The back page of Monday night's Evening Herald put the tin hat on a quite bizarre week in the history of the Irish football team. It was a week that began with Giovanni Trapattoni claiming that Andy Reid was too sad to have around the place, a claim later refuted by Liam Brady. It was the week when Team Ireland, minus Andy or Steven Reid as well as Lee Carsley and Stephen Ireland, were quite pathetic in a 3-2 Croke Park defeat to Poland. And it was the week when Trapattoni staged the most remarkable game of charades I have ever seen in all my years covering sport, amateur and professional, as he acted out his desire to kick the same Andy Reid up the behind! That's right. Last Thursday morning this reporter and several others sat bemused in the Dublin Airport Hotel as Trap stood up to show us - graphically - how he wanted to kick one of our finest players up the backside in a German hotel bar. We'll come back to that act in a few paragraphs, but first let's rewind only as far as Monday and the edition of the Evening Herald that came my way, in exchange for €1.20, in the Blanchardstown Shopping Center. The Monday night Herald is a must for all of us involved in the grassroots so beloved of FAI chief executive John Delaney as it contains the first public announcement of the junior soccer fixtures for the following weekend. On Monday, as we waited to see the new and ultimately disappointing James Bond movie, I glanced first at the junior soccer pages to discover that my under-15 team from Dunshaughlin will play host to league leaders Castleknock this Sunday if the rain stays away. Seeing as how I had more than a few minutes to spare, I then turned to the back page where sure enough the main story, by my old friend Paul Hyland, concentrated on the latest twist in the ongoing Trap-Andy Reid saga. The story down the side of the page was next to catch my attention - and what a story it was as Bohemians manager Pat Fenlon, fresh from winning the FAI Cup final and completing the league and cup double, berated the same Trapattoni for ignoring the biggest game of the domestic football calendar. Nutsy, Fenlon's football name if you will, was angry that not one of the FAI's well paid management team had taken the effort to watch the FAI Cup final when the Bohs 'keeper Brian Murphy was simply outstanding. The snub was no surprise to those of us who have been watching Trap for some months now. After all the Ireland boss, paid a mere €2 million a year by the FAI and Denis O'Brien, can't be bothered to watch players in England's Premier League, so why would he bother with the FAI Cup final? It's a moot point at the moment as Andy Reid becomes more isolated by the day, and Trap admitted publicly that he has no plans to even consider a recall for Lee Carsley, who is playing first team football at Birmingham, ahead of Premiership reserves Darron Gibson or Glenn Whelan. The fact that Trapattoni wasn't at Sunday's FAI Cup decider in the RDS, attended by an impressive 10,000 strong crowd by the way which included President Mary McAleese, made for a great line by my old colleague Aidan Fitzmaurice in the Herald. Essentially Aidan remarked on that back page sidebar that President McAleese has seen more eircom League football this season than the Ireland boss Trapattoni, a quite brilliant and sadly funny remark that is 100 percent true. Trapattoni didn't see any football last weekend unless it was on DVD or one of the satellite channels the FAI now have piped into his Milan home. He claims his scouts - including Marco Tardelli, Brady, Frank Stapleton, Mick Martin and Ashley Grimes - are well qualified to keep a handle on the Irish players in Britain. Sadly the performance against the Poles last Wednesday night, when Trap finally met a tactician in charge of Ireland's opposition for the first time, did little to suggest anybody working with our national side is getting things right at the moment. Now I know the cranks out in the Bronx will point to the fact that Team Trap is currently second in their World Cup qualifying group and likely to stay there at worst for the remainder of the competition, thus guaranteeing a place in the playoffs next November. That, folks, is the problem. As things stand the playoffs will be as good as it gets for Ireland under the cautious Trapattoni in a group crying out for some imagination. Last Wednesday proved it as Poland, under the ageing Dutch master Leo Beenhaker, found Trapattoni out tactically on Wednesday night, worked their three goals well and only had to survive a late Irish revival sparked by the arrival of the enthusiastic Hunt brothers Noel and Stephen. There was little else to cheer about Ireland's performance when Whelan and Gibson were again exposed as wannabes in the center of the midfield on a night when Andy Reid and Lee Carsley were nowhere to be seen. By Thursday Trap had insisted to the daily papers that he is in no rush to change things, before revealing to the Sunday papers that he wanted to kick Andy Reid up the rear in the team hotel on the night of the Georgia game last September. Reid's sin was to play the guitar and sing a song or two, some of them at the behest of Trap's assistant Brady, after a game in which he had played no part whatsoever. Trap's sin, as he tried to deflect from the real issues of the day by playing charades, is to ignore one of the few real talents Team Ireland has at its disposal. What happens between Trap and Reid in the coming months will tell us much about Ireland's qualification hopes for the World Cup finals, but right now it is not the Sunderland man who deserves a kick up the backside. Any football manager who can tell me that Glenn Whelan or Darron Gibson are better footballers than Andy Reid right now deserves a kick up the Arsenal all of his own. As I said, a bizarre week brought to heel by one sentence linking the Irish football team manager with the Irish president. Who said this job can get boring!