Tom Humphries/LockerRoom:There's a sense in which sport is always surprising and another sense in which it contains nothing but the same old, same old.

Matches may unfold as great organic narratives of luck, fate and romance but seasons always end on schedule with parades of winners and processions of losers, both bound to follow the same hackneyed choreography. Your team wins. My team wins. Somebody had to win.

It's not often you experience moments which at the time feel different, epochal or important, but the past few weeks while not without their wearying moments, have at least been novel.

Our friend Dave Maher the great Sportsfile photographer went to Austria last week and registered a bit of a coup bringing back the shots of Giovanni Trapattoni brandishing the green, white and gold. The impressions that came home were of as much interest as the photos: Trapattoni's professionalism in dealing with a request from an Irish photographer shamed his younger premiership colleagues when it came to manners. The fact he was the last off the training ground having been in among his players cajoling and instructing all morning surprised those of us used to observing men with sulky faces who watch with arms folded as their millionaire charges go through their daily rote.

And the Valentine's Day announcement of the coupling of Marco Tardelli with Trap. All these things suggest a man not just treading the water of late career but hungry for the return to serious duty, a man in the diametrically opposite corner from those jaded souls who told us once they would do anything to play for their country but feel now they would rather not do so because they must look after their club careers or don't like being played out of position or people are mean about their hairstyles - golden geese to whom nobody can say boo.

And that impression was strengthened by the news that when Trapattoni was done getting his photo taken holding the Irish scarf and the Tricolour he didn't discard the props having availed of them cynically to send us a message about how Irish he feels himself to be.

Instead he asked politely if he might keep them. He didn't ask so that we might know him in future as Paddy O'Trap; he asked because his mind is already switched on to the task of hoovering up everything Irish so it can all be assimilated and processed and used. And the refreshing thing is it won't be used to mollycoddle or patronise us with bibulous faff about how uniquely wonderful we are as a race and how he, il Trap, would walk 500 miles for a creamy pint of that Guinness stuff we are fond of. Sure aren't we a great little race of pixieheads altogether begob.

No, the refreshing and charming element of the new situation is that Giovanni Trapattoni doesn't really care about how we feel about him. He's just somebody who will use everything at his disposal in order to get us better football results.

And that's where it feels as if we are standing at the point where tectonic plates shift off each other. The FAI have somehow (to their surprise, one imagines) shifted somebody who is a little out of their league.

In Salzburg when Dave Maher met with Trapattoni there was no retinue of fawning media handlers surrounding him, none of the superstar bull that surrounds the lowliest division one player in English football - just a man shaking hands with a photographer there to do his job, a man understanding what the job was and co-operating on a cerebral level.

And that puts so much welcome pressure on the big knobs and big names of Irish soccer. There has to be a new way of doing things both on and off the field.

The players are playing for a man now who is far less impressed with them than they are with themselves. The FAI serve the international manager now instead of the other way around.

It's time to step up to the plate. The press conferences out in Abbotstown during the week were just part of the process of saying goodbye to the old ways. The whys and whens, for instance, of Denis O'Brien's involvement in setting up the payroll need not necessarily have had to evolve into a negative news story, but the FAI fudged the details, because that is in their nature.

And soon what might have been sold as a simple sponsorship arrangement became O'Briengate. We don't feel that because O2 sponsor Arsenal they own a chunk of Arsène Wenger's brain; 02 don't demand to be allowed pick the forwards in away league matches or anything.

The FAI's handling of the O'Brien contribution sent everyone off looking up the records for similar deals, for evidence of a previous interest in (let alone a previous passion for) soccer, for word that O'Brien had bought influence, power or access for his money. And what was a good-news story (Trapattoni) came to have an odd smell off it by the following day. Disclosures forced us to blow the cobwebs off our opinions of millionaire tax-exile businessmen who deny the nation the benefit of their tax contribution to do with it as they please but go around patronising us with their knight-in-shining-armour routines. The more we were forced to think about the O'Brien deal the less we liked it. The FAI have a knack that way.

Trapattoni's appointment has, one hopes, put an end to this era of mollycoddling and patronising us as fans. It will put an end also to the systematic mollycoddling of players. One series of social conventions will cease to be operative and we will all be the more honest for it. We won't be pandered to as the "greatest fans in the world". The players might be told, as were several at Bayern Munich, that they are among the most spoiled in the world.

And that is the fragment of sports essence that has been missing for some time from the Irish scene. Brian Kerr put it up to the millionaires' club a few years back, but they didn't want to know about watching videos and thinking hard and improving their preparation. Because he didn't have a name or an income with which to gull them and because the players didn't feel they owed him the loyalty anybody else would have felt Brian Kerr was owed there was a negative exercise of the concept of player power.

In Cork at the end of the week a different exercising of the same player-power phenomenon had a more positive outcome. Apart from having to give a basically meaningless commitment not to strike again so long as the county board are good boys, the players won everything and the county board won nothing except a fig leaf to cover their embarrassment at having to dynamite Teddy Holland out of his position.

In Cork when Kieran Mulvey's arbitration came through, the county board were essentially routed. That doesn't have to be the end for certain high-profile figures. Not being able to work within the brave new world might just be the end though. Mulvey has bequeathed to Cork one last chance and Cork in turn have offered us a picture of the future of player relations, which have moved on from the old employer/employee model.

What has happened in Cork will have profound implications for the way teams are managed and run. What has happened in Abbotstown will have a similar impact on everything to do with the flagship side of Irish soccer. We love our flags and our Tricolours and our ole ole ole, we love our big sunny days by the banks of our own lovely Lee, but the realpolitik behind the big shows changed last week forever.

What a gift it is to be born in interesting times, most particularly when you have a column to fill of a Monday morning.