Cost of Italian dream team for two years - €5m; bringing the trophy home next summer - priceless

THE FOLK at the Football Association of Ireland were up bright and breezy yesterday morning, 7.06 the time-stamp on the press release announcing Giovanni Trapattoni had agreed a new contract.

Once his Euro 2012 work is done then he’ll turn his attention to sailing the good ship Republic of Ireland in the direction of Brazil 2014.

Some were still sifting the raisins from their muesli when John Delaney popped up on Morning Ireland, the FAI’s chief executive sounding sufficiently chuffed about the news to do a lap of honour at the Aviva Stadium, even if the sight might have puzzled security on the early shift.

“He’s achieved, simple as that,” he said, explaining the FAI’s eagerness to extend Trapattoni’s stay, revealing that Monday’s discussions were silky smooth.

All that had to be agreed was the pay cut the manager, his assistant Marco Tardelli and fitness coach Fausto Rossi would accept, to reflect these troubled times.

"They took a little cut, did they," asked Morning Ireland.

“They did, yeah,” said Delaney.

“It was a significant pay cut, was it,” asked BBC radio.

“Yeah, it would have been, yeah,” said Delaney.

Significant or little, it was a cut, the CEO telling us that the Italian trio were “very much aware of how difficult things are, not only in Ireland but in Europe in general”.

As, of course, Delaney is, having seen his own salary drop sharply from €450,000 to around €400,000 in just a couple of years.

So, how much is the new deal worth? “That’s confidential,” he said, “a private matter” between Trapattoni and the FAI. Reliable sources though (eg Twitter and the like) suggest the manager agreed to a cut of €200,000 to €1.5 million a year, with Tardelli and Rossi’s wages bringing the cost of the management team’s package to around €5 million over two years.

Once again, the FAI’s knight in the shiniest of armour, Denis O’Brien, rode to the rescue, agreeing to contribute half of the cost of the deal with Delaney conceding it “couldn’t have been done without him”.

Mind you, Michael O’Leary and Christoph Mueller should probably have chipped in too, there’s unlikely to be an empty seat on Ryanair and Aer Lingus flights heading east come June.

As a gesture, you can only hope one or the other waives the excess baggage fee come July when the trophy is being flown home to Ireland.

The windfall from Euro 2012, Delaney explained, has to go towards the debt on the Aviva Stadium, which the FAI is hoping, God willing, to have cleared by 2020. So, without O’Brien, presumably, they could only have offered Trapattoni a mere €750,000. That’s not much more than Fabio Capello gets paid each month, so Trapattoni would have been more than justified in asking: “You being funny, no?”

When he recalled meeting O’Brien in Tallinn earlier this month, no wonder Trapattoni’s ol’ blues twinkled when he said “he is always kind”.

Exceptionally so, as it has proved.

And it’s only a couple of months since there was talk of Trapattoni and Co’s salaries being halved, but that was at a point when Euro 2012 qualification seemed a little less than certain, and the team’s style of play was proving a sure-fire cure for insomnia, leaving Johnny Giles, for one, nodding off on his Montrose desk.

Now? All has changed, like, utterly. Turkey, Belgium, Scotland, Romania, Hungary, Switzerland and Norway, and a whole bunch of others, will be uninvolved observers of Euro 2012; we’ll be bang in the middle of it all, and it’ll be a blast.

So, with a longer term contract tied up, can we expect swashbuckling, tiki-taki, devil-may-care football from a brand new team infused with youth?

“He’s 72 years of age, he’s not going to change his habits,” said Delaney, so we took that as a “possibly not”.

Never mind. We have Euro 2012 to look forward to, a few summer weeks to distract us from the gloom. And for that, well, €1.5 million-a-year seems almost cheap-ish at the price.