Trapattoni volume is timely and welcome

EMMET MALONE ON SOCCERYou could do worse than read the republished book on the newly installed Irish boss

THE LIKES of Ashley Cole, Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard produced such awful volumes of memoirs in the wake of England's latest failure to crack the big time a couple of years back that we all found ourselves in the remarkable position of marvelling at the wit and wisdom of Joey Barton, who summed up the approach thus: "I played shit. Here's my book."

Still, the best thing to come out of the crop of 2006 was sales were so dismal it destroyed, at least for a time, the market that requires no more of a footballer than to come up with enough revelation or controversy to bring in a sizeable sum from a newspaper for extracts and then deliver the balance of the 80,000 or so words in the form of utter banalities.

The books produced by, or in conjunction with, Niall Quinn, Tony Cascarino, and most recently Paul McGrath, show, on the other hand, how worthwhile such enterprises can be.

When it comes to books written about players or managers by third parties, things are just as mixed, with Eamon Dunphy's recently republished biography of Matt Busby, A Strange Kind of Glory, close to being as good as it gets in a market otherwise dominated by journalists making maximum use of access to a newspaper archive and their computer's "cut and paste" facility.

Some of these latter efforts are a whole lot better than others and when fans are coming new to the subject then there's not a great deal wrong with condensing and reproducing what is already known about a player or manager elsewhere, particularly if the story is strong enough.

With the new Ireland manager the yarn could hardly be much better and so the arrival of Trapattoni: A Life in Football, by Egon Theiner and Elizabeth Schlammerl, is as welcome as it is timely.

Published by Liberties Press and available for around €15, the book is an updated translation of an Austrian biography written about the Italian during his time at Red Bull Salzburg.

The slightly rewritten original book, sandwiched between enjoyable contributions by Paddy Agnew and Niall Foley, does read a little like it has been translated. And the significance of it having been produced in German is easy enough to grasp as you read through it for despite the now 69-year-old having enjoyed the bulk of his most significant successes at home in Italy, this account is at its best when focusing on his spells in Germany, especially the second spell at Bayern Munich and the brief one at Stuttgart and Austria.

It gets more detailed as it comes to deal with the latter part of his career. The problem, however, is his background, playing days and even most successful time in management, the years at Juventus, are breezed through.

Even the most pertinent part of his career from an Irish point of view - the four years he spent in charge of the Italian national team - merits only 16 pages.

Fortunately, it's the strength of that story itself which saves the book. With little more than the bare facts to work with in places, Theiner and Schlammerl presumably have little option but to make the economy with which they deal with the narrative seem like a virtue, but they do this well enough.

In a volume tailor-made for the holiday-reading market, the pair provide an enjoyable account of Trapattoni's career and a sometimes intriguing insight into his personality and methods. What emerges is a man shaped by his working class upbringing outside Milan and a sense that he owed it both to his family and himself to make the most of the talents he possessed.

It is an extension of this philosophy that he has sought to bring to the teams he has overseen since moving into management and so, while Trapattoni continued to have a reputation for producing teams whose nature is first and foremost defensive, the authors provide solid statistical evidence from the days when his teams dominated Serie A that goalscoring was a major ingredient in the recipe for success.

Ultimately, he is a rather pragmatic man who seeks to dispassionately assess the pool of talent available to him then looks to improve it in whatever way is possible before setting about the task of simply making the best of the situation.

With Italy, as with Ireland, buying in was not an option but then the Azzurri looked a decent enough bunch when he took over in the wake of the team having narrowly missed out to France in the 2000 European Championship final.

Trapattoni, though, was the victim first of the poor fortune his side endured in the 2002 World Cup finals and then the initial lack of conviction displayed in Portugal two years later.

That he both placed an inordinate amount of faith in Francesco Totti in 2004 and controversially omitted Alberto Gilardino from his squad for the tournament is acknowledged here but there is no room for either issue to be explored further.

Amongst other matters of interest to get a mention include the news that the Italian FA had earmarked his now assistant with Ireland, Marco Tardelli, to succeed him after two years but rushed to give Trapattoni a new contract after qualifying had gone so well. Then, when the following campaign didn't start so brightly, the federation president - Franco Carraro - wanted to poll the players on the question of their coach's future, an idea described as disgraceful by goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon.

Here, of course, the FAI did sound out leading squad members as to who should succeed Steve Staunton, but when it boiled down to a straight choice between Trapattoni and Terry Venables, their preferences were of little interest to them.

It appears the Italian then emerged victorious from the negotiations over money, suggesting his many dealings down the years with club boards and presidents around Europe had prepared him well for the biggest and baddest the FAI could throw at him.

Perhaps the most interesting thing the book highlights is that when things don't go so well and he starts to feel unwelcome, then Trapattoni is not a man to hang about.

So if the opening qualifiers don't go well, and it ends up being rewritten for another market, the chapter on the Republic of Ireland boss could yet end up being very short indeed.