The Canadian comedian Norm MacDonald tells a gag that boils down to a dog, owned by a homeless person thinking: “You know what? I could do this myself.” That, in a way, is what the FAI decided yesterday when it bit the bullet and settled up with Giovanni Trapattoni for a chunk of the value of the remainder of his contract.
The Italian was hired at considerable expense in 2008 and handed the task of leading a team back to a major championship after three unsuccessful campaigns. He promptly weighed up what he would have to work with, decided on a plan that involved what he considered to be “playing to our strengths” and went to work.
He failed narrowly, and in controversial circumstances, at the first attempt and succeeded at the second and while there is a section of the team’s supporters that simply never warmed to him, most people would accept that, given the decidedly modest talent pool available to him, that was pretty good going.
The Euro 2012 finals were a major turning point in his five and a half year tenure with Ireland however. Through no particular fault of his own, the team came completely off the rails in Poland where it was outclassed. A terribly tough draw was compounded by an unfavourable order of games on top of which an individual error a few minutes into Ireland’s opener left the team chasing things almost immediately.
Heroic failure
The manager came away from it all worse off than he had been from the heroic failure of Paris and he needed a big campaign this time around to restore his standing.
With key members of the experienced old guard gone, however, the team struggled and the Italian knew the score: Like the dog in the gag, his employers might be expected to put up with downsides like unattractive tactics and the occasional muddled spat with an innocent player as long there was a novelty sized upside in the post from Fifa or Uefa every couple of years. Poor football andpoor results, they could be forgiven for thinking, needn't come with a Trapattoni-sized price tag attached.
It remains to be seen whether it will emerge how much they had to pay the various members of the management team in order to facilitate swift regime change but Trapattoni clearly knew the end was approaching in recent days and conducted himself with considerable warmth and dignity. As he saw it, he deserved the respect of having his contract honoured in one way or another and that’s fair enough but it would be nice to think he was more concerned with making a point than a substantial profit.
He maintained to the end that he had done not just a “good” job but a “great” one, which rang pretty hollow over the last few days as the team edged closer to a rare fourth-place group finish – on the way to which, it appears, they will have taken just two points from the three teams to finish above them.
Being beaten badly by the Germans last October was embarrassing but Trapattoni obviously had a point when he said Joachim Loew’s side was very good and he was missing a lot of players.
No great shakes
Sweden, though, were no great shakes and he ultimately failed in his task last Friday, which was to devise a way to cope with Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Similarly Austria, David Alaba aside, should be pretty much on our level but instead they looked a different class over the closing stages on Tuesday in Vienna, with Ireland left hanging on for a draw that would have done them no good.
Trapattoni’s early success was based on ensuring Ireland were hard to beat but he never managed to inspire an end to the torturously long run without a competitive win against quality opponents, and in the current campaign even the hard-to-beat tag has been shed.
His side lost at home twice this time around, something Ireland had not done for almost half a century, as well as on the road this week to a fourth-seeded side. In most instances, the defeats could be traced back to individual errors, the “little details” he arrived promising to look after but which were, in the end, his downfall.
Clearly it wasn’t good enough and gradually his contention that there was no remotely serious alternative to his approach came to look increasingly unsustainable.
It didn’t help either when Marc Wilson admitted on Sunday that even then, more than five years into his reign, some players still found his instruction difficult to comprehend.
There were misunderstandings that led to conflict too but he certainly wasn’t always the guilty party when it came to fallings out and most of the exiles deserve little enough sympathy. Neither, when it boils down to it, does he, for he was a well-rewarded hired gun who delivered for two-thirds of his time and then paid the price when results slipped.
He is immensely pragmatic, as his treatment of players young and old clearly showed, and has been around the block a few times so he would have expected to be dispensed with just as he had dispensed with so many down the years.
None of which is to say that he won’t be missed, in the press room at least, because while his less considered critics occasionally talk about a man who, as a manager, won 12 league titles in five different countries as well as a Champions League and assorted other titles as if he was a moron or “muppet”, the reality is that he was interesting, entertaining, charming, funny and immensely likeable. In stark contrast to so many of the games his team played, there was never a dull moment.
