LOCKER ROOM: With much sleight of hand, the wily manager is delivering. The emperor's new threads are splendid. Respect

THIS IS a nightmare. Success is making a failure of our trade.

It’s all so outrageous that you want to be the first to point out with confidence that the emperor has no clothes. None! Not a stitch. But . . .

We’ve all been so thoroughly charmed by Giovanni Trapattoni’s enthusiastic trespasses into the English language, a guttural tongue unsuited to his passions, that you want to be the one to say ‘wait a minute, he’s a silver-tongued snake oil salesman, a charmer and a charlatan’. And yet . . . We are so beguiled by his little trick of making the most absurdly romantic assertions as to anything being possible, while setting out his sides in the most hard-headedly pragmatic manner that the curmudgeons among us are itching to say, ‘hang on a minute, with Glenn Whelan anything is possible?’

We are so busy counting with auditorial exactness all the strokes of luck which fall like confetti on to Giovanni’s bony shoulders that it is tempting to adopt the stentorian tones of those economists who chide the Government for having cheered on a bubble for the past 10 years. ‘Bubbles burst’, we want to say . . .

There is no arguing, though, with being unbeaten after seven games in a group which contains the world champions. Our successive one-all draws away from home with the big fish in the pond mightn’t have been epic occasions of swashbuckling and derring-do but in a way they were more remarkable for that.

To demand that a team of such apparently modest talents play with such patient exactitude away from home is in itself a Braveheart thing to do. Giovanni has his system and his demands. Everybody fits in.

It shouldn’t work but somehow it does. These after all are largely the same group of players who felt their brains would burst if Brian Kerr asked them to consider for yet another minute the DVD evidence of how they might tackle certain types of opposition, the same group who welcomed the hapless Steve Staunton as welcome relief from all that cerebration.

Now they go about their business as humble cogs in a machine which can run quite smoothly away from home in the face of a late onslaught, with Sean St Ledger and Stephen Kelly operating as half of the back four.

This column would have been firmly in favour of the Ireland management and public setting up a Greenham Common-style camp outside of Stephen Ireland’s place, a foothold from which we might beseech the little fella to come and play for his country again.

This Monday morning is the time to say leave him be. He has no principled reason for walking away and those who have played through these open seven games deserve better than to see their management prostrate itself at the feet of the prodigal.

When injury or retirement drops a player into featherbed middle age, but middle age nonetheless, they have one brief career to look back on, to tell the kids about. Just ask Duffer. Stephen Ireland’s story could have included great nights in Croker, Bari or Bulgaria but it won’t. Petulance is its own punishment.

Compare his lot to that of Caleb Folan. A nice man, Folan looks like the sort of handsome character actor who crops up in the background of American TV series of little consequence. His football career has played out accordingly, wearing the colours of sides like Rushden and Diamonds, Chesterfield, Wigan and Hull City. He has a granny from Galway and a grandfather from Inis Mór but his claims to an Ireland career looked irreparably tainted after that agonising Steve Staunton press conference a couple of years ago when the Gaffer struggled less successfully than Giovanni does with the English language in his efforts to paint a picture of a man whom most of us felt the gaffer wouldn’t be able to pick from a police line-up.

Folan is a pleasing throw-back to the Big Jack days, a striker who simply poots ’em under presha. His work-rate and bravery are a constant chastisement to those who don’t turn up. When you dare to believe that Giovanni might somehow micro-manage this squad – past the reefs of the play-offs and on to South Africa – it’s hard not to grin at the thought of fellas like Caleb Folan enthusiastically hurtling about on World Cup prime time while prissy divas with more talent and way more attitude watch on television in their lonesome mansions back home.

We’ve always fancied the idea when it came to our soccer teams that we punch above our weight. Even when we had a side of actual quality in the Charlton era we opted to kick and rush a lot of the time and ended up with a squad which contained more genuinely world-class players than at any time in our history but which, considering the style we played, still punched above its weight. And that made us happy.

This current side has a man formerly known as the Honey Monster as its bulwark. It runs off a modest central midfield pairing whose general anonymity makes predecessors like Mark Kinsella and Matt Holland looks like Posh’N’ Becks-style limelight addicts. It is decorated by a plethora of wingers who as often as not make you put your head in your hands rather than throw your hands in the air but the diligence with which they are pushing the boulder of qualification up the hill makes heroes out of them.

We weren’t beautiful to watch in Sofia and we can be thankful that Berbatov appeared to have shrunk every time we saw him and that Martin Petrov appeared to have brought either half his brain or half his backbone but we were organised and had conviction.

Some of us wondered if Giovanni Trapattoni wasn’t just a beaten docket plucked from the pile by a desperate FAI. It was tempting to doubt him, a man offered a lush sinecure, a job which came with adulation and which didn’t involve traipsing around Britain to matches.

He is delivering, though, and on nights like Saturday he does so with sufficient sleight of hand to make us wonder precisely how he is pulling off these tricks! What the hell, the emperor’s new threads are splendid. Respect.