just don't."

So it was on Monday when he somewhat regretfully had a lash at Roy Keane for sounding like what, in fact, he actually is - a Premiership football manager. There is a part of Eamon that will always hanker after the punkish, anti-establishment rebel of his own past. In his wildest and least compromising essence, Keane represented all that Dunphy believes to be great and indicative of a free and independent spirit.

Part of Dunphy probably yearns to still be that outsider, railing against the establishment. The problem is that by becoming such a raging success as an iconoclast, Dunphy has become a celebrated establishment figure. He drinks at the top table now.

Just because you don't wear a tie in the Premiership studio does not mean you are not conforming with the rules at Montrose.

The romantic in Dunphy so reveres Keane that he cannot bear to hear him sounding remotely agreeable. Keane, of course, appears for his obligatory press conferences at Sunderland and, as has always been his style, answers whatever question is fired at him honestly and engagingly. But given the repetitious nature of the press conferences, he is bound to lapse into auto-pilot now and again.

Also, Keane's mind is probably locked into the addictive and cut-throat business of trying to keep his team in the Premiership.

You think of what Keane is doing, a young manager in charge of a club operating on near-socialist principles in comparison to most of its competitors, and wonder how it will turn out. And you think of Keane's journey, from the raging days at Manchester United under Alex Ferguson to his apprenticeship at Nottingham Forest under England's last iconoclast, Brian Clough.

Of all the books written about Clough, it is likely none will ever nail the voice and personality of the man as hauntingly as David Peace's brilliant novel The Damned Utd. This is a book about football inasmuch as American Psycho is a book about the stock exchange. But it does capture the brutal loneliness of football management in a way real life never could because no manager would own up to it. And it does feature several wonderful vignettes of mutual loathing between Clough and John Giles in which "the Irishman" always comes out best. It is strange, reading that fictional portrayal of the young Giles, to think of the distinguished man who now sits in the RTÉ studios alongside Dunphy, his long-time pal, both cocking a snook at the notion of growing old. And it is odd to think that too that Clough, rooted as he is to English football culture before the Premiership, belongs to the same generation as Giovanni Trapattoni, both children of 1930s Europe.

Clough is a memory from a gone time and Trapattoni powers on, intent on leading Ireland toward the brightness. And it is comforting to think Keane may some day follow in the footsteps of the Italian master.

By that time, the FAI will be a greatly changed organisation. But hopefully Eamon Dunphy will still be sneaking a smoke around the back of the bicycle shed at RTÉ.