Trap still waiting for the negatives

SOCCER:HAVING COME close to echoing Steve Staunton's damaging assertion nearly six years ago that San Marino were always going to get better as the campaign went on, with his insistence on Friday night that going to Kazakhstan is never easy, Giovanni Trapattoni staged a more combative defence of his position over the weekend with the Italian adamant that he can still lead Ireland to a second place finish in a group in which top spot was always accounted for.

If the headlines on Saturday morning had left the 73-year-old in any doubt about where the majority of the press corps stood in relation to his position, then the tone of much of the questioning he faced over the weekend will have cleared things up for him.

He remained defiant, however, expressing the belief that he retains the support of ordinary supporters, that he is, notwithstanding the scale of Friday’s defeat, moving the team in the right direction and, more specifically, that he can guide it first to a play-off spot ahead of Sweden and Austria and then to Brazil.

With the former Juventus boss apparently determined that he will not walk away even, he said, if Ireland lose in Torshavn, he was asked what might be expected from the campaign given the available talent and the money being spent on retaining his know how.

“I think we can achieve qualification,” he said. “Germany are superior to us. Austria will not be easy, I know that, or Sweden, but with these two teams we can be competitive. I don’t want to keep repeating that players were missing against the Germans. With a new energy coming, why not? We have this possibility.”

It would, on the face of it, be quite an achievement given the Swedes would have been widely fancied to finish ahead of Ireland at the start of the campaign and, with goal difference the first criteria on which sides will be separated, Trapattoni’s men will arguably need to finish a point ahead of their rivals.

His rather more immediate concern, however, is whether he gets to stick around that long. After training on Saturday he was effectively asked whether he could halt the momentum that seems to be gathering behind the idea that he will have to depart. He said yes but it was pointed out such predictions have a way of becoming self fulfilling prophesies with the authority of managers sometimes irreparably undermined by the need for constant firefighting against a sense of imminent departure.

Even if the FAI accepts the case that Trapattoni should make way for an as yet unnamed replacement who would have to work with the same group of players, the situation is difficult for the association.

Denis O’Brien pays half of the cost of employing the management team who collectively earn around €1.8 million with the manager believed to account for a little over two thirds of that. He was persuaded to stump up the cash on the basis it would pay for “a world class manager” which the association’s officials got to choose.

With the association itself in dire financial straits, it would presumably be humiliating for those same officials to go cap in hand to O’Brien looking for the money to pay off the man they hired, especially if they retained any hope that he might contribute to the salary of their chosen successor.

And so, for the moment at least, nothing is likely to change with Trapattoni, and most likely his employers, desperately hoping for both a win and a performance in the Faroe Islands. The Germans won at home last month against the Faroes rather less impressively than they did in Dublin on Friday.

“Yesterday (the 6-1 result) was a disaster,” acknowledged the Italian who maintains there has been no hint from the FAI so far that they are casting around for an exit strategy, “(but) this is not a crisis. I understand after the Euros, we might have spoken about it that way after the Kazakhstan game (if we had lost) but not in a week when we have missed five players and suffered a defeat that’s a one off. You think to go to Kazakhstan is easy. Austria drew 0-0 in Kazakhstan.”

The veteran coach will, of course, again be without many of the players that earned his side its desperately unconvincing single goal victory there although he may yet have Robbie Keane back with the striker passed fit yesterday to at least travel. Andy Keogh is definitely out, however, having suffered a concussion after a training ground collision on Saturday.

Trapattoni suggested that there will be two or three changes for the Torshavn game which will be played on an artificial surface, and hinted that Robbie Brady might play a larger part. The young winger’s attacking energy could certainly prove an asset and he seems unlikely to have been as negatively impacted by the events of Friday night as some of those who endured the full 90 minutes.

As for the manager, he was asked in what circumstances he might consider his position if a defeat in the Faroes wouldn’t prompt him to: “When there are no positives,” he said. “When I ask the team to do something and they don’t do it. Until there is a negative reaction I am happy to stay.”

Further clarification may be required on how negative that needs to be.