Vincent Hogan's take on the Mainz incident in the indo today. Reid was some idiot if it's true.
http://www.independent.ie/sport/socc...e-1558847.html
Defiant Reid to blame
By Vincent Hogan
Monday December 01 2008
"They say some of my stars drink whiskey, but I have found out that the ones who drink milk-shakes don't win many ball games" -- Casey Stengel, former New York Yankees and Mets manager.
This isn't a story about drink and its delinquent hold on professional football. It may serve the interests of knee-jerk philosophy to paint it as such, to tart it up into another keening parable on Ireland's relationship with booze and our native immaturity.
But, through the eyes of a worldly-wise Italian, it can only be about one thing. When Andy Reid kept on strumming his guitar after Giovanni Trapattoni's call for bed that night in Germany, he pretty much tossed the most basic concept of authority into an open fire.
True, there were -- purportedly -- nine others involved in the sing-song. Yet, they quickly dispersed the moment Trapattoni was seen to become animated at 2.0am in the hotel bar.
Reid, it is said, "challenged" the Irish manager and their argument reputedly came "close to blows".
Since Trapattoni articulated his version of events last week, our national team -- sadly -- has been gratuitously depicted as a rag-ball collection of Oliver Reeds, for whom little is of consequence beyond the next drinking session.
As a country, we have form here. When Roy Keane fell out with just about anything that moved in Saipan, the squad he left behind was conveniently flayed by every two-bit moralist this side of Heaven's door.
This worked on two levels. Firstly, it elevated Keane to messianic status in the eyes of his lovesick congregation. He was a man essentially sacrificing himself for the greater good. Secondly, it depicted his team-mates as feckless cads for whom the World Cup amounted to little more than an extended binge.
'Genesis' put the lie to that first piece of hokum by concluding that the Irish captain actually did not want to be at the tournament in the first place. The team's performances, in which -- physically -- they outlasted every opponent that they faced, pretty much belittled the second.
Drink was not the issue in Wiesbaden. Drink is not the issue with this Irish team. Yes, you can wheel out any number of physiologists or sports scientists who will tell you that alcohol is best avoided by any athlete at any time. Then again, most doctors will tell you and I that, if we take four drinks on a night out, we officially qualify as binge drinkers. And both conclusions, I imagine, are inviolably correct.
But there is a hopeless conceit at work in depicting the Irish players who broke that curfew in Germany as some kind of mongrel sub-species of, say, those who ply their trade in Trapattoni's homeland, as some commentators did last week.
It is not an uncommon thing in Italy and France to see footballers smoking after games. In English football, a smoker would draw disbelieving stares.
Trapattoni is a man of the world who knows that football is played by people not automatons. He had no difficulty with the players drinking in Wiesbaden, nor should he have had. It was Saturday night. The game in Podgorica was four days away. So long as the 1.0am curfew had been adhered to, this was hardly a night in Babylon.
The problems arose when the curfew was broken. A sing-song, reputedly kept alive by Reid and his guitar, had run a full hour over time before Trapattoni's patience snapped. If there were 10 players in the bar at the time, nine of them seemed to absorb their guilt pretty instantly and retired, without argument, to bed.
Reid, who had not featured in the night's victory over Georgia, chose - for whatever reason -- to stay and argue.
Perhaps something the manager said had angered him. Perhaps he simply felt that, as the musician in the group, he was being held largely culpable for the curfew being defied. Perhaps he was hurting a little over not being used in Mainz. None of this actually matters.
The fundamental here is that Reid rushed into a fight he had no business taking. In doing so, he challenged the authority of his manager on a level simply unimaginable in any serious dressing-room.
That was the story of Wiesbaden. Not the drink. Not the sing-song. Not even the careless breaking of the curfew. It was one player's decision to pick an idiotic fight when every intelligent muscle in his body should have been tugging him upstairs.
- Vincent Hogan
