TIPPING POINT:Aesthetic obligations are usually the preserve of the top dogs and that's not really an Irish role . . . we're better at the underdog stuff

FADÓ, FADÓ children, in those far-off pre-Premier League days, our football thrills were simple. Like when RTÉ started showing games on Saturday afternoons: full games, not just edited highlights, the full 90 minutes, loiiive! Oh the novelty of it all, the anticipatory saliva we dribbled. And then came the reality.

There were no twinkle-toed South Americans back then, no Mediterranean sophisticates caressing the ball into sexy Modigliani-like angles on perfectly-manicured pitches. Think more agricultural, think bullocking Tony Adams ploughing his way through a mucky field, without a tasteful tattoo or an earring in sight. Back then you see it was George Graham’s Arsenal that were the top dogs in English football.

Nostalgia has generated retrospective fondness for that team, particularly the famous back four.

They even got a mention in The Full Monty, the lads only getting a sense of timing when alluding to the offside-trap proficiency of messers, Adams, Bould, Winterburn and Dixon, yeah that Dixon, the blonde anodyne on Match Of The Day.

But the reality at the time was brutal. Watching that Arsenal side, especially in an eye-watering yellow and black diamond away strip that more resembled a radiation warning than anything remotely fashion conscious, was to find out how long 90 minutes could take. They were the ultimate exponents of the long-ball game. Wimbledon might have been blamed for starting that abomination but it was Arsenal who perfected it. And because they were successful, they were on every week. Think about it: a non-stop diet of Perry Groves. It’s a wonder we all didn’t get scurvy.

But it’s remarkable how the more things change, the more they stay the same. Back then there were plenty of noses being turned up at the Arsenal style of play. At the time, just a few clubs could be relied upon to not hoick the ball directly up to the forwards. Liverpool tried to employ midfielders for more than staring at the sky, so did Man U.

Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest were almost continental in their cerebral view of the game. This, we were solemnly told was the “proper” way to play football. The only problem was Arsenal kept winning. And that in turn provoked grumbles about how Graham’s side had an obligation to do more than just punt the ball long onto Alan Smith’s battered noggin.

That obligation to the game’s ideal isn’t just a soccer thing. Gaelic football aficionados have been painting gloomy scenarios about what will happen if club coaches around the country start doing things the Donegal way after the jaw-dropping tedium of the recent semi-final against Dublin. Now while it might be true that watching the “Och Ayes” is painful, that is hardly their problem. In GAA-land, all you really have to worry about is your own tribe, and winning usually keeps the natives good and happy.

Soccer can be different. You only have to look at the distaste with which Real Madrid fans regard the way José Mourinho lines up his team to frustrate and defend. That is not the traditional Real way. Pedestrianism you see doesn’t fill the Bernabeau.

Actually one of the most touching moments of sporting idealism in recent memory came in last May’s Champions League Final when Alex Ferguson didn’t set up his United side to frustrate and disrupt Barcelona. It isn’t the Manchester United way he argued, despite the previous year’s evidence of how Mourinho’s Inter stymied Barca in the semi-final. It was brave and admirable and it didn’t do anything to stop Barcelona running through them like a dose of salts.

The common denominator between Real and United though is that they are two of the biggest sides in world football. Obligations to play “properly” are real to them in the same way that no self-respecting Kerry manager would ever get the Kingdom to play the way Donegal do.

Facing into tomorrow night’s crucial European qualifier in Moscow then, it is important for those railing at the ultra-conservative way Giovanni Trapattoni sets up his Republic of Ireland side that they remind themselves that cerebral obligations to play the right way are usually the preserve of the elite.

It works for Barcelona because they have the players to bring it off. But passing for the sake of passing alone is futile and despite thunderous media indignation about how dire viewing it is watching Ireland right now – and they can make the Arsenal of 20 years ago appear pretty damn sexy – only the most green-eyed, plastic-hammer waving fan cannot suspect Trapattoni might be right in concluding the team can’t be trusted to do anything bar punt it up from back to front as quickly as possible.

It was revelatory to listen Liam Brady after the Slovakia game, wishing we had a creative midfield playmaker of the type that he once was. But wishing won’t make it so.

The truth is Ireland don’t have such a player, haven’t had since Roy Keane.

Neither do England, and they’ve a helluva bigger pick.

As for Scotland, Wales and Norn Iron, well God help us. And the reason nobody in this part of the world has such a player is because they aren’t valued in the type of football played in these islands.

Every time it comes to international stuff, particularly at championship finals, but also during international weeks like this, there is invariably a lot of breast beating about why our players can’t keep control of the ball for a reasonable length of time before passing it to someone they know. But when the national flag waving is over, everyone concentrates again on the club stuff and the immediate requirements of power, pace and mobility take over.

Nothing has changed about that in the two decades since Arsenal went to Liverpool and pulled a championship out of the fire at Anfield, a home of football purity that later managed the rare feat of peeing off a rare and brilliant playmaker in Xabi Alonso to such an extent that he scarpered back to Spain and consoled himself with a World Cup winners medal.

In Irish terms James McCarthy is currently filling the martyred misunderstood hero role we seem to relish so much in this country, Eamon Dunphy more than anyone.

But McCarthy should remember how recently it was that Andy Reid was just such a wronged hero. And now he’s forgotten, back at Forest, traded in for a newer model, younger, shinier, thinner.

As for the elitist obligation to play the right way, let’s not forget that Jack Charlton’s Ireland were an abomination to the eye, and no one gave a monkeys, until they started losing.

Aesthetic obligations are usually the preserve of the top dogs and that’s not really an Irish role. Famously we’re better at the underdog stuff.

So let’s hear it everyone – On Me Head!