Rest easy ? silly season is almost over

Brendan O’Brien
Gdynia

Back in March of 1939, the FAI decided that Cork should accommodate the visiting Hungary team for what remains the first and only full international played at The Mardyke and the visitors were afforded a lavish welcome from Lord Mayor and TD James Hickey.
The ‘céad míle fáilte’ extended to a special dance on the Saturday night prior to the game and a banquet afterwards while the ground itself was extended to cater for the expected surge of interest from the local populace.
Ireland’s trips to Hungary have tended to lean more towards the low-key and this week’s was no exception. Giovanni Trapattoni’s men slipped in and out of the Hungarian capital in the space of three days without leaving many ripples on the nearby Danube.
All that changed early Tuesday evening at Poland’s Arka Gdynia Stadium where the 15,139-capacity ground was filled to four-fifths of its capacity.
The team was introduced one by one and John Delaney presented a signed jersey to Mayor Wojciech Szczurek.
Even his halting three words of Polish garnered polite applause.
Green, white and gold balloons and a giant Tricolour were unveiled. A warm-up jog around the pitch perimeter morphed into a lap of honour as the excited locals bid ‘Wita — Welcome’ to a team which will call their place home for much of the next two weeks.
Suddenly, the travails of Budapest seemed a long way away but the third leg of a trip that has so far taken in Malahide, Montecatini, the Hungarian city and northern Poland will not be easily forgotten by those with a keener interest than the denizens of Buda and Pest.
It was meant to be no more than a simple stopover, one last chance to run through well-rehearsed lines but, as the evening wore on, it became clear that not everyone was singing off the same chorus sheets.
The sight of Ireland being pressed back into their own third by a young side that had failed to qualify for Euro 2012 and, thus, one with nothing to aim for but a sun-kissed beach was worrying enough just six days before the clash with Croatia.
More alarming still was Giovanni Trapattoni’s press conference which, after all the confusion and miscommunication was put to one side, seemed to suggest that the manager was unsure of either his formation or his personnel at this late stage.
It was a bizarre ending to a night that had already delivered thunder, lightning and a torrent of chances — most of them at the Irish end – but the hope remains that it was an aberration by a team and manager with one eye fixed on Poznan.
Within hours they were in Poland and, flying from Budapest towards the Baltic Coast and Euro 2012 will have begun to feel very imminent as the redesigned doughnut-shaped Gdansk Arena appeared over the right wing of their chartered aircraft as it naked to land at the Lech Walesa Airport.
Gdansk: where they will play Spain, Gdynia: where they are training and Sopot: where they are staying — are awash with flags of the 16 competing nations. Waiters and owners of restaurants and bars are already asking the whereabouts of the famous Green Army.
Those same supporters may well have been wondering how to read the mixed signals emanating from Budapest before Trapattoni cleared matters up on Tuesday.
Another case of mountains being fashioned from molehills but rest easy — silly season is almost over.

Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/A0whRUTjpCs/post.aspx

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