MICHEL PLATINI wasn't satisfied. Another game, another goal up, but yet another slow-burning Juventus performance. So, he would repeat his usual call to the line. "Move forward, get up the field, the defence is too deep." Around six years later at Inter, Lothar Matthaus was often shouting the same sentiments. "Attack, mister, attack!" To which he would get the same sort of reply from Giovanni Trapattoni. "Stay where you are, it's better that way."

As opinion went from optimistic to fatalistic and back again in the space of five days this week, the main point of contention among the Irish soccer public was whether Trapattoni simply has to play such a cautious formation to overcome the relative poverty of the Irish squad. Yet as those two vignettes with Ballon D'Or winners indicate, he would play with a similar perspective even if he had an all-time dream team of Roy Keane, John Giles, and Liam Brady to pick from.

And despite how frequently the national mood about the team and Trapattoni transformed during the week, one thing that is likely to stay constant is that 4-2-2-2 formation. Yes, Trapattoni may have broken with both set-up and attitude to subs when he brought on Caleb Folan against Italy but, as the piece below this details, that was merely down to the particular opposition and peculiar circumstances. It will take more than a draw in what was quite a bizarre game in Bari for Trapattoni to alter his approach.

There's unlikely to be any conversion on the road to Damascus, as Bill O'Herlihy wished for on Wednesday. It was out of this intransigence, of course, that Trapattoni built up one of the finest ever CVs in international management so we should be wary of being too critical. Yet amid all those achievements, there have been occasions when he might have added to them had he shown even an element of the flexibility he did on Wednesday.

The most infamous example comes from the 1983 European Cup final against Hamburg, a time when Juventus had already won four leagues under Trapattoni but were desperate to claim the one competition both Milan and Inter had already won yet always eluded them.

Before the final in Athens, he had secured those titles by perfecting il gioco all'Italiana, Serie A's evolution of Catenaccio and the system with which Italy won the 1982 World Cup.

It consisted of an asymmetrical 4-3-3 with an advanced left-back and worked so well in Italy because everyone was equally asymmetrical. Yet in that final, Ernst Happel merely switched his Hamburg across the pitch. Trapattoni attempted only a cosmetic change by moving Claudio Gentile to man-mark, but that left Antonio Cabrini and Marco Tardelli – the two non-forwards with the most freedom – isolated and Juve lost 1-0. With that defeat died il gioco all'Italiana.

There are similar – if admittedly less consequential – stories throughout Trapattoni's career. When he returned to Juventus in the '90s and used a formation not unlike Ireland's now he insisted on putting David Platt – famous for his late runs – into a position similar to Glenn Whelan's. Not that Trapattoni would admit such a set-up is cautious.

In his mid-90s book The Conception and Development of Football Tactics, he claims there are merely "different perceptions of what attack-oriented football is". Yet Italy's most celebrated football writer Gianni Brera wrote of him "when you build a house, you start with the foundations not the roof. [Nereo] Rocco and then Trapattoni have always built their sides on the basis that it is easier to concede one goal less than your opponents than to score one goal more. It seems to me perfectly logical reasoning."

And this is the point that mustn't be forgotten. Amid all the apparent criticism of Trapattoni there is a caveat. He undoubtedly has the right defensive framework – a few remaining individual errors aside – for this Ireland side. It just requires a touch more flexibility, the creativity of the two central midfielders and their link to the wingers particularly crucial – as the Bulgaria game showed. It is no coincidence after all that our most rousing performances have come after going a goal down.

Yet that the team needs such an incentive to properly play may have a cost. In drawing with Bulgaria and Montenegro, we are second-last in the Uefa table of nine second-placed teams. There are only eight places – at the moment Croatia miss out. However, since only results against the top five teams in each group are considered, the last night of fixtures could well see us bizarrely watching for Georgia's results instead of Bulgaria's in the last rounds of fixtures as we have six points off them as opposed to only a potential four against Montenegro. That, or equally bizarrely, we should perhaps hope for Bulgaria to score first in Sofia.

That seems to be the only way for Trapattoni to heed Platini's call.