A few weeks ago a bet was cast in the bar of the Jury's Hotel that sits opposite Croke Park and makes almost as money for its owners as the stadium does for the GAA.

On match days the four star hostelry is always jammed, be it with GAA, soccer or ru&gby fans anxious to preview and review the big action across the road.

It's not a bad hotel in the modern sense of the word. When the ground is quiet it is a haven of tranquility not five minutes drive from the center of Dublin's fair city. When the ground is heaving then the hotel across the way heaves as well, a focal point from supporters of all hues and all creeds. The bar in Jury's was packed as usual on the night of the Ireland-Poland game that marked the first defeat - and the first real eye opener - of the Giovanni Trapattoni era. Before the game the Green Army was in buoyant mood, many of them queuing up to have their photograph taken with John Aldridge and Jason McAteer, there in their capacity as eircom ambassadors on the night of the game. After the 3-2 defeat, a loss that was deserved as it was alarming, many regular fans offered the first disapproving voices since Trapattoni was appointed manager. The regular reader of this column will know that I was never in the Trap corner when it came to appointing a successor to Steve Staunton. My money was on Terry Venables to get the job, simply because I believed this time last year that we needed an experienced man with a knowledge of the English game to get the best out of our English-based players. As it happens we got an experienced manager with no knowledge of the English game who won't even go to watch games in England on weekends, part of the reason why I am not confident at all about our World Cup qualification hopes. At the time of Trap's appointment those of us in the Venables camp were cast as some sort of demons who had bought into a Cockney myth surrounding the so called wideboy of English football. The anti-Venables camp even claimed that our man would spend more time in Spain than he would spend working with Ireland, a rich notion in the light of Trapattoni's refusal to scout his players on club duty. Naturally, one of the biggest supporters of Trap's appointment as manager was my old friend and foe and Star colleague Eamonn Dunphy. Surprise, surprise. In the past if Eamonn said something was black I'd be known to say it was white and vice versa. We have differed on many subjects, most notably Roy Keane, Mick McCarthy and Jack Charlton, and we were at odds when Venners was left out in the cold by the FAI last March. Today we are at loggerheads again on one front and in agreement on another, hence the bet in Jury's Hotel on the night of the Ireland game. The morning after that match Eamonn told the Star readers that the lack of tactical organization and awareness from Trap's team was worse than anything witnessed in the Staunton era. It was a justifiable claim from one of Irish soccer's most lauded pundits, and one which we got to hear about late on the Wednesday night in Jury's as the paper was going to press. On hearing Dunphy's latest opinion I struck a bet with another colleague that by the end of the World Cup campaign the great man will be telling us that he got it all wrong this time last year, and that Terry Venables should have got the Ireland job all along. To be fair more than one fellow hack took the bet, so I look forward to collecting sometime around October when the World Cup dream comes crashing to a halt and Eamonn admits he should have sided with Venners. By then Venables could the slam the final nail in Trap's coffin after confirmation on Tuesday that Bulgaria have sacked their manager Plamen Markov and could give the job to the man who was nearly Our Tel. In the meantime Eamonn has other fish to fry. Right now he is telling anyone who will listen that Roy Keane's days as Sunderland manager are numbered as the club he turned around two and a half years ago sit in the bottom three of the Premier League. Eamonn, Roy's biggest fan by his own admission, is no longer convinced that Keane has what it takes to become a top class manager, and on current evidence he probably has a point. Keane has spent a small fortune and a big one buying players for Sunderland but those same players now have him in a very fine mess. In order to recover ground and prove Dunphy wrong he must achieve the impossible and get a result at Manchester United on Saturday. If he does then Keane will survive this crisis and Dunphy will probably proclaim him a saint once again, but I do worry for the Corkman even if I believe he deserves more time at the Sunderland helm. The club, in case you missed it, are no longer controlled by the Irish consortium that was brave enough to give him his first job in management. The controlling shareholder at Sunderland FC is now an Irish American entrepreneur by the name of Ellis Short. He will care little about anything Dunphy has to say about Keane's managerial credentials, but he will care a lot about results. If things go wrong in the next three games for Sunderland #8212; against United, West Brom and Hull #8212; then Keane may discover that the dollar now rules at the Stadium of Light. And Mr. Dunphy may well be right with his latest opinion!