SOCCER ANALYST: Trapattoni got his tactics absolutely spot-on and the players carried them out to the letter

SOME MIGHT view the two draws against Bulgaria in this campaign as missed opportunities, that our failure to hold on to leads in Dublin and Sofia has denied us the chance of putting even more pressure on Italy. But while you could certainly argue that about the home game, I think Saturday’s result was just fine. The critical thing was not to lose, to maintain that five-point gap over the hosts. Job done.

It might seem unambitious to be focusing on second in the group rather than winning it, but I just think it’s realistic. If you had offered Giovanni Trapattoni a point before Saturday’s match he’d have snapped your hand off. He was never going to get the team to really push on after Richard Dunne’s goal, nor after they equalised. He was perfectly content with a point. He’s realistic, too.

You have to say he got his tactics absolutely spot-on and the players carried them out to the letter. But, while I’m not taking anything away from our performance, I was very surprised by the Bulgarians. They seemed quite content to play in front of us for most of the game, rarely making any real effort to get behind us. From a team that needed to win that was strange. Dimitar Berbatov just seemed intent on dropping deep, like he saw himself as a play-maker rather than a striker. They knew exactly how we’d be set up, there were no surprises there, and they knew exactly how we’d play. Yet they tested us much less than I expected.

Technically, Stiliyan Petrov is an excellent player – as we saw when he ran the game in Dublin – but sometimes even the best of players can have too much of the ball. It happens often, team-mates constantly passing to their best player, regardless of his position, regardless of whether someone else is better placed. They’re were doing it with Berbatov a bit as well. Sometimes you just have to take on more responsibility yourself.

I think that played into our hands. They kept giving it to those two, but they were in such deep positions they really couldn’t hurt us from there. Apart from anything, I thought they would have tried to put Sean St Ledger under more pressure, considering it was his first competitive game.

And I thought St Ledger did well. He was helped, of course, by Dunne, who was just outstanding on a day when you really needed him to be because the young fella alongside him was making his competitive debut. It was a towering performance, but that’s what we expect from him now. He led the team.

St Ledger, I’d guess, came away wondering what all the fuss about stepping up to international football was about – he’ll have had tougher games in the Championship. But it’s all part of his education. At this level teams won’t necessarily have somebody playing up against you all the time – players drop off, it’s a bit more subtle, so you have to learn to be more watchful. They prey on those moments where you lose concentration or make a slip, rather than giving you a real physical battle, which is what St Ledger would be used to.

And Kevin Kilbane’s mistake shows precisely why, at this level, you have to be so watchful. The slightest slip and good players punish you. After Saturday, and the own goal at Croke Park, Kilbane won’t have happy memories of Bulgaria in this campaign.

Kilbane is a real good squad player, an honest performer and good to have in the dressingroom, but he’s not a natural defender. When everyone is fit again – if Steve Finnan comes back, for example – I think there is a case for switching John O’Shea to left-back.

Caleb Folan impressed me, I thought he did well, he was a real handful for them. It’s a while since we’ve had an option like Folan, and if he can build on that performance he might just be the one to get the best out of Robbie Keane for us – and, for me, Keane has always played better with someone in Folan’s mould.

When you haven’t got much creativity in midfield, which we don’t, it’s never a bad option to have a big man up front. You don’t want to overplay it, but it can be useful, even if just for the last 20 minutes of games – get Aiden McGeady down the flanks to chuck it in for the big forward, with Keane picking up the bits and pieces. At least Folan’s emergence has created more competition for places up front, which we really haven’t had for a while.

But we still lack any real creativity or guile in midfield, and that showed again on Saturday. True, replacing Keith Andrews or Glenn Whelan with a more creative player would constitute a gamble in Trapattoni’s mind, but it just makes the Stephen Ireland situation all the more ridiculous. Yes, we’ve all tired of the story by now, but Trapattoni doesn’t sound to me like he’s given up, he knows more than anyone that Ireland is the type of player we just don’t have, and he would, most definitely, improve the team. We’ll see what happens on that front.

So, at the end of a long season for the players, I think Saturday’s draw was a more than decent result, putting us in a very good position in the group. It is unlikely we’ll catch Italy, they’ve always seemed to be able to get the results they needed, like in tournament football. If they come to Dublin looking for a point in October, they would be very hard to break down.

But for us to keep up that pressure, to keep them looking over their shoulder, we – needless to say – have to beat Cyprus in September. If we do – and we should – with Montenegro at home in the last game, that meeting with the Italians would be intriguing.

Second in the group is the likely outcome, but you just never know.