SPORT REVIEW 2011:The Italian's style of play has attracted its fair share of critics, but it's hard to dismiss Giovanni Trapattoni's achievement of guiding the Republic of Ireland to the European Championships

LANDING THE Philips-sponsored Manager of the Year award is scarcely going to silence the sizeable portion of supporters who find it impossible to admire his methods. However, after a year in which the success of Leinster’s rugby and Dublin’s football teams, to name just the most obvious two, presented the judging panel with worthy alternatives, it did tend to underline the way the Republic of Ireland’s qualification for next summer’s European Championship is viewed by those for whom style need not take absolute precedence over substance.

The Irish, Trapattoni’s critics will argue, achieved second place in their group without ever having to beat a team ranked above them. They were then handed by far the easiest of the potential play-off opponents; an Estonian side whose inexperience was all too apparent when the two teams met in Tallinn where the locals’ succession of errors amounted in the end almost to an implosion.

And even before that the luck of the Irish, or Italian, had been evident at key points in the campaign. Macedonia’s inability to score in Skopje had very little to do with the quality of Ireland’s defending while Russia should have had a hatful in Moscow in spite of it.

Ultimately, Armenia posed the greatest threat to Ireland’s grip on a place in the play-offs but they too crumbled when it mattered, almost handing victory to Trapattoni’s men on a plate when they came to Dublin for the last group game of the campaign.

And yet the 72-year-old’s achievement in getting this group of players to the point where they will play three of the game’s top international sides for a place in the quarter-finals of a major championship is hard to dismiss.

Sure, the team enjoyed its share of good fortune but the players’ apparent regard for Trapattoni in spite of occasions on which he has effectively pointed to their collective shortcomings as a hurdle he has had to overcome suggests some sort of gift for man management.

Certainly, for all the luck involved, it is impossible to imagine a team that didn’t want to play for each other, or their manager, emerging from the Luzhniki Stadium with anything to show for their efforts.

The way the manager has sought to overcome the limited collective ability at his disposal is consistently criticised, though, and the tactical approach, with its emphasis on direct football played with passion and consistent pressure on opponents, is certainly not easy on the eye. But the inability of the team to pass their way forward without losing possession, even against the weakest of opponents, suggests that an alternative approach would not be too rewarding.

Critically, in any case, only one of the 13 other nations that came through the qualifying process to reach Poland and Ukraine – the Czech Republic – is ranked lower than Ireland by Fifa.

And none is as poorly represented at the top end of Europe’s club game. Unless you count Darron Gibson, which Alex Ferguson appears not to anymore. Excluding the Derryman, Ireland, in fact, are one of only four finalists not to have a first-team player at an English top six side anymore. However, each of the other three – Sweden, Ukraine and Greece – does have at least one at a major continental power.

Trapattoni’s achievement then has been to forge a team that can overcome, no matter how unconvincingly at times, inferior teams, while almost always making life difficult for superior ones.

In the three and a half years or so since he has been in charge of the side, Trapattoni has never stopped talking about the “little details” and in at least some of this year’s games his determination to convey to his players the need for higher levels of concentration and commitment has borne fruit.

Moscow stands out as the most remarkable game of the year, which says something about the nature of Ireland’s campaign, but of course there was the spirited friendly win over Italy in Liege and the scale of the 4-0 success in Tallinn, Ireland’s biggest away win in a competitive game for 17 years.

Trapattoni made a fair bit of his side’s success in the Carling Nations Cup but the fairly abysmal quality of the Welsh and Northern Irish sides that played in Dublin before the summer ensured that only the narrow win over Scotland really counted for much.

Still, clean sheets were delivered in all three games and those achieved in the latter formed the start of a record-breaking sequence of games in which the team managed not to concede.

Along the way, Trapattoni refreshed his squad slightly, replacing Kevin Kilbane with Stephen Ward and establishing Jonathan Walters and Simon Cox as part of his striking line-up. But there are still significant concerns for the manager as he turns his attention towards 2012 and the prospect of meeting Croatia, Spain and Italy.

Many of the squad’s better players are edging towards the end of their careers. Richard Dunne’s performance in Moscow is a reminder of how important a player he is when fit and fully engaged while Robbie Keane’s goals tend to keep his critics at bay. Even their ability to deliver in a tournament situation against sides of far higher quality must be questionable at this stage, however.

Shay Given showed worrying signs of vulnerability towards the end of the qualification campaign while Damien Duff, for all his talent and guile, no longer has the pace to go past a good full back which tends to render his game somewhat predictable at this stage.

All will travel in the summer hopeful of standing out in games that will place them firmly centre stage again. In the end, though, Ireland’s chances of being successful at the tournament still appear to come down to Trapattoni’s ability to make the team add up to more than the sum of its parts.

On the home front, in addition to successfully defending their league title, Shamrock Rovers made a significant breakthrough in Europe by becoming the first Irish side to qualify for the group stages of a Uefa club competition. Rovers dramatically beat Partizan Belgrade away in extra time thanks to a stunning goal from Pat Sullivan and a penalty by Stephen O’Donnell to make it through in the Europa League.

Since then, they’ve been discovering how hard it is to compete with the sort of teams who routinely play at that level.