Andy: If the Cap Fits

Let’s deal with the really important issue of the day. Whatever the result of the friendly against Poland – which is two days away at the time of writing – we need Andy Reid in the Irish squad. We also need Stephen Ireland. Nothing against our new Great Black Hope, Caleb Folan. He’s a game lad, who constantly threatens to stand on your toe, as the last gaffer said in commendation. But Kaka he is not.

Stephen Ireland is a classically Corkonian conundrum. There are times when he looks as if he could yet be as good as Kaka if he keeps his head down and works at it. A young fella with time on his side, he is playing marvellously well for Manchester City at the moment, outshining Robinho and Elano and Shaun Wright Philips and a whole host of other more expensive and presumably far better paid players. There must be someone out there who can convince him to play for his country. Has anyone in the Irish camp tried calling his mother?
Seriously, though: the FAI should have someone working on it overtime. It is criminal that he is out there making headlines and scoring goals in the Premiership and we have to depend on two workhorses in the centre of the park. One workhorse good. Two workhorses bad!
Giovanni Trapattoni is not to blame for his absence. The cold-shouldering of Andy Reid, however, is a different matter.
The rumour mill has it that Reid was singled out for blame for a sing song that took place after the game against Georgia. He was the man with the guitar and legend has it that he became the focus for criticism from members of the Irish management team including Trapattoni himself. In this version of events he didn’t take kindly to it and argued that he was being picked on unfairly. Clearly you’d have to have been there to know the full story.
Either way, he was left out of the squad for the friendly against Poland – a move that, on the face of it, smacked of pettiness. Questioned at his first press conference in the build-up to the Poland game, Trapattoni offered his own explanation. He said that Andy was sad when he wasn’t playing – and that therefore it was better not to have him in the squad unless he was going to play. The implication is that Andy Reid resented being left out of the team, and watching what he believes are lesser talents flourishing under the new regime.
This much is true: every footballer has to deal with the possibility that they won’t be picked. And if they are left out, they have to be big enough to avoid sulking. However, communication is of the essence in situations like this. If a player is made to feel that his chance will come, then they are less likely to become disaffected. Similarly if decisions are explained to them, then they are generally better able to handle them.
I was surprised at the extent to which Trapattoni committed himself publicly to the idea that Andy Reid was well down the pecking order. He did it in a way that must have left Andy Reid feeling that there was little or no chance of getting an even break. “I like big,” he said, about the kind of players he wants in the centre of the park. And he went on to say that he had Duff and McGeady and Stephen Hunt for the wide positions – so he doesn’t need Andy Reid in that department either.
Does he really think that Andy Reid is no better than fifth in line for a centre midfield berth? Does he also really feel that he is fifth in line as a wide-man, behind Andy Keogh? If so, you’d have to ask, has he watched him in action? For Ireland? For Sunderland? Has he made any effort to bring him on, in the system he has been developing for Ireland.
There is precious little evidence of it. He may have been annoyed that Reid didn’t make the initial get together in Portugal and decided that his chance had passed him by. Otherwise, he could have played him in the friendly against Norway – or at least given him twenty minutes in which to put his best foot forward. Or, at a push, he could have called him and explained that, while the die had been cast for the immediate, upcoming the senior games, he wanted to see him in action, and was going to give him a full 90 minutes in the B team’s friendly against Nottingham Forest. He did neither.
Unless there is something serious that Trapattoni knows that no one else does, it seems like a crazy call to make, to leave an obviously talented player – our best passer of the ball who wants to play for Ireland, a potential goal scorer and one who is capable of being lethal from set pieces – entirely out of the reckoning without having given him a single opportunity to play.
It is perhaps part of a wider problem with Trapattoni and his back-room team. It is hard to fathom, for example, why so few subs have been used to date, since he became manager. Anyone who has played football knows that there are risks involved in changing things if you are drawing a match or are one-nil up. But when your strikers are obviously out on their feet and the wide men are suffering too and you are being pressed back into ever more desperate defence, and there are willing runners on the bench, it seems crazy not to get a fresh pair of legs into the frame, to harry the opposition tirelessly, and to get on the ball, hold it up and relieve the pressure.
Not to want to take even the slightest risk reflects a fundamentally conservative mind-set. But it also suggests that there is a lack of awareness of how the guys who are not on the pitch are likely to feel, looking on like saps at the chosen ones. Players permanently glued to the bench get a sense that they are not very highly rated. Which is what Andy Reid feels. And, as it happens, what Joey O’Brien feels – with the added complication that he thinks no one even knows his name.
So far Giovanni Trapattoni has achieved results that are hard to argue with. But in numerous other ways, the indications are that he is potentially building up problems of a type that could be avoided. The indications are that communication is not what it should be. And that players are not convinced that the management set-up is geared to give everyone who might be in contention a fair chance.
If things start to go wrong, it could prove to be his – and Ireland’s – undoing...