Three degrees below, with snow flakes falling around the Red Bull Salzburg Stadium on Friday night and Giovanni Trapattoni must be the only person, bar the players, who is not wrapped in his warmest coat. He only has his immaculate blue suit to protect him from the elements as he paces the technical area, gesturing, talking to himself and wolf whistling at players with his two little fingers stuck in his mouth to attract their attention. Wrapped in thought and cocooned by concentration, he may as well be wearing several of the blankets provided by the club to its supporters, so little does he feel the cold.
“I felt warm. I may be getting on in age but I feel young,” said Trapattoni, who turns 69 on St Patrick’s Day. Forget banishing snakes; what Trapattoni has to do is banish the uncertainty, doubt and self-loathing which have steadily been deepening in Irish football since Roy Keane walked out of the World Cup in 2002. And qualify Ireland for the 2010 World Cup, with Italy also in the group.
Trapattoni has his own crosses to bear when it comes to 2002 in Japan and Korea; his Italian team only reached the last 16 and then failed to emerge from the group stages of Euro2004, since when the aura that surrounded him in his home land faded noticeably.
“Such is Italy,” Trapattoni remarked to Italian journalists after his appointment last week. “You get a couple of games wrong and you are immediately labelled as an old senile sod. But I am not driven by any desire of revenge. If it had been up to me I would have avoided Italy in the draw. But it is clear that when we meet I will try to beat the world champions.”
Since 2004, Trapattoni has gone on to win championships with Benfica in Portugal and Red Bull Salzburg in Austria, his 10th league title in all. His side’s 4-0 victory on Friday night against SV Mattersburg restored them to the top of the table, but not everybody is convinced that he still doesn’t feel he has a point to prove back home. IT HADN’T been a very auspicious start when Trapattoni went to pick up the FAI’s three headhunters from their hotel in the centre of Salzburg last Sunday. Trapattoni, using his Italian sat-nav, got lost on the way to their hotel and eventually ended up waving at them frantically from the end of the road, but that was the only wrong turn he took all day.
Though Ray Houghton certainly hasn’t let himself go, he remembers feeling a little self conscious when all four of them – Trapattoni, Don Givens, Houghton and Don Howe – crammed into the lift at the Italian’s apartment in the centre of Salzburg.
“Going up in the lift, I said to him that he looked fit. He turned to me, pointed to his head and said ‘you’re only as old as you think and I feel fit.’” Houghton’s scepticism remained, while Trapattoni’s wife Paola showed them the stunning view from the apartment of the Salzach river which snakes through the city and then retired to let them talk football over a bottle of red wine and slices of salami.
“I went in there with my eyes wide open. When you hear somebody is 68, you do become wary. Is his English good enough? But he wasn’t dith-ering, even though he was talking in a language that wasn’t his first. We as a group wanted to hear what he had to say about football matters, which is what we got from him. The knowledge that he wanted the job, he believed in the job.” Houghton said Trapattoni’s drive and passion reminded him of Sir Alex Ferguson, and Trapattoni himself has been more than happy to examine the comparison. In an interview with the Italian journalist Gabriele Marcotti in The Times, Trapattoni revealed his approach to management in today’s environment when he commented: “Players today aren’t just footballers. They’re part of something bigger, cogs in a giant economic machine. They are assets on a balance sheet of a publicly listed company. They are money-generators in a web of interests: media, sponsors, contracts, image rights. Everything is magnified. It’s not like 30 years ago when Sir Alex and I were players. Your responsibility as a manager is much greater because your actions have major economic repercussions. You can’t just go ordering players around and shouting at them.”
“I handle things a little differently. In Italy and Germany you can’t be coercive,” he said. “There are two important rules I’ve learnt. The first is that you can’t lie to your players. Maybe there was a time when you could, but in today’s game you will be found out within 24 hours and then you’ve got big problems. The other is that you can’t be afraid to look weak. Players study managers as much as managers study players – they’re not stupid. They don’t buy the idea of the scary superman who pummels everybody into submission. They are freethinking men.
“You don’t command respect and instil discipline by being all-powerful. In a sense, that’s like lying, because they know you’re not. They know you make mistakes, they know you have your insecurities. It’s better to show yourself as a human being, with all that comes with it. That’s how you become a leader of men: by showing them that you are like them and knowing how to pull their strings. To do this you have to be pragmatic.”
There were plenty of instances on Friday night when the players and even a member of staff at one point, felt the wrath of Trapattoni, but by and large he has managed to reach an accommodation with the modern day footballer despite his traditionalist views on the question of authority.
One exception was Paolo Di Canio, who describes him as “the best” and a “national institution” despite a spectacular falling out at Juventus in the early 1990s precipitated by Trapattoni’s decision to drop the player.
“We rowed,” Di Canio recalled in his autobiography, “and unable to accept that somebody had stood up to him, he said: ‘Young man, you need to learn some manners. Obviously, your parents never taught you how a civilised person behaves. What kind of people were you raised by?’ That did it. Nobody insults my parents. To me, they were everything. ‘Why don’t you go **** yourself?’ I shouted back at him. ‘I don’t need to take this s*** from you!’ He didn’t know how to react. He got closer and closer, like he was trying to challenge me. I just took a step backwards and shoved him away as hard as I could. He flew backwards, landing on the physio’s bags next to the bench.”
That incident comes to mind when the case of Stephen Ireland is concerned. With the help of his friend Sven Goran Eriksson, Trapattoni should have little difficulty convincing Ireland that his interests are best served by coming back. The same could be said for Andy O’Brien and Steve Finnan, though Stephen Carr now seems beyond the pale.
“I’m sure the players will look up to him,” Houghton says of a group which seemingly had its heart set on Terry Venables. “They will have tapped his name into Google and see his achievements as a manager and if that doesn’t inspire him then nothing will. If I were still a player, I would be looking at him and thinking he can improve me as a player.”
Trapattoni himself is fond of the comment that “a good manager can, at best, make a team 10 per cent better, but a bad manager can make a team up to 50 per cent worse,” a sentiment with which most Ireland fans will readily agree.
Trapattoni has already been shaking his head about the desperate naivety Ireland showed in conceding late goals against Slovakia and Wales inn the last European Championship qualifying campaign. If anybody can eliminate such defensive blunders it is Trapattoni. And vitally, what Trapattoni will provide along with his pragmatism is certainty, for the first time in the Ireland camp since the days of Charlton, though the brand of football will be far more sophisticated.
“He’s big on a winning mentality,” Houghton says. “That is where you start from. Organisation. Everyone knows their jobs. There’s no saying I didn’t know what you meant.’ That is what you do. There is no grey area.”
Trapattoni is even more immersed in the Italian defensive tradition of cat-ennacio than Capello, though Houghton dismisses the notion that Trapattoni’s Ireland will be overly defensive.
“He told us that in one season at Juventus, Claudio Gentile got four goals from right back, [Gaetano] Sci-rea got seven from centre back and his left back [Antonio] Cabrini got five. So he wants his defenders to get forward. His philosophy is we attack as a team we defend as a team. What he is bringing is a winning mentality. He got players to play whatever you want to call it.
“Winning football. We need to start winning football games. Our players need to remember what it is like to win matches.”
It is a point which is also emphasised by the veteran Italian sports journalist, Giancarlo Galavotti, now the football correspondent in London for Gazetta dello Sport.
“In date or out of date,” Galavotti says, “Trapattoni is successful. Full stop. The same with Fabio Capello. They ask will England play with style? Capello says you have to win. If you win, you win with style. If you don’t win, you can have as much style as you want.
“Both countries, England and Ireland, aren’t exactly the flavour of the year in terms of spectacular football. They are both teams that desperately need to qualify for the 2010 World Cup. So whether Trapattoni does it with catenaccio or does it with five strikers, in the end the quality of his tenure will be judged by his success and the results.”
Trapattoni says he turned down offers from Italian clubs and former USSR states when he decided to take the Ireland job. In the process he admitted that one of the attractions of the job was that he would now be able to spend more time with his grandchil-dren. When the Irish players get him, they should grasp every word the old man has to say and the opportunity that comes their way.
