SOCCER:WHAT WITH the rain pouring down on Ireland's training session, a good portion of the players who were supposed to be taking part in it having cried off due to injuries and a chunk of the press conference afterwards being devoted to the club career of Robbie Keane, it was easy to understand how Giovanni Trapattoni looked like his summer holiday had never happened.
The break, though, hasn’t robbed the Italian of his inexhaustible ability to look on the bright side. When it was put to him that losing so many players, not least in central midfield where he has been left with just two, might make it hard to get the most out of tomorrow night’s friendly with Croatia, he begged to differ.
“When we play against different teams and encounter different situations,” he said, “it’s important that we have different solutions. Stephen Ward has also played in midfield but there is also the option of playing with one striker and two wide players.”
One of the midfielders still available to him is Darron Gibson, who, cautiously, he suggested, might have been better off moving this summer so as to play more.
As for one of his strikers whose future is rarely off the agenda, Trapattoni acknowledged that Keane should be a first-team regular at a top-flight club but suggested that regardless of how things pan out for the Dubliner at, or away, from Spurs, he remains a central part of his plans for the Irish side. “In important games you need important players,” he observed, “and Robbie is a very, very important player.”
Damien Duff, he insisted, had returned to the squad following the Achilles problem that had kept him away at the start of the summer with “the enthusiasm of a 22-year-old.” The winger, he said, had volunteered to come. “He said he could have his Achilles treated and still come with us but I said to be careful, I said the same to (John) O’Shea this time; I said that what’s important is September. But they want to come and that’s a great example to the younger players. It shows how we are becoming a team with pride and the right mentality.”
It was that growing sense of competition within the squad, it seems, and a feeling they might be going somewhere that spurred one of Trapattoni’s options at centre half or left back, Darren O’Dea, to push through his season-long loan from Celtic to Leeds.
“I was very worried about it at the start of the season,” said the 24-year-old Dubliner last night. “I was desperate to get out, I could see the squad doing fantastically well, top of the group and next month deciding whether we qualify.
“I watched the World Cup draw being made and truthfully, it scared me that I could be sitting around and miss out on something like that. Sitting around at Celtic would have hampered me a lot in that, so that’s why it’s great to get out and play first-team football.
“The country (team) is in a good place right now, as in we have come off the back of four wins and everybody is very confident that we’ll qualify. I was genuinely scared of missing out on something like that.”
Quite where he is in the international pecking order after a strong finish to the last campaign is not quite clear, as he readily admits. “I don’t know, truthfully. I did what I felt I had to do last month. But you’ve got Richard Dunne doing that for God knows how long, while Ledge (Seán St Ledger) has come in over the last few years and done really well too. I feel I’ve done well when I’ve come in and that bodes well for the manager when he has plenty to pick from.”
Meanwhile, asked about Sunderland-bound winger James McClean’s decision to opt for the Republic of Ireland ahead of Northern Ireland, Trapattoni said: “It’s good that he’s clarified what he wants. Now we can follow him more.”
