AS HE seems to have done at least once in the lead up to a few big games of late, Richard Dunne was obliged to sit out training at Malahide yesterday although Marco Tardelli insisted afterwards that the Dubliner will stage his usual recovery in order to feature against Russia on Friday night.
Darron Gibson is similarly expected to shake off a knock to his knee in training that required an icepack as the players left the training ground for the team hotel. However, on balance the Irish management team, who lost Damien Duff and Keith Andrews to injury on Monday, might regard yesterday as more encouraging following the news that Roman Pavlyuchenko will not be travelling to Dublin due to an ankle problem.
“Last night we made a decision that Pavlyuchenko will not travel with the squad to Dublin and Skopje,” said the Russian manager, Dick Advocaat, who has called in Zenit St Petersburg striker Alexander Bukharov as a replacement striker.
Dunne, who came up against Pavlyuchenko on Saturday at White Hart Lane before the striker was replaced at the break, had struggled ahead of the game in Armenia last month with a quad muscle strain and subsequently missed a couple of games for Aston Villa with a knee injury.
This time out, his presence on the sidelines, as the bulk of the squad was put through its paces, was down to tiredness in the wake of the Tottenham game, insisted Giovanni Trapattoni’s right-hand man, with Tardelli slightly reluctantly agreeing with a “100 per cent” estimate of the defender’s chances of starting against the Russians after it had been put to him by a TV reporter anxious for certainty. “He feels well but it is better for him to have the rest for one day,” insisted the Italian.
“It is a precaution and there is no problem. The knee, is not very good right now but he played on Saturday so for now there is a rest.”
Leaving aside a slight sense of alarm regarding Dunne’s fitness, it was a quiet day out in north county Dublin where any Russian spies would surely have been amused by the work undertaken by some of the Irish players late in the session on approach work and finishing.
The general format involved somebody knocking a ball from midfield to a team-mate out wide on the left and then looking to get forward to turn the subsequent cross home. The success rate was naturally lowered by the fact that most of the team’s most likely scorers on Friday night were elsewhere on the training pitch, but there certainly wasn’t much produced by those who did participate to strike fear into any prospective opponents.
Trapattoni stood in the middle of it all, cheerfully grinning, but even he must have wondered at times what exactly was going on. On Monday, he had quietly explained that in Italy players who were injured report for international duty out of courtesy before being excused. On this occasion, he must have felt like screaming once or twice about his players’ general ability to cross and beat a goalkeeper in an otherwise undefended goal.
On the defensive front, as it happens, there was some good news, although nothing that will influence events on Friday or Tuesday, with Ciarán Clark, the highly rated Aston Villa defender, who has captained England at various levels over the last few years, having apparently committed himself to playing for the Republic of Ireland at senior international level.
Well established in the England set up, 21-year-old Clark, who has made three first-team appearances for Villa, looked an unlikely target for the FAI, but Dunne has confirmed that he has been working on him in recent times and, aware that he qualified for the switch, the association made an official approach late last month which, it appears, has been favourably received.
Don Givens, who has watched the player in action on a number of occasions, will now discuss how best to proceed on the matter with Trapattoni on Saturday when he reports back on the qualifying game between Armenia and Slovakia which he will be attending this Friday night.
“He’s a very good player,” said Givens. “He’s a tall left-sided centre half, which is nice for a start, and at a time when a lot of defenders like to get on the ball and make things happen, he’s a player who likes to defend, to get his body in the way of things and head the ball away.
“He could be a very useful addition to the set-up and the English will be disappointed, he was definitely in their plans.
“I’ll talk to the manager on Saturday but I’d imagine we’ll follow it up as soon as possible.”
Seamus Coleman, meanwhile, might be just the sort of modern day defender Givens has in mind, but the young Everton player admitted he might have to exercise a little more caution if he is to establish himself in his preferred right-back position in the English Premier League.
“Yeah, definitely. I know that myself,” said the 21-year-old who is in the senior Ireland squad for the first time this week. I need to know that I can’t always be bombing up the wing as someone can sneak in and get a goal. It’s the same with every player. You need to work on every part of your game.”
