Trapattoni to issue ultimatum to players

SOCCER NEWS:FROM A portion of the stands in the Maurice Dufrasne Stadium on Tuesday night hung an enormous banner emblazoned with the words: "Love for the Italian team doesn't have any borders." It was "signed" by the Italian immigrants of Belgium who, at the end of the game, booed briefly then trooped out en masse, leaving it there, looking increasingly bedraggled in the rain.

Given time, members of the Belgian Italian community will doubtless rediscover their affection for the Azzurri but for a while at least they will be hurting, their pain only added to by the fact the team’s undoing in Liege was engineered by a legend who himself oversaw two assaults by their national team on major championship finals which the folks in Italy would probably prefer to forget.

At 72, Giovanni Trapattoni’s days of managing at the very top of the Italian game are now behind him – he confirmed as much again this week – but his passion for management remains undiminished as was clearly demonstrated yesterday in Dublin where he admitted, only half in jest it seemed, his ideal schedule for the summer break would be to persuade his wife, Paola, to take off to their holiday home for a month while he digs in and watches a lot of games on DVD.

The Italian’s reserves of energy also seem inexhaustible and he bragged good-naturedly yesterday he has “a battery like a Duracell” before adding: “My life is like a holiday and I love this job. As long as I have my health, am lucid and can do it then I will do it.”

How long more he is doing it in the pay of the FAI remains to be seen. He restated his and Marco Tardelli’s desire yesterday to stay on for the next World Cup campaign and said that he intends at least to attend the draw in Brazil next month.

Whether the association opts to keep him on, he admits, is a decision for someone else and he acknowledges his employers are entitled not to be rushed into a decision.

However, his position will have been strengthened somewhat, of course, by the team’s current run of four straight victories during which 10 goals have been scored without reply but he and everyone else knows the real business only resumes in September when games against Slovakia and Russia will do more to determine his future than even the most thrilling of wins over the four-times World Cup winners.

If he can put up with the uncertainty of his employers, though, because he has little other choice, then it seems he has finally reached the end of his tether with some of his younger international players.

Having dodged the question previously of how he would deal with those whose commitment has been questioned in the wake of dubious absences, Trapattoni says he will be delivering ultimatums before Ireland’s next game with player’s being required to make it clear whether they wish to be involved with his “project” once and for all.

“In the future,” he says, “it will be like this. I will send them a text and I will say: ‘Do you want to come with us again: Yes or no?’ They must be clear about it for you and for the Irish people, not for me.

“They must be clear. I have worked in four other countries and this behaviour is impossible for me to understand. Maybe it’s because they’re young because the senior players answer immediately. The others are like ‘the disappeared’.”

Few are likely to complain about the manager laying down the law; anyone in his position should feel entitled to exclude someone who does not even reply to calls or texts inviting him to represent his country – even if it makes the stakes in relation to his sometimes faulty line of communication that much higher. The simple fact is it will be up to Trapattoni and his association support staff to ensure there are no more “misunderstandings”.

The concern, however, is that after three weeks, during which those players who did turn up, some of them very senior members of the squad, repeatedly accepted invitations from the media to slate those who had not, long-term relationships will have been damaged by what has been said and done.

Trapattoni, though, insists if the players are serious about progressing they will, as footballers often have to, simply swallow their differences and get on with it. “The senior players must teach the others to accept these things,” he says. “Players can’t be jealous of each other in these situations. A team is a team because it rises above such things. You can’t be jealous because you don’t play; instead you must show me (that you should) now show me. There are many young players, and they are not bad, they just have to be educated.”

Educated, that is, in the areas of manners, respect and etiquette, he made clear.

For those who did come and showed themselves willing to be educated in the ways of football he had only lavish praise in the wake of Tuesday’s remarkable defeat of his former player Cesare Prandelli’s men.

It was, in ways, the perfect victory for Trapattoni whose central strategy since he took on this job three years ago has involved preparing his players to take on better sides with victory the goal and the avoidance of defeat the fall-back position.

The ferocious determination with which his second string battled to carry out his game plan in this week clearly delighted him and while he insists the team’s chances of springing a similar type of surprise in Moscow are dependent to a large extent on the presence of the team’s key players, he could be forgiven just now for believing that almost anything is possible for this team.