SOCCER:GIOVANNI TRAPATTONI will head to Villa Park this afternoon in the hope of persuading Richard Dunne to commit to the Republic of Ireland's forthcoming World Cup qualification campaign.

Following Shay Given’s recent departure, the Italian confirmed that he had also lost Damien Duff to international retirement yesterday and, as he announced his squad of 23 for the World Cup qualifier in Kazakhstan, his certainty regarding the central defender’s continued availability had clearly taken a battering since he said, less than two weeks ago, that all of his senior players would be sticking around.

“He said to me that Kazakhstan would be too soon for him but that maybe for Germany he could return,” Trapattoni said of Dunne. “But the latest news is that he might move club and if he does that there is a new manager, new players, a new situation, it could be a problem.”

Dunne has been linked with a move out of Villa as new manager Paul Lambert attempts to trim the wage bill, but the Scot has sought to dampen the expectation that a deal for the 32-year-old is imminent. Trapattoni is, nevertheless, anxious to hear from the defender himself that he is still intent on playing through the World Cup campaign and hinted that the player might, as Robbie Keane will it seems, be allowed to skip some or all of Ireland’s friendly games in future.

“Tomorrow we will go to the game between Aston Villa and Everton and hopefully we will meet him,” he said. “Maybe we can get more information then about his future.”

Keane’s decision to stay on has at least left Trapattoni with his captain still on board but there was a good deal of talk yesterday about how the tactical experimentation that started last week in Belgrade might be continued in Astana before things are tightened up for the visit of Germany in October. It is far from clear whether the Italian would try to select the LA Galaxy player in anything like a 4-5-1 formation again.

The striker, who scored before being sent off for his club on Thursday night, will, in any case, be allowed to return to America after the qualifying game on Friday week, rather than having to travel all the way back to London for what promises to be a remarkably low-key friendly against Oman in Craven Cottage.

“For a friendly game it’s a long flight,” acknowledged Trapattoni, “and he’s very busy with his club. Also, it’s an opportunity for us to look at the other players.” And he has a bit of that to be getting on with just now.

The manager made little enough effort to put a gloss on Duff’s decision, admitting that when he phoned the Dubliner after receiving a text message from him last Thursday, he offered to allow him to continue playing on very much his own terms.

“I said to him you can come in and play 10 minutes, 45 minutes, 50 minutes, the second half but he made his decision. I said to him to come and play even 30 minutes, because his name is important to our opponents, but he said that it was better that he cuts his ties.”

Trapattoni said that he had sought to persuade him to stay involved so as to help with the development of the younger players coming through, but even he admitted in the end that this was a big ask of a player with a young child and only a few years of top-level club football left in him.

Duff had originally sounded like a man who was on the verge of announcing his departure in Poznan on the eve of the game against Italy when he captained the side in what was his 100th senior appearance. Trapattoni, though, insists that the player experienced a couple of changes of heart before he finally felt able to confirm his intentions.

His departure, of course, will open doors to others with James McClean, Seamus Coleman and James McCarthy the most likely beneficiaries. If Stephen Hunt harboured ambitions of replacing Duff on Ireland’s wing for the forthcoming campaign they were fairly cruelly dashed yesterday when he was omitted entirely from the squad, suggesting that, having been manifestly unhappy not to get a run out at all in Poland, he has now slipped further down the pecking order.

Ciaran Clark also continues to be overlooked despite the fact that Dunne is, at the very least, out of the next couple of games and that he looks set to displace him on a longer term basis from the first team at Villa Park.

Perhaps an exceptional performance today will change the Italian’s mind but there is a sense that the basis for Trapattoni’s reasoning in the case of the young defender is not entirely ability or form-related.

Asked about the 22-year-old yesterday he was quietly dismissive, suggesting that he had plenty of cover in all of the positions that Clark normally plays, but choosing to overlook the fact that, of all the people providing it, only John O’Shea is also a regular in a Premier League side. There are, of course, quite a few less of them about the place these days.