TIPPING POINT:It's easy to imagine Mick McCarthy smiling to himself and figuring "once bitten, twice shy" when he hears the calls for him to lead the Republic again, writes BRIAN O'CONNOR
TO THOSE of us who hack for a living, it always comes as a surprise when evidence crops up of the stuff actually being read sometimes. So to the man in Dunnes who said on Saturday: “Go easy on Trap, the players are shite,” thanks a lot, and sorry for inquiring if you were one of the FAI’s Malcolm Tuckers.
It’s interesting though. The general consensus now is the only thing preventing the FAI from firing Giovanni Trapattoni’s ass is the cost of paying him off. And that many of the players have given up the ghost with him. But presuming the general public have washed their hands of the legendary Italian too might be dangerous.
Joe and Josephine Public persist in believing they can make their own minds up about most issues, but particularly football, which is an irritant for professional critics whose job requirements mean they have to believe they know better, but at least keeps things interesting.
Even being beaten by the Faroes may not be enough for a mass turn on the Irish manager. It might even be to Trap’s benefit. One thing we’re suckers for in this country is a victim, even one knocking down €1.5 million a year for doing not very much. And Trap is taking an awful lot of flak right now, enough maybe for people to turn against the critical tide.
If they want him out, the manager’s most fervent critics need to ease up on the invective a bit. It could be counter-productive.
Sadly, though, asking us in the commentating class to rein in the hyperbole is like asking Frankel not to gallop. It’s simply not the nature of the beast. Even when it’s potentially self-defeating.
The 6-1 hiding the Germans inflicted on Ireland will sting for quite a while. But not quite as long it seems as the memory of Eamon Dunphy endorsing the claims of Mick McCarthy in the succession stakes immediately after the game. It is remarkable how that particular contribution caught the weekend zeitgeist. “Did you hear Dunphy about McCarthy?” has been the vibe.
Even by Dunphy’s standards of shamelessly contrarian volte-faces, the McCarthy line was a doozy. And the delivery was perfect, an I-have-sinned-but-I-am-big-enough-to-admit-it pathos mixed in with a for-the-common-good rallying call. McCarthy is now the real deal, a saviour among us, fitting for the promised land of Irish football rehabilitation.
This is the same Mick McCarthy that 10 years ago epitomised everything trite, safe, bourgeois, gutless and unimaginative; who perched himself on the side of a Pacific Béal Na Bláth and picked off the wild fella from Mayfield peeping his noble but ill-fated brow from behind the Crossley tender of football purity.
Flexibility of opinion is an intellectual plus but Mick’s rehabilitation is a flip-flop of such chutzpah it could be hired out to bare feet on Bondi Beach. It’s not just Dunphy who indulges in such flexibility either. Not by a long way. Plenty other football experts are describing McCarthy as the obvious choice to replace Trapattoni, the same Trapattoni hailed as the continental Messiah when he was first appointed.
But that was then and this is now. Opinions have done a 180. The language employed has done the same. And it’s this which seems to be getting on people’s wicks; the absence of a linguistic middle-ground, any shade of grey in the black and white definitives trotted out by a commentariat determined to outdo itself in frothing indignation or spurting adulation.
You can see the point. There is a school of thought which states any argument is valid so long as it is stated vehemently enough, a flawed theory that nevertheless can pay off spectacularly. And the reason it pays off is because – and you ain’t gonna like this Sean in the shop – the grey middle is boring.
No one wants to hear or read grey middle. Most of us get enough of that at home, or at work. When it comes to sport we want certitudes. Even if they don’t exist, we want them. And it is our gig in the hack-kingdom to provide them.
Not that it makes us popular. Trapattoni could lose 6-1 again tomorrow night, and get the team lost on a raft in the North Atlantic on the way back, and he will still cut a more popular figure than his critics.
The relationship between luminary and critic really does resemble that between dog and lamppost and there’s no mistaking in the public mind which gets to trot off head held high. That has something to do with media excesses and a lot to do with it being easier to identify with the personality at the centre rather than the usually anonymous carpers at the side.
It was Disraeli who pointed out how much more easy it is to be critical than correct, and it is even easier when there’s nothing personal at stake, like a job. But that doesn’t mean criticism is irrelevant. No less a successor of Disraeli than Churchill pointed out how critics can be a necessary evil, a bit like pain: it points attention to where there is something wrong.
And there is clearly something wrong in the Irish set-up right now. What isn’t so clear is why it should be Trapattoni. Okay being the boss means carrying the can but some of the stuff being flung at the manager is so over-the-top it risks tipping over the edge into irrelevance.
It was certainly noticeable over the weekend how a drip-feed of discontented comments from “friends” of the players kept the heat on the manager, leaving the squad to settle into a presumably comfortable vat of pained martyrdom out at the airport.
Professional players have a long history of looking for someone else to blame and this looks a very convenient ‘out’ for a squad of players who clearly are not short of self-regard but have an undeniable deficiency of quality when it comes to the highest class.
Maybe Trapattoni doesn’t organise them exactly the way they would like, and maybe he doesn’t handle them with kid-gloves but we’re talking professionals here, professionals who are fundamentally playing for Ireland, not Giovanni Trapattoni. It surely has to be a matter of professional pride to at least try in a match. Blaming the manager for not doing so is a cop-out, which allows another bullet be put into the chamber of a critical cannon that is resolutely being aimed at Trap right now.
Schooled as he has been by an even more hysterical media school in Italy, it’s hard to see him folding like an origami swan through all this. And he has seen enough to know how the critical tide is not restricted to just one turn.
His compatriot Enzo Bearzot went from zero to hero during the course of the 1982 World Cup finals alone. Alex Ferguson needed a famous FA Cup goal against Nottingham Forest to hang on to the Man U gig. Mick O’Dwyer was on the verge of the bullet in Kerry. And let’s not forget a certain former Irish manager, a man that took Ireland to the World Cup and became a public pariah for his trouble. In fact, while the vortex of footballing controversy swirls its way towards a small rock in the cold north, it’s not difficult to imagine Mick McCarthy smiling to himself and figuring once bitten, twice shy.
