AFTER ALL the talk, security seemed loose but still rather tighter than it needed to be at Carton House near Maynooth yesterday as Real Madrid rolled out their stars to train in front of the media for the first time.

Sure, there appeared to be a disproportionate number of high-ranking uniformed Gardai knocking around the place and two members of the Spanish club’s entourage with responsibility for keeping players, press and punters firmly apart did briefly wander from door to door making almost random attempts to prevent journalists entering areas they were supposed to be allowed into until finally they settled upon the door we were actually supposed to be kept out of.

But a handful of children of hotel guests and owners of homes adjoining the estate were allowed to bag autographs as Ronaldo and co made their way from pavilion to pitch for their mid-morning run and four Spanish teenage girls appeared to have gotten themselves into a good position to do the same prior to the afternoon session.

The training itself was decidedly low key. Barely a ball was kicked as the world’s most expensively-assembled squad did some fairly basic fitness work 100 metres or so from the viewing area.

Occasionally Ruud van Nistelrooy and Mahemdou Diarra – both returning from knee surgery – would jog past the media tent and the first couple of times their close proximity prompted a whirr of photographic activity but the novelty gradually wore off and the snappers resumed their pursuit of long lens shots of the world’s priciest (and poutiest) player.

Back in the main group Ronaldo, like most of his new team-mates, spent most of his time standing or wandering about doing next to nothing.

Briefly, towards the end, the proceedings gathered a bit of momentum but before you knew it, the players were all flat on their backs doing warm-down exercises and the journalists started to head for the function room where the first of this week’s press conferences was to be held.

The Portuguese is scheduled to speak to the media tomorrow while yesterday it was club captain Raul who fielded questions from the 50 or so journalists, three quarters of them Spanish. For a while before his arrival the official translator sat wading through a very large dictionary, perhaps preparing herself to cope with any questions about the weather which was of the sort that the Spanish may not, one suspects, have ever felt the need to come up with many descriptive terms for.

While British and Irish clubs have long since been attracted to Spain for warm weather training camps, Real actually came here looking for the opposite and, obliging little nation that it is, Ireland delivered in spades. The morning was nippy and at times very, very wet as the players went through their paces but pro that he is, Raul laughed it off when one local television reporter felt the need to apologise for the conditions.

Now 32, Raul has been living with the press since he was a teenager and this looked about as taxing for him as the earlier training session. The Spanish international pretty much sleep walked through yesterday’s proceedings.

Generally, he came across rather well, if only because, unlike Kaka in an interview the previous day, he had the good sense not to talk about himself in the third person. It was all pretty dull stuff, though, with the striker dealing capably and tactfully with successive questions about Ronaldo, Real’s chances of emulating Barcelona’s remarkable success of last season and even his own chances of getting into the team now that the club has spent the gross domestic product of a small nation state on new talent.

Towards the end he managed to entertain the travelling press corps by pretending he had no idea what the guy from Sky News was on about when he talked about Galacticos and then went on to endear himself to the handful of English reporters present by saying how much he would like Xabi Alonso to join the club from Liverpool over the coming weeks.

More amusing for the neutrals, meanwhile, was Raul’s description of Ronaldo as both an “agreeable lad” and “much more normal that people imagine”. A bit like Irish players answering endless questions about Roy Keane, Raul, one suspects, may need all of his media savvy to prevent the strain from showing over the coming months as he is required to heap praise on the new star turn in Real’s multi-ringed media circus.