Tom Humphriesgets to hear the manager field the most fawning, crawlingly, lickspittlely questions ever asked

SIGNORE E SIGNORI, be seated please! Showtime! Featuring the comedy stylings of . . . Giovanni TRAP-A-TTONI!

He enters the room. Nah, he owns it, baby. He owns this room and every cheap-suited sucker in the joint. Fifty expensive cameras go click, click, whirr. Two hundred tape recorders go to red light. The Italian media break into spontaneous applause. The TV guy at the front thinks of a 50th different way to ask if this isn’t the greatest, most meaningful moment ever in the history of the world. The lovely Manuela sits to Trap’s right. The equally lovely Robbie Keane sits to his left. It is as if they are invisible.

This is the Trap Show. All Trap, all the time. Music maestro please!

“It home,” he says with a smile, “we applaud after a victory not before a game.”

See? Simple brilliance. Does he mean us? At home? Does he mean that he is Irish now? He is with us and Italy is his ex. A whole boot-shaped country jilted by this twinkly legend. Ours! Like Big Jack! At home with us.

Or is it an in-joke with the Italians. Home. Letting them know that they should behave with a little more cool in front of the visiting yoiks with the red faces. He’s playing with us, playing with us all.

This is home for now, though. This room. This stage. His rules. The Italians and the Irish compete in the business of shushing each other as he speaks in his low growl. Beneath the camera noise only Manuela’s perky translations are audible, but we know when Giovanni has said something funny or wise because the Italians in the front rows – which they have commandeered like bargain hunters queuing since before dawn – either nod appreciatively or dissolve into laughter, leaving us hanging on, waiting for Manuela’s words that we might join in with our smidgin of love.

The match, Giovanni? “I think about the famous legend of David and Goliath. We are David. Italy should be Goliath. Legends stay legends, but I have a lot of trust in my team. We have to believe in everything we have done so far. We have five matches to go before the end of qualifications. We believe.”

Legend! He said the Bible was legend! Loveable old heretic! No time to analyse though. The tug of love is on.

How emotional will you be when the national anthem is being played, asks a journalist of Italian and female persuasion.

“It is my national anthem, but I get equally emotional when I hear the Irish anthem,” says Giovanni smoothly.

“Maybe you get confused,” she says with mild disdain. Behind her we are beaming. In your face bi-atch!

The Italians love Trap and today in Bari they love him more than ever. Bari is the home of Antonio Cassano who has been cruelly dropped from the national team by the dastardly Marcello Lippi. Many warm, fond questions are asked of Trap who, of course, gave Cassano his big break and who was repaid handsomely by Cassano’s performances in the European championships in Portugal. Happy days.

Trap walks a clever line, never once criticising Lippi but conceding that in the case of Cassano, "Yes, I advised him like he was my son". (This is clever stuff. The antipathy of southern Italy, the mezzogiorno, for the suave industrial north can never be underestimated.)

So after a series of Cassano questions reflecting the regional discontent, they ask for a definitive view: “Will the atmosphere be an advantage for the Irish team?”

Trap is too clever for this sort of clumsy tackle.

“The Italians will support Italy,” he says. “As a national coach, not naming names, I have been in the same situation before.” (This is a nice jab at the fawning laptop jockeys in front of him, those Italian hacks whose colleagues kicked Trap to death over his failure to bestow enough love on Roberto Baggio, and later Alberto Gilardini, when he was Italian manager. That stint finished with many in this room dismissing him as a beaten docket. Which he may transpire to be, but for now he is our beaten docket and we love him.)

He tapdances on like Astaire mounting a pristine white staircase in topper and tails. He has white gloves and a cane. The show reaches its finale. He pauses to field bouquets delivered in the form of the most crawlingly fawning, lickspittlely questions ever asked at a press conference.

“There are T-shirts around town. Some with you posing as Obama. Others as St Patrick! Which do you prefer?”

“I don’t get any money for either,” he says, bringing the house down.

Anybody able to top that? Yes! We have a bid.

After quoting a list of encomiums from men like Lippi and Zoff, the questioner asks Trap to define, if he can, his own greatest quality.

Trap should really at this point claim his greatest quality to be an ability to keep his dinner down in the face of oily sycophancy. Obligingly, though, he points out that his greatest trait is his ability to not look back.

“I think you have to leave a mark everywhere you go. But all the places I go I haven’t always been remembered for my victories, but it is important to be remembered and loved for your work.”

We all nod gravely. So true. Yet so romantic.

But then, surfing in on a tide of nausea, is another questioner. The capper. The showstopper. The big number!

“Giovanni. At your age you are still putting everything in. Still changing your life over. You not only take over a new job but you take a new job in a different country. You go to press conferences and you speak English and you speak German. In a way you are an example to many of us. We joke about it, but your courage is to be admired.”

Even the hacks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to groan. Giovanni, unable to detect an actual question, replies with some wisdom.

“A great philosopher said there are only three certainties in life. You live, you die, you change. I change.”

And then it is over. No more questions. No encores. He rises. We all smile.

The great man has disproven his own maxim. If you want to see a show, he likes to say, you go to La Scala and not the stadium. But this has been pure show! Broadway and the West End! But in a stadium! Grazie e bounanotte!

PS: Giovanni had no team news ahead of tonight’s big game.