WHEN JOHN Delaney was at the heart of the process that led to Giovanni Trapattoni being appointed manager of the Republic of Ireland team, he made a point of publicly involving senior players, with a group of six, including current skipper Robbie Keane, meeting the association’s chief executive to discuss the matter.
Four years on the sense that the squad’s most senior figures were firmly against the prospect of the Italian being replaced may well have played a significant part in prompting Delaney and the FAI to leave the manager in place when the scene appeared to have been carefully set over several days for his departure.
Having made every one of his 35 international appearances under the current regime, Keith Andrews is clearly one of those who feels that he owes the Italian, and the Dubliner said he would have been “devastated” if Trapattoni had been sacked.
Andrews was one of the first one of a handful of new players to be integrated into the squad during Trapattoni’s first year in charge and made his debut against Poland in November 2008. Now a regular in the team and one of the few to emerge from Euro 2012 with any real credit, he believes that Trapattoni should be allowed to build on qualification campaigns in which he has taken the team to a narrow and controversial play-off defeat and then qualification via a two-legged defeat of Estonia.
“It’ll be the FAI’s decision,” he said prior to last night’s dramatic events, “but from the players’ point of view, we’re 100 per cent behind him. We believe in what we’re doing. I’d be devastated. I think a lot of the players would. There’s a lot of hype goes on outside the camp but it’s a very, very happy camp. We love turning up, training, the atmosphere around the hotel. We’ve been very successful under this manager and I think it would be a shame if that changes. We are a million per cent behind this manager and we fully expect to see him here next month for the Greece game.”
The Greece game and the friendly that follows it in February probably featured prominently in the FAI’s deliberations regarding whether or not Trapattoni was to be kept on. While Andrews is one of many to point to the fact that, in the wake of Tuesday’s win in Tórshavn, Ireland are, notwithstanding Sweden’s remarkable result in Berlin, much where they expected to be in the Group C table, there were clearly other considerations. The FAI fears that crowds, virtually guaranteed to be close to capacity just a few years ago will continue to dwindle, in part because of an increasingly negative public perception of the current team’s playing style. A change of coach, the argument went, might significantly boost numbers and so have a positive long term effect on the organisation’s finances.
The FAI’s own misjudgement in relation to the sale of its 10-year, Vantage club tickets is a key contributory factor to its current problems on this front but having heavily discounted admission prices in all sorts of ways since it can, it seems, do little more in terms of pricing to entice people along to games.
An increase in the rate at which the team is being overhauled would be likely to prove popular with supporters as long, crucially, as Ireland do not start losing more regularly and some more attractive football would be welcome too as long as a new manager could coax it out of the decidedly limited available talent pool. In the end, it seems, the board appears to have decided that it was all an impossible gamble to justify right now.
If the Italian has gained a sense this week that he is not quite as positively regarded by many as he would like to think then some small good will have come of what has generally been an extremely messy and embarrassing episode for the association.
As it is, communications between Abbotstown and Milan are unlikely to be improved in the wake of all this although the 73-year-old is likely to have enjoyed his employers having to inform him, as they did last night, that they would like him to continue in his position.
