Spirited Ireland will need to rediscover rare Paris verve

SOCCER: Russia v Republic of Ireland: IF GIOVANNI Trapattoni and Marco Tardelli fail to have their contracts renewed by the FAI over the coming weeks then, to misquote slightly from Casablanca, they'll always have Paris.

More precisely, they’ll always have the World Cup play-off game where the Republic of Ireland played with a rare verve and Thierry Henry’s handball prevented a triumph for the visitors that seems to become more of a certainty with every single retelling.

Tonight, they and their players have the opportunity to supplant the saga of hopes cruelly dashed at the Stade de France with a tale of genuine heroics and expectations exceeded.

It’s a tall order, of course, but the manager was talking again yesterday about how much this Irish team has improved under his guidance and if they really could conjure up a victory between them in Moscow then his critics would have little option but to eat their words, at least for a month or so.

And Trapattoni insists his side will play to win although, in reality, taking the three points that would put Ireland in the driving seat for an automatic place in next year’s European Championships looks a little implausible.

Indeed, it’s hard to be convinced, especially when the veteran coach is saying, almost with his next breath, that Ireland, first and foremost, can’t afford to lose.

The real fear is that he’ll be reviewing his take on it all by 7.30pm Irish time tonight and it’s not hard to visualise him emphasising, in the wake of a defeat, the possibilities that still exist for this team in the play-offs.

To be fair, Trapattoni has a difficult balancing act to negotiate as he prepares for the encounter at the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow.

The clean sheets kept against Croatia and Slovakia have given him something to keep on shouting about but the performances and lack of goals scored have robbed the Irish players of the psychological momentum they appeared to have built at the tail end of last season.

Having lost John O’Shea and Seán St Ledger, he has little option but to start with Stephen Kelly and Darren O’Dea. The first has struggled at this level while the latter, for all his occasionally frantic heroics against Italy and Macedonia in recent months, is still unproven at the highest level.

Elsewhere, there is no avoiding the fact that he needs to get a great deal more out of Aiden McGeady and Kevin Doyle, both of whom were below par against Slovakia last Friday night, while Stephen Ward, Keith Andrews and Glenn Whelan have to stand up and be counted if the Irish are not to find themselves firmly on the back foot for long stretches as they did in the home match against tonight’s opposition.

Retaining possession a little more effectively will be a necessity while the team could also do with collectively exerting more influence over the pattern of the game.

Confidence is a key factor in achieving either and the manager duly spent a significant portion of yesterday’s press conference at the team’s enormous hotel close to the Dynamo Stadium putting a gloss on Friday’s events at the Aviva where, he claimed, his side had had the better chances and deserved to win.

None of the assembled journalists were buying it and it’s hard to imagine the players will.

Still, they’ll appreciate the 72-year-old’s determination to be positive ahead of a game in which Ireland are looking not only to earn their first win in Moscow but to become only the fourth ever visiting team to secure a competitive victory in the city.

Two of the others, Germany and Slovakia, have done so in the last and current campaigns respectively so you might argue that the place is not the fortress it once was. However, the Irish tend to settle for the spirited avoidance of defeat on the road themselves and deep down you get the feeling that the majority of the camp would settle for that.

The manager, though, was keen to emphasise that he had first-hand experience of success stories at the Luzhniki Stadium, remarking that when he had been playing for Italy they came here and secured the draw they needed and qualified for the 1962 World Cup finals in Chile.

As it happens, the two sides didn’t meet in those qualifiers but Italy did face the Soviet Union in late 1963 in the preliminary rounds of the following year’s European Championship. They lost 2-0 at this afternoon’s venue and 3-1 on a aggregate and were eliminated. The Soviets went all the way to the final before being beaten by Spain.

These are, of course, what the manager himself likes to describe as “little details”.

Stung, perhaps, by the scale of the criticism of his tactics after Friday’s game, Trapattoni insisted that he is not an inherently defensive coach. “If I was,” he maintained with some passion, “I could not have achieved all that I have over the course of my management career.” His “simple philosophy”, he said, is to “score more goals and concede less”.

It isn’t a bad place to start with any team and if he pulls it off tonight, he will, more than three years into his tenure, have something much more than hard luck stories and a team that’s hard to beat to bring into talks with his employers.

MOSCOW LINE-UPS

REPUBLIC OF IRELAND (4-4-2)

Shay Given (Aston Villa), Stephen Kelly (Fulham), Richard Dunne (Aston Villa), Darren O’Dea (Leeds United), Stephen Ward (Wolverhampton Wanderers), Damien Duff (Fulham), Keith Andrews (Ipswich Town), Glenn Whelan (Stoke City), Aiden McGeady (Spartak Moscow), Robbie Keane (LA Galaxy), Kevin Doyle (Wolverhampton Wanderers).

RUSSIA (probable, 4-4-1-1)

Malafeyev (Zenit St Petersburg), Anyukov (Zenit St Petersburg), Ignashevich (CSKA Moscow), Berezutsky (CSKA Moscow), Zhirkov (Anzhi Makhachkala), Zyryanov (Zenit St Petersburg), Shirokov (Zenit St Petersburg), Semshov (Dynamo Moscow), Arshavin (Arsenal), Pavlyuchenko (Tottenham Hotspur), Kerzhakov (Zenit St Petersburg).