Redemption realistic for exiled Ireland, but only on Trap's terms
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They are not exactly the Three Tenors -- not one of them has yet displayed the extrovert panache of the late Pavarotti when he invaded the football stages of Rome and Los Angeles -- but rarely can a trio of World Cup performers have sung so coherently and consistently from the same sheet of music.
Giovanni Trapattoni for Ireland, Fabio Capello for England and Italy's returning conqueror Marcello Lippi, have all, and in almost identical fashion, hammered home the same imperative.
It is the making a team, a unifying of purpose that already has shifted the balance between the requirement of special talent and the importance of accepting that one rule applies to all who care to wear the shirt of their country.
Stephen Ireland's reluctance to do this is no doubt a source of some sadness to Trapattoni, but then we don't need clairvoyance to imagine his reaction when reading the file of the talented 22-year-old from Cork.
It would have been roughly the same as his compatriot Capello when he first encountered an English dressing room inhabited by a group of superstars who had been pampered quite relentlessly in the years of Sven-Goran Eriksson and his hapless successor, Steve McClaren.
Superstar
This isn't to say Ireland is a superstar; merely the owner of talent which, if properly marshalled and motivated, might be of considerable service to a team not overburdened with blazing virtuosity.
Capello cleared out the agents and the bad habits, the sloppy discipline, the casual dress, the rarely idle mobile phones, and he told players like David Beckham and Michael Owen that playing for England was no longer a right but a privilege granted to those who might still have something viable to offer. Trapattoni's approach to Ireland may have been less abrasive, but the point can hardly have been missed by Ireland -- or anyone else harbouring doubts about his commitment to the cause.
If the player did have second thoughts, if he displayed some inclination to climb out of the appalling hole he dug for himself when his brief international career ended so ignominiously, well, redemption might be available. But on Trapattoni's terms; there would be no beseeching, nothing beyond the informal inquiry of his assistant Liam Brady.
With his point, made gently enough, that a team's tactics, and instincts, can be more easily controlled than its personnel, Trapattoni is merely underlining the classic point of so many who have led teams to success on the international stage. Before he returned to lead the Azzurri he guided, without notable help from blazing individual talent, to the World Cup crown two years ago, Lippi said, "So many make the mistake of believing that the big job is to assemble all the best players, but when you do this you often pay too high a price. The best players, of course, don't always make the best team."
If he saw it, the Lippi quote would have resonated in the mind of no-one more powerfully than Jack Charlton, the man who so relentlessly purged the cult of personality in Ireland's most successful spell in international football. Once he asked England's only World Cup-winning manager, Alf Ramsey, why it was he had chosen to place him among such silky talents as his brother Bobby and Bobby Moore. "It is, Jack, because I don't necessarily pick the best players. I pick the best team."
In the affair of Stephen Ireland, Trapattoni found a superb spokesman in Richard Dunne this week.
With fine economy, the Manchester City man spoke of the weariness he felt at constantly being asked about the possible return of a player who had, for his own reasons, quit the colours. Dunne didn't further muddy the water, he didn't speak of any disgust at the manner of Ireland's abdication, the lies that accompanied it, but he did raise the most pertinent point of all. What if Ireland built on their promising start in qualifying, what if they marched on South Africa 2010, what, quite, would the re-appearance of Stephen Ireland say to the foot soldiers who had made it happen?
It would declare that you could treat the whole process with contempt, you could luxuriate in the rewards and the celebrity of the Premiership without irksome diversions in places like Georgia and Cyprus, and then, if the mood took you, if a little career-enhancing glory might just be involved, you might just change your mind.
That Dunne should even touch on the possibility is maybe no small aria to the psychological change that Trapattoni may already have worked.
At the very least it suggests a change of emphasis, a certain fancying of possibilities under a man who, it appears, has laid down values that will not waver with every new gust of circumstance.
Stephen Ireland lied his way out of the Irish shirt. Whether or not he ever confronts the truth expressed this week by Dunne will, we have to believe, remain some way down Trapattoni's list of priorities. How could it be otherwise in any football man who knows how to make a team?
- James Lawton
