What does football really matter? In the context of mounting job losses, people unable to pay their mortgages, social welfare cuts, resources being denied to special needs children, hospital wards closing, the deepening of the poverty trap, escalating emigration – and so on through a litany of the consequences of the austerity agenda that has been imposed on Ireland – the obvious answer is not a lot.

But the obvious answer is often the wrong one. For a start, it misses the point that football matters enough for over 20,000 fans to travel to Poland to support the Irish team in what had promised to be a brilliant adventure.
It misses the point that the hopes of the nation were hugely invested in the team doing well, a romantic allegiance which was aptly reflected in the viewership figures for Ireland’s opening game against Croatia, when 2 million people tuned in to watch.
And it misses the point that a big performance by the Irish would likely have had a hugely beneficial impact on national morale, helping just a little bit to shake off the worst ravages of the economic nightmare we’ve been enduring collectively these past three or four years.
And that is only the surface layer. Every weekend, all across Ireland, thousands of teams line out in various football competitions, from schoolboy leagues upwards. The level of participation here in soccer is higher than any other sport. The game is widely played and supported in deprived and marginalised urban communities. In those areas in particular, it represents a desperately needed antidote against permanent disaffection, alienation, the attractions of crime and other forms of social malaise.
Every week during the winter, the Hot Press Munchengladbach 1891 caravan rolls into parks and pitches all over Dublin, in Ballymun, Finglas, Liffey Valley, Neilstown, Tallaght, Coolock, Swords and so on. We meet the men on the sideline, who dedicate their lives and their energies to keeping clubs going – who put up the nets and line the pitches and do all of the necessary humdrum things that running a football club requires. And we see first-hand how, when the young fellas – or mostly young anyway – have a game to play on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning, they are that much less likely to end up twisted drunk the night before or to get into the harder kinds of narcotic that have the potential to ruin lives.
Training once or twice a week; the fitness levels required to participate; the hard work and discipline involved in staying in condition; the awareness of what it is to be part of a team; the insight that offers into what might be required of us in terms of working for the collective good in other areas of life – all of these are a natural byproduct of playing ball.
These benefits manifest themselves variously in improved health, in social cohesion, in a sense of involvement, in a buttress against the ravages of deprivation and in all sorts of other ways both great and small, across the lives of everyone who participates.
Football does not just matter. It matters enormously.
For sure, you need to remember that it is only a game. But it is one about which people feel passionate and from which they derive a unique pleasure and pride. Which is why there is a real need to reflect on what happened to Ireland in Euro 2012 and to decide: where do we go from here?

Ireland played Bosnia in Dublin a couple of weeks before the Euro 2012 tournament was scheduled to start. Afterwards, on the basis of the team’s performance in that game, I wrote an optimistic piece here about what lay ahead. It wasn’t an unreasonable position to take. Instead of hoofing it long, our second string goalkeeper Keiron Westwood played the ball out through the defenders and midfielders who came in to receive it to feet from him. We retained the ball well on the night. We passed it crisply and cleanly. James McClean made an impressive debut. Aidan McGeady came on at half-time and ran riot. It looked as if, having got the team to the finals, manager Giovanni Trapattoni might just be allowing the players to shake off the shackles, and to express themselves. If we approached the tournament in the same spirit, then we’d give a good account of ourselves.
Less than a week later, we played Hungary away. Whatever had happened in the meantime, the Irish team performed with none of the authority or sense of freedom which had been evident in Dublin. On a number of occasions, our defence was ripped open. The Hungarians missed sitters and we hacked out an undeserved draw. But it was a woeful performance. Had I written the piece after that game, I’d have registered a deep sense of foreboding that we were facing a whitewash in Poland. Which is exactly what happened.
We equalled the worst ever performance in the finals, being hammered three times and amassing a goal deficit of eight. Sometimes in football, the results only tell you half the story. Great performances can go unrewarded as a result of refereeing errors, a moment or two of madness or the bounce of the ball. But none of these things played a part in our downfall. The bottom line is that we were terrible throughout.
In The Irish Times, Brian Kerr analysed the statistics from our three games – painting a damning picture of the tactics employed by Trapattoni. Ireland had the second lowest number of shots in the tournament. They also had the second lowest number of shots on target. The Irish keeper Shay Given had the greatest number of saves to make. Over our three games, our five strikers mustered only eight efforts on target between them. Our pass completion rate was a dreadful 58%. And the stats for Trapattoni’s favoured long ball approach were even more damning, with Ireland retaining possession less than 40% of the time.
Of course the quality of the opposition has to be taken into account. We were up against three very good teams. Spain are the best in the world; Italy gave them a fantastic game in their group match, which ended in a 1-1 draw and was probably the best exhibition of individual skill, collective ability and tactical nous in the entire competition. But that does not excuse our manager’s paralysing persistence throughout with a system that was clearly thoroughly inadequate. Nor does it explain why the positives from the Bosnia game were so utterly absent from our approach in the tournament proper...

The argument has been made that we just don’t have the players. Well, the same might well be said of Greece, and they reached the quarter finals. It might be said of Denmark but they at least started out with a victory, over the richly talented Holland. It might be said of Ukraine, who were largely reliant on the partially crocked 35 year old Andriy Shevchenko – but they delivered a far more credible performance than Ireland. It might be said of Poland or the Czech Republic. But all of these teams competed more effectively than we did.
In so many respects, individual Irish players performed below their ability, most notably Shay Given, John O’Shea, Glen Whelan, Aiden McGeady and Robbie Keane. You have to ask: why?
It is the manager’s job to fashion a system which will enable the players to compete effectively; to extract the best possible performances from individuals; to make the collective greater than the sum of its parts. It is the manager’s job to ensure that the little details are taken care of – a mantra on which Giovanni Trapattoni has repeatedly staked his reputation. And the truth is that he failed in each and every one of these respects.
The huge growth in the number of national teams in Europe as a result of the break-up of the Soviet Union, the old Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia has introduced a whole new batch of minnows to European competition. One effect of this has been to hugely distort our sense of where we stand. Ireland can be made to look relatively good, when the results against these lesser teams are measured. But to let that fool us into thinking that a rigid 4-4-2 system is the best way of lining up against the top teams in Europe or the world is a colossal error – for which we were duly punished severely.
In our Euro 2012 qualifying group, the extent to which we were twice outplayed by Russia should have sounded the warning bells. They ripped us apart in Dublin and led 3-0 at one stage. They did the same again in Moscow and could have beaten us 6-0 except for a combination of brave and brilliant performances by Richard Dunne and Shay Given – and a bucketful of old-fashioned luck. There is no evidence, however, that Trapattoni learned even the slightest lesson from those two telling encounters. As has been so widely observed, he had no Plan B.
All of that is damning. But that is not the worst of it. A manager always has the opportunity to change things on the pitch if it becomes obvious that the game-plan is not working. Every week, people do it in junior football. A well-drilled team can be prepared to mutate its formation on an agreed call. Substitutions can be used to counteract opposition threats, to replace a player who isn’t performing or to add a different dimension going forward.
But in Euro 2012, Giovanni Trapattoni had nothing in the bag. He was bereft of ideas or initiatives that would vary the approach. As a result, he made a number of decisions which no one can explain – and which he himself has failed completely to justify.
Why did he bring on a striker, Simon Cox, on the left wing for Aiden McGeady, against Croatia when there were two left sided wide-players, Stephen Hunt and James McClean, on the bench, bursting to get involved? It was a bizarre decision that made no sense whatsoever, if the desire was to get back into the game and win it.
If that first game convinced him of the need to have an additional man in midfield against Spain, why did he then pick Simon Cox – a striker – to replace Kevin Doyle rather than, say, Darron Gibson? And if he was playing a version of 4-4-2 with one of the strikers working back a bit harder, why did he not play Doyle, Jonathan Walters or Shane Long up front so that at least we might win something in the air?
There is no one in football who can explain what he was thinking. Worst of all was the decision to introduce Paul Green to replace Glen Whelan against Spain, ahead of Darron Gibson. The latter may not be a world beater but he is a decent footballer who is composed on the ball. He passes well. He has a great shot and is capable of scoring goals. But the journeyman got the nod – and was directly responsible for the fourth Spanish goal.
There was another option open to Trapattoni that might just have paid dividends. Was he even aware that Damien Duff had played upfront off Robbie Keane, with superb results, at the 2002 World Cup? How effective might it have been to play McClean out wide and Duff ahead of Andrews and Whelan? Apart from the fact he knows how to defend, Duff would certainly have posed a different sort of problem for opposition defences because he is comfortable on the ball, fearless running at the opposition and wins free kicks. But I suspect that the thought never even occurred to Trap.
The inexplicable decisions were legion. Jonathan Walters was introduced as a sub against Spain and shook things up just a bit. So why then was Kevin Doyle – who didn’t get onto the pitch at all against the world champions – restored up front against Italy? If any of these decisions had produced a positive result you’d say ‘hats off’. But not one of them did. Instead, they showed that the Irish manager is stubborn, old-fashioned and ultimately lost – the whole farrago reaching its nadir when he hid behind criticism of the players to excuse his own failure. That should not surprise us: condescension to those he manages has been a feature of his reign.
The conventional view, and the one advanced by the FAI CEO John Delaney, is that it was an achievement on Trap’s part, getting us to the finals. This is only correct up to a point. We were in a weak qualifying group: there is, for example, no reason why we should not be as good as or better than Slovakia. And the draw in the play-offs was kind to us. Estonia, one of the new minnows, are not up to much. To have beaten them is no great achievement.
The bottom line, however, is that Giovanni Trapattoni led the Irish side to humiliation in Euro 2012. And he did so having consciously left some very good footballers entirely out of the equation. Why? Because he could not see them fitting into the rigid system he prefers. Paul Green is entirely innocent in all of this: at best a Championship player, he was chosen by the manager to play for Ireland and went out and did his best. We can ask no more of him. But the manager’s chronic limitations are symbolised by the decision to select Green ahead of a footballer like Wes Hoolahan, who has been playing regularly in the Premiership for Norwich all season and doing well, creating and scoring goals.
Indeed, in general, it has become increasingly clear that Giovanni Trapattoni is suspicious of players with a creative instinct. He could have introduced James McCarthy, a fine young footballer who is the man in the engine room for Wigan Athletic, earlier than he did and nurtured his talent. He could have brought the likes of Seamus Coleman through as a right full-back – where John O’Shea had a disastrous tournament. He could have encouraged Ciaran Clark, Marc Wilson and Anthony Pilkington. But he did none of these things. Instead he brought Ireland to Euro 2012 with the oldest squad in the competition. Instead he brought Paul Green – who, within minutes of his introduction, gifted a goal to Cesc Fabregas.
All this confirms that Trapattoni’s management style is utterly self-centred. Rather than looking at the talent at his disposal and seeing how that can best be deployed, he insists there is only one system that can work and chooses the individuals he thinks most suit that personal blueprint, ahead of clearly superior players.
That arrogance was allied to incompetence in the appalling treatment of Kevin Foley. It was conveniently swept quickly under the carpet in the interest of avoiding another Saipan, but Trapattoni named the Irish squad for Euro 2012 earlier than he needed to. He included Kevin Foley. To then dump him, because of a perceived concern about John O’Shea’s fitness, was not evidence of a man doing the hard things that a manager has to do; it was evidence of a man who had himself bungled badly, betraying one of his players simply because he could. Once Foley was in, he should have stayed in. But if he was going to shaft the player, Giovanni Trapattoni should at least have acknowledged that he had made a mistake and then apologised publicly to Kevin Foley. He did neither.
His actions suggest that Giovanni Trapattoni believes that it is not the players who win matches but the coach. He wanted yes-men who would dilligently follow orders. He was like General Custer leading his troops into an unwinnable battle, deliberately taking with him soldiers who were not remotely the best shots available because they would not question his decisions. Well, in the same spirit, this should be Trap’s Last Stand.
If it is the coach who wins matches, it is also the coach who loses them. The responsibility for the debacle in Poland is his. Did he instruct Shay Given to bang the ball long at almost every opportunity? And if he didn’t, why did he continue to play Shay when he gave the ball away so badly all of the time? Did he tell the Irish players that the full backs were always to take the throws and not to risk losing the ball by being quick? And if not, then why didn’t he insist that we approach the game with a bit of spontanaeity?
The point is that there is not the slightest suggestion that Trapattoni has the capacity to change. We are heading straight into a World Cup campaign in the autumn. The likelihood is that he will do nothing more than shuffling the personnel, and we will then be treated to more of the same sterile football, with some of our best footballers excluded from the squad. The effect could be devastating.
The warning signs were there in the build-up to Euro 2012. Irish fans don’t like the way Trap plays the game. They voted with their feet and their wallets by not turning up at our recent friendlies. Euro 2012 will have greatly deepened their disillusionment. If this is the way it is going to be, they may stay away in their droves.
Giovanni Trapattoni has a history of achievement in club football, but the international game is different. You can’t buy players: you are stuck with what you have. The most important thing is to learn how to best utilise the talent which is at your disposal. All of the evidence suggests that he is not good at that – and that he has little or nothing to offer Irish football now, other than a tired repetition of the same old redundant formula. There is an alternative. It may cost the association, but it is time to move on.
The last four in Euro 2012 comprises Spain, Portugal, Italy and Germany – four superb teams, who play the game the way it should be played. They are the benchmark.
We need a manager who is capable of learning from the tournament’s great teams and bringing Ireland’s best footballers to the fore. We need a manager who can get them working as a unit, playing a better class of football. We need a manager who is capable of dealing with the realities of the modern game and who doesn’t seek actively to instil in our players the kind of inferiority complex that guarantees defeat. Above all, we need a manager who will not drive Irish football fans even further away from the national team.
The future of the game here – at every level – depends on it.