TV VIEW: WITH EVERY game that goes by in his absence, Andy Reid is turning into a better and better player. At this rate, giants of the game like Di Stefano, Cruyff and Zidane will turn into mere imps compared to Ireland's very own pocket-battleship of indignation.
At the helm, of course, is Eamon Dunphy, RTÉ’s Admiral Graf von Spee, navigating his latest cause through waves of evidence that suggest the residual spume of those waves may not be black or white, but in fact battleship grey.
Right from the start of RTÉ’s coverage of Saturday night’s World Cup qualifier against Italy, it was almost possible to feel those engines warming up against the Eyetie in his sights on the horizon.
The ghost of the Charlton years was raised, and while Gilesy begged to point out the differences between Big Jack and Il Trap, Eamo was having none of it: “Both of them don’t give the licence for players to be creative, to be imaginative, to play without fear.”
By half-time, everything was set up.
“Ireland desperately need Andy Reid in the side,” Eamo wailed, like a mournful banshee peering out to sea as the Wild Geese take a powder towards France.
At full-time, it was full steam ahead and bugger the smoke.
“A travesty, a terrible performance, shameful,” he thundered. “We never passed the ball. It’s clear Andy Reid needs to be in the team. . .This is a great injustice and it is compounded by it happening to the one player we need to solve our problems on the field.”
To those of us of a certain vintage, it all sounds familiar. Not for the first time, Eamo has found a cause and turned the person at the centre of it into the embodiment of injured and righteous nobility, with an undeserving world incapable of comprehending the blessing it has in containing such a hero.
David O’Leary was just such a flower of humanity against the vengeful Charlton ogre in the late 1980s. Roy Keane morphed into the world’s greatest living human being during Saipan, and now Reid is in the high chair of adoration. However, it might be a good idea for Reid to remember how history suggests that chair can turn very rocky very quickly.
For instance – believe it or not children – there was a time when Liam Brady was the anti-Christ too. During the mid-1980s in the Eoin Hand era, Brady was very much out of the Dunphy loop, when everything he did sent the Admiral – then a mere cadet at outrage school of course – into paroxysms of fury. And I mean everything, even the way he ran.
“The arrogant swagger of his gait,” is a marvellously colourful phrase from that time which captured all of Eamo’s persuasive passion but also illustrated the complete lack of nuance that is so often his shortcoming.
The concept of doubt seems to be as alien to Dunphy as it is to a fanatic driving a car at a checkpoint – which probably explains the subsequent lack of embarrassment when he completely changes his mind.
Brady is now a pal while Keane isn’t any more. Just remember that Andy, in case you decide to wallow in victimhood just a little too much.
Not surprisingly, Gilesy is of a similar view to his pal in the Reid debate, but what was really significant on Saturday was Graeme Souness’s determination to plot his own course.
“Ireland don’t have good enough players against a team like that to keep the ball,” he said with the resolution that made him such an outstanding player, the manager who signed Rangers’ first Catholic and almost caused the combustion of Istanbul when he metaphorically, if not literally, stuffed a Galatasaray flag up several thousand Fenerbahce fundaments.
“I think Andy Reid would make a big difference,” said Giles sagely at one point.
“A big difference – in this team?” Souey interjected, doubt dripping from his pursed lips.
“Yes,” Gilesy replied, with just a hint of irritation that bodes well for our futures, if not Il Trap’s.
“Oh, again, Tony, Andy Reid?” an exasperated Trap said to Tony O’Donoghue, minutes after delivering a World Cup play-off place and a 2-2 draw against the world champions.
Such exasperation is hard to blame. The man who was earlier described by our very own Paddy Agnew as a “living legend” in Italy must be getting rightly brassed off about the canonisation of a talented – but hardly world-class – player whose big chance at Spurs ended with a splutter and whose most notable athletic feat since has been the dropping of a stone-and-a-half in weight.
Those of us in possession of even more luxurious backsides are not in a position to mock, but, then again, we are not professional athletes paid to stay in shape.
What Trap is paid to do though is deliver results, and on that basis his backside remains as svelte and pert as any septuagenarian has a right to. In fact, Andy Reid may well end up having a rear view of it disappearing into the South African veldt next year.
