SOCCER:HAVING WATCHED day two of his training camp finish with a lively but decidedly low key four–a-side in Malahide yesterday Giovanni Trapattoni will get to add both quantity and quality to his European Championship squad tomorrow as most of his key players for the trip to Poland join up with the squad.

The Italian appeared to be working his early arrivals fairly hard, with Simon Cox suggesting via Twitter they had been subjected to a triple session.

Still, it was hard to see how Trapattoni might, as he has suggested he will over the coming weeks, add to James McClean’s range of talents, for instance, in a session that ended with what looked a little like a lunchtime knockabout.

Marco Tardelli, as it happened, tipped McClean afterwards to be a surprise package at Euro 2012 just as he is, although he then rather casually observed: “I think the team is fit and we have a good chance of winning the trophy.”

A mile up the road, at an event to promote Carlsberg’s tournament-related Facebook page, Shay Given expanded on the idea, insisting the team would travel to Poland intent on emulating Denmark and Greece.

A decade ago, getting to the last 16 seemed a decent showing in Japan and South Korea after all that preceded the World Cup from an Irish point of view, but there is a clear sense of disappointment when the goalkeeper now recalls the way the team made its exit to a Spanish side he reckons were “hanging on,” before qualification came down to penalty kicks.

Since then Greece have followed in the footsteps of Denmark as unlikely winners of the Europeans and the Donegal man maintains that targeting the trophy this time around is the least Trapattoni’s players owe their manager, the fans and, of course, themselves.

“A good tournament,” he says, “would mean picking up the trophy.”

“People will read that now and think ‘he’s off his trolley’, because of some of the teams we’re playing against and because we’ll be facing some of the best players in the world.

“But if you go into a tournament, you’ve got to be in it to win it. The manager, I’m sure will say the same. We want to go there and try to win the tournament and if we can’t do that, then we want to get as far as we can.

“To say we just want to get out of the group is being negative. We’ve seen in the past what has happened with Denmark and Greece.

“They got one result and then it spurred them on to the next result and then there’s a snowball effect and, before you know it, you can be a long way in the tournament.”

Getting out of a group that contains the last two winners of the World Cup, as well as a Croatia side that has been climbing steadily in the international rankings of late, would represent comfortably more than half the battle but Given is one of those who believes that the scale of the challenge will be good for the team.

“We’re not daunted by it at all,” he says. The opposite, in fact. We’re really excited about it.

“We’re not daunted by any of the teams that we’ll be playing against.

“I think it’s more, especially when you get to my age, more about the excitement and the challenge.”

Boil it all down then and Given’s message seems to be: “Bring on the big guns!”

His manager, one suspects, spent a good deal of yesterday afternoon thinking precisely the same thing.