LOCKERROOM: From a position where we could have gone 10 points clear, it looks like we may be facing a good old scrap

WHEN OUL Dev said that thing about rugby and hurling being the games best suited to the Irish temperament it wasn’t meant for public consumption. He was dining in company at the Annual Dinner of the Rockwell College Old Boys. Dev’s sight was failing and – the breed being civilised enough to pass in proper company – he failed to spot an Irish Times reporter sitting at the same table.

Rockwell has an interesting history of hurling and rugby before hurling went underground and in the course of a conversation about that very history Dev expressed his view that these were the games best suited etc etc etc. The remark made the paper the next day and was quite a topic of conversation back then.

Dev was mildly embarrassed (The Ban was in full swing) but he was probably onto something. When you watch the Irish soccer team play you understand the world’s game is suited to aspects of our character but not really to our temperament.

There is always a dissonance between the pragmatism of learned soccer men (or sciolists too) and the thing we want to see when we go to watch the boys in green. It was a true, though we denied it vehemently at the time, that the tragedy of the Charlton era (if there was any tragedy) was that the players whom Big Jack had available to him were capable of better than he let them be. Jack, much though we loved him, could never get past his patrician view of us as loveable little underdogs and so it came to pass that with some exceptions (the USSR in the Euro 88 finals being the best example) we played a style of football which was beneath us but which suited our temperament.

For those who enjoy the sight of a rolling maul inside the oppositions 22 or the sound of two hurls clashing as shoulders and hips meet over a sliotar, the next best thing was that Irish team in full kick-and-rush mode. We played passionately and disrespectfully and just point-blank refused to let others play. There was better in us, much better, there is a certain native genius for the game which runs in a line through men like Giles and Brady and McGrath, a wellspring of imagination and creativity which some Irish manager will someday unleash, making us briefly (one imagines) a team worth paying to see.

In the meantime we have the usual tension between what a cerebral soccer man sees and what the paying customer wants. When Ireland had done losing 1-1 to Bulgaria on Saturday night there was a mild and half-hearted ripple of booing that went about the place. Nothing terminal, just a slightly petulant articulation of frustration.

When we get a goal after 35 seconds, the inclination in our hearts is to drive on, to stitch it into them, to sicken them. Sitting back and containing the opposition for the final 89 minutes of a game isn’t really in our make-up. Especially when we have a midfield which was marked absent on some of the days when passing was being taught.

My God it was hard to look at the charity shop which the Irish midfield represented at times on Saturday night donating possession again and again to the grateful Bulgarians and not pine for the presence of Andy Reid and Stephen Ireland. A little intelligence. A little derring do. Things which would appeal greatly to the Irish temperament. They were sitting in armchairs somewhere. Its upsetting really. A mini-Saipan. A small drama in need of Tommie Gorman.

On Saturday we were ordinary but we were ordinary with a world class manager so in a way we feel it easy to fool ourselves. This is the way the game is played. Contain. Tease. Defend. Maybe Trap is right about these things. He’s a charmer and a fox and he knows what he wants. It’s too late to say that with some ordinary players and a world class manager we are all fur coat and no knickers, but what is becoming clear is that this group we are in is no group of death. (What is the opposite of a Group of Death? The Group of Frivolity? The Group of Bon Vivants?)

Anyway failure to come second while rubbing shoulders with such modest company would be unforgivable. We fritted away the chance to tramp down the dirt on the world Cup hopes of a typically unadventurous but technically decent Bulgarian team on Saturday night having been that goal up while people were still taking their seats.

So from a position where we could have gone 10 points ahead of Bulgaria we now face into a mid-week expedition which may yield nothing. The Bulgarians, if they beat Cyprus at home, will be four points adrift. Enough of a carrot for it to make it worth their while stocking themselves up with Berbatov and co to do us over in Sofia in June. Then we are a point ahead of them with a game more played.

Mick McCarthy often use to muse over that phenomenon, the randomly played notes in the music of chance which dictates whether a manager places his bare bottom over a bacon slicer in Burtons window (a tradition in Barnsley it always seemed) or upon a well-primped cushion on a throne.

That’s the beauty of this group. It unfolds according to the logic of it’s own little dramas. Achieving second place would be no great feat for this Irish side but it would handsomely justify the investment in Trapattoni and his assistants. It would lend some charm to the notion of watching most games on DVD rather than in cold drafty English grounds, we’d take that and being devils for the old celebration, we’d enjoy it and look forward to the play-offs. Near misses sate us.

What if we come third, however. For a time on Saturday we were 10 points clear of Bulgaria and playing at home and we had the chance to buy some breathing space and maybe gird ourselves for the play-offs when they come.

Now we could be in a scrap. It could end not with the old olé, olé, olé stuff which we all crave but with a cold hard morning in mid-October when we wake up and realise we didn’t clinch that second place which we had the chance to make ours and the resources to make ours.

And we’ll have to ask will we treat Trap the way we have treated native managers in the face of such a failure. Will we ask if the emperor we hired at such expense is naked or will we delude ourselves that this is as good as it gets.

Fingers crossed it never comes to that. We have enough hard reality to be dealing with these days. Give us some romance and some fairytale endings Trap. Somebody, somewhere, owes us a good time. We have the temperament for it.