Three years on, is it time to show Trap the door?

With every Irish fan and pundit worth their salt hoping for a revitalised and new-look side for the inaugural Nations Cup, we ponder if it's time Trapattoni had a look over his shoulder.

By Niall Delaney

So a General Election is on the way and the goons replacing the clowns will no doubt continue to scour around desperately to save and scrimp every bit of money they can. They'll be on the look out for cold hard cash in order to plug the giant financial hole that Bertie, P. Flynn, Raymond Burke and every other dodgy Fianna Fáiler that you care to mention has been carefully nurturing for the last 20 years.

Well I have got one for the poor unfortunates tasked with welding the wings back on to our crashed economy - sack Giovanni Trapattoni and cut a ridiculous €1.7 million salary.

A wage packet, if ever there was one, that symbolises the shameless waste of wedge that this country has become notorious for. Whether it’s the FAI or Denis O' Brien picking up the ludicrous €141,000 monthly tab it matters not. Remuneration should be exclusively linked to performance and what on God’s earth has Mr Trapattoni done to justify this shockingly rotten rate of pay?

Hmm, well he's young but probably better than Kilbane...

So far, a big fat nothing and what’s worse, the future looks equally bleak. As is so often the case, a new year brings fresh hope and I for one eagerly awaited the advent of The Republic of Ireland's first international of 2011 and the subsequent naming of the first XI to take on Wales.

What I've seen is as predictable as it is truly annoying.

True to form, the allegedly wily Italian has picked a team that baffles and befuddles when what he should do is pick a team that can actually qualify for the Euros in 2012. This team should not include Glenn Whelan or Paul Green, nor Jonathon Walters or Sean St Ledger, but yet with Trap you get this horrible feeling that these are players, or what’s even worse - playthings, that he will not drop, will not put down, will persist with until the bitter end and that end will ultimately be a failure to qualify for a second consecutive tournament.

If this happens Il Trap will have trousered a cool €8 million: handy money for a few pre-retirement leisurely jaunts around Europe and pretending to learn English.

I know so many passionate Irish fans who want nothing more than to cheer on the Boys in Green in a reverse mass emigration to Poland next year. I know I want to be there and in order for Ireland to qualify we need a manager who'll stop the shite and play his best team.

So when Captain Robbie Keane pulled out due to injury, rationality may have dictated that a combination of the tireless and talented Kevin Doyle and the electric Shane Long would have been the ideal duo to knock a few past our Celtic cousins.

What we got instead, however, was Jonathon Walters, a lumbering journeyman that only found out he was Oirish this time last year.

Then there is the continued selection of Glenn Whelan over his Stoke colleague Mark Wilson, even though the latter has taken the former’s first team place for the Potters. Whelan has not started a game for Stoke in months while Mark Wilson has proved a strong athletic performer in midfield this Premier League season.

Then you have the Sean St Ledger situation at centre back. This is a guy who is struggling at Championship level week in, week out up against the likes of Jason Scotland and Robbie Blake. But yet he is an automatic pick for us?

I, however, take an altogether different view feel that Ireland's blackest hour was the day Paul Green first donned an Irish jersey.

Nonsense. Ciaran Clarke and Richard Dunne should be the centre-half pairing for years to come, or at least as long as the Tallaght native Dunne has the legs. Trapattoni should have gone for Steven Ward at left back for this one, while the hugely promising Greg Cunningham can slot in there when he returns from injury.

While many cite the IMF arrival as the blackest hour in our young country’s history, I take an altogether different view and feel it was without doubt the day Paul Green first donned an Irish jersey.

For me it’s important to keep English people like Paul Green English, and not to try and claim them for our own, so that whenever our friends across the water start banging on about 1966 or the time they beat Germany 5-1 and how great they are at football, we can simply roll out Paul Green and say something like "Excuse me mate, but here is a fully formed English adult laughably inept at that particular sport".

But no, Greenie is the new Breenie and a long and fruitless place in the team seems to await Trap’s latest love child. When you add in the complete mismanagement of James McCarthy and the shockingly bad treatment of Andy Reid, it all leaves you feeling pretty low.

While I fully expect us to go out and wallop the Welsh, I still get frustrated at how good this Irish team could be. Anyone who says the players are not there are simply wrong - we have good players, players easily good enough to get out of this group at the very least.

A line up of Given, O'Shea, Clark, Dunne, Cunningham, Coleman, McCarthy, Meyler, McGeady, Doyle and Keane looks pretty tasty in my eyes.

So Trap, hang up the cap, and hand over the reins to someone with fresh ideas because, like Anglo Irish Bank, you should have been wound down a long time ago.