Tardelli set to get the ball rolling

SOCCER:Marco Tardelli will become the first of member of the new Irish senior management team to get to work next weekend when he travels to England in order to start the process of seeing at first hand the pool of talent available for the forthcoming World Cup qualifying campaign.

Tardelli will spend a good deal of time in Ireland during the next couple of months working on his English, amongst other things, but the former Inter Milan coach will also take in a string of club games in Britain as well as the under-21 international against Montenegro in Galway on March 25th and the senior friendly between Northern Ireland and the Republic's World Cup rivals, Georgia, the following day in Belfast.

Whether Liam Brady will join his old friend in the management set-up remains in some doubt despite a meeting between the Dubliner, Giovanni Trapattoni and John Delaney having apparently gone well in Salzburg on Wednesday.

"The FAI and Giovanni would love him to come," said Delaney yesterday, "but Liam has got to look at whether he can do both roles. Liam is a professional and wants to be sure that if he does take it on that he would be able to continue with his job with Arsenal. So he's going to think about that for a little while, talk to Arsenal about it and see if he can accommodate both roles.

"I don't want to talk publicly about what his role (with Ireland) would be," continued Delaney, "but certainly it was clarified over the day or two we were out there. But I'd love to have him. I think he's the perfect fit for the role we spoke about. He also has a very good relationship on a personal basis with Tardelli. They're very good friends. And of course he played under Giovanni and, as you know, he rang Liam when he first got the approach - so I think there's a lot there that would work very well. So I'm hopeful but it is Liam's decision to make."

Brady would be expected to take a sort of European-style team manager's role while also providing a link between the Italians and the various parties with whom they will be dealing. The expectation was that it would be part-time and focused around matches but it's not clear whether the idea of hooking up with the squad for two weeks, as might be required in May, would be practicable for the former Arsenal star.

The training camp trip to the Algarve might look like the sort of thing he would be able to skip but it will be the new manager's first chance to work his squad and Delaney says Trapattoni is likely to use contacts established during his time in charge of Benfica to line up a couple of training games with club sides.

In the meantime, the Italian is said to have already familiarised himself with most of the squad's leading figures thanks to a consignment of DVDs brought out to him in Austria after his appointment.

"He was up to speed on those," says the FAI's chief executive. "He gave them a real going over, to be fair. And now he wants DVDs of recent matches played by the teams in our group."

Delaney went on to reveal that part of Wednesday's meeting also centred on the logistics for Ireland's away trips in the autumn, primarily the double header in Georgia and Montenegro. The veteran Italian, he said, has suggested that he will be tweaking the timetables in the hope of improving the team's preparations for the games.

"He is very set on trying to organise things around flight times, eating times and training times. They seem to be very important to him.

"Particularly, he was concerned about what time we leave Georgia for Montenegro (for the back-to-back World Cup games in September). It's a three and half hour flight down, there's a time difference and I think they will train that afternoon. Where it's practical he likes to have training after a flight so you might see more sessions at 6pm than you have in the past."