Clairefontaine, the 140-acre ranch surrounded by woods south of Paris, sets the benchmark for national training centres in Europe, but the Italian version — Coverciano — has a soul that couldn’t be reproduced anywhere else. It must be barely a quarter the size, which is still substantial, squeezing into the eastern side of Florence, and somehow managing to add to the city’s impossible elegance.
Sponsors and their families, invited along for face-time with the Italy players, found themselves being harried by crews of journalists who had descended on Coverciano to cover the latest football corruption scandal gripping the country. Some of these had been diverted from the earthquake 200km further north.
And what was Gennaro Gattuso doing, walking by carrying a white table over his head and followed by Fabio Cannavaro? It turns out that 12 of the 2006 World Cup winning team are on site at Coverciano doing their coaching badges. Gattuso stops and talks about how he will speak to Rangers over the next couple of days about the possibility of returning there as a player. When the name of Giovanni Trapattoni is mentioned, he pauses for a moment and an unfamiliar smile appears. “He is a good manager. He is an old man but his spirit is very good.”
Trapattoni was il capo here for four years from 2000 to 2004 and commands enormous affection, but his spell as Italy manager was probably the most disappointing of his long career. Giant portraits of the great Italy national coaches hang in one of the conference rooms and Trapattoni is not amongst them. There is Vittorio Pozzo, who won two World Cups in the 1930s, Ferruccio Valcareggi, who guided Italy to their only European Championship in the late 1960s, Enzo Bearzot from the 1980s and Marcello Lippi, Trapattoni’s successor who went on to win the World Cup.
The eye is diverted during a long press conference in which the Italy captain Gianluigi Buffon is defiant in the face of detailed questioning about the latest corruption allegations. Nobody has been charged or found guilty, he points out, yet the Italy police turn up at 6am with press photographers in tow to get their names in the papers and humiliate the team.
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If the media are chastened, they don’t show it; as Buffon leaves the press conference and walks towards the players quarters he is still mobbed by reporters shoving microphones in his face. He walks on grimly while security comes to his aid, but again he stops when asked to take a couple of questions about Trapattoni.
“Trapattoni is a legend,” Buffon says when asked about why he remains so popular. “He has always done well and he has always won. The only time he didn’t win was with Italy, for the national team, but many managers have been there and never won.”
And could he still manage at the top level in Italy? “I think so,” Buffon replies. “One like him supported by the calibre of [Marco] Tardelli has a lot to offer and can give a lot to any team. It is a style that never goes out of fashion and continues to bring results.”
Trapattoni is only an hour’s drive away west of Florence, based in the spa town of Montecatini where he has brought the Ireland team for a week of preparation. Apart from the civic reception accorded to him and the Irish team by the mayor on Monday night and the Irish week organised by the town’s council, it was telling that teenage Italian football fans — Napoli fans in this case — gathered outside the team hotel in the dark on Thursday night waiting to have their picture taken with Trapattoni, who duly obliged. Still, whatever Buffon says about Ireland’s Italian manager one day returning to manage in their native country it is inescapable that Trapattoni is part of Italy’s past rather than its future. When that reality was put to him on Friday he gave an interesting reply.
“That is the life. Now I know more, more situations. I have improved from 10 years ago and also from when I had fantastic players like [Michel] Platini and [Zbigniew] Boniek. Now, I have improved so much without these biggest players. We show we can win with the other players. You can sell newspapers without the best reporters. We have improved and I’m lucky because I continue to discover the new situations. I’m still hungry for what can happen in the future.”
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Some things he can never learn at his age and nor does he probably want to. The Kevin Foley situation, for instance, could have been handled better. It was a mistake to name what was said to be the final 23 back at the beginning of last month. And the call to pull Foley from the 23 could have been made a couple of days earlier rather than an hour before the noon deadline on Tuesday. Foley is well used to disappointments with the Ireland team and that would have avoided him posing suited and booted in the team photograph by the plane at Dublin airport on Sunday and training with the team in Italy before being given the bad news. It is no surprise that he feels betrayed.
One other player is believed to have been unhappy with the way that was handled and wanted there to be some form of protest, but the rest were happy to move on and accepted that it was a decision that the manager was paid to make. There does seem to be a unity and clear sense of purpose about the Ireland squad and so far they appear not to feel “cooped up”, unlike the way their Italian counterparts felt in Coverciano. When an Irish music group performed in the town, Robbie Keane, Richard Dunne and Shay Given wandered out from their adjacent hotel to have a listen.
Perhaps Trapattoni had Italy’s troubles on his mind when shortly after the media had taken their place in the stand at the training ground on Friday, the manager switched training the full length of the pitch, playing what was clearly the first XI against the rest.
Namely Given, O’Shea, Dunne, St Ledger, Ward, McGeady, Andrews, Whelan, Duff, Keane and Doyle. As Italy totter towards the Euros — they were defeated 3-0 by Russia on Friday night and play Ireland on June 18 in Poznan — Ireland are steady and stable.
“This week we made a very good atmosphere,” Trapattoni said. “The weather, the pitch. We have had the possibility to do very quiet training, with concentration, with enthusiasm. We had time to recover the one or two injuries, the doubts like John O’Shea.”
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Trapattoni reiterated that the team he puts out in Budapest tomorrow night in the friendly against Hungary tomorrow night will start on Sunday against Croatia in Poznan, “unless there are surprises”.
He goes into all the details again about what happened to Italy in those two campaigns. How the referee who made some appalling decisions in the second-round game against South Korea in 2002 was subsequently suspended over his decision-making and then convicted of heroin smuggling. Back then, Trapattoni was given holy water by his older sister, Maria, who is a nun in Bergamo, which he sprinkled around the training ground and around the technical area in the Daejeon stadium in South Korea. It appears not to have worked, though God only knows what would have happened had he not sprinkled it. Trapattoni says Maria is sending more down for this campaign, which her brother will again be dispersing.
“She always does,” says Trapattoni. “But not to win. For protection against jinxes.”
A week in Italy and you begin to understand how people feel that way.