The Ireland squad will make up for their limitations by thinking and playing as one, writes FRANK McNALLY
INTENTIONALLY OR otherwise, Giovanni Trapattoni revealed a big insight about Ireland’s Euro 2012 strategy in the first part of his squad announcement.
It may only have been his occasional habit, when speaking in English, of omitting plurals where they should be and including them where they’re not. But somehow he hinted at a deeper truth when he said he had picked “three goalkeeper”, including “Shay Givens”.
The implication here is that Trapattoni’s 23-man squad will think and play as one, making up for their individual limitations when compared with Europe’s best by submerging themselves in a collective.
Conversely, certain key players will be expected to shine. Thus the Ireland manager was predicting, not for the first time, Given will play like there’s more than one of him. He didn’t say anything about “Richard Dunnes”, but then the big defender probably already knows what’s expected.
“Identity”, ironically, was one of Trapattoni’s keynote ideas. He spoke of how his team had grown into its current identity, part of which had involved “recognising our limitations”, and then attempting to expand them.
Another key player in Poland, therefore, may be Sean St Ledger. Everyone else in the 23, plus the five standby players, was identified by both first and second name. But as is his wont, Trapattoni, accidentally or on purpose, referred to the Leicester City fullback as if “Saint” was his first name.
Coming a week after he invoked the help of another saint, by climbing Croagh Patrick, this, too, looked like part of an emerging strategy. With the Irish set-up now including several Shay Givens and at least two holy men, even Spain may need a miracle to score against us.
There was a poignant irony in one of the names that didn’t get the call-up to the squad. Barring injury or withdrawal to one of the first-choice midfielders, the Boys in Green at Euro 2012 will not include the player named Green: Paul, formerly of Derby County.
He was the nearest thing yesterday to a Gary Waddock, the player famously unlucky enough not to make Jack Charlton’s final list for Italia ’90. And Green’s omission was made more telling because it had seemed in advance that he was vying for a place in the squad with Wigan’s James McCarthy.
Then McCarthy emerged as the player – spoken about cryptically last week by Trapattoni – who had ruled himself out for family reasons: his father’s diagnosis with cancer.
Maybe the McCarthy family trauma puts mere sporting disappointments in perspective. Either way, the manager insisted, the players excluded had taken the call well. In his own words, the manager sugarcoated the pill by telling those who lost out they were “enough young” that in the future they would be “90 per cent with us again”.
A Trapattoni press conference is an intense experience, not least for him. Behind his still broken English, there’s no mistaking the intellectual rigour he applies to management, and his certainty about ideas that have served him throughout his long and successful career.
On the subject of James McClean, in particular, he struggled to communicate all the things he wanted to say.
You sensed the Sunderland midfielder forced his way into the 23 despite, rather than because of, the public clamour for his inclusion. Trapattoni spoke of him admiringly, yet with qualification, as one who still had much to learn.
Describing a wonder-goal McClean scored for Sunderland, the manager supplemented his English vocabulary with hand gestures and sound effects, as one defender (“boom!”) and then another (“boom!” again) had tried to stop the goal. It was a bit special, said Trapattoni, but it was also “lucky”, even if he, McClean, had made his luck.
Asked if he hoped the same player might prove to be his Toto Schillaci (the breakthrough Italian player who starred at Italia ’90, knocking Ireland out along the way), Trapattoni recognised his own limitations. Reluctant as he always appears to be to do so, he referred the answer to his interpreter, whose smile echoed Trapattoni’s hope for divine assistance in Poland: “May God be on his side and may he be like Schillaci.”