THE ISSUE of whose idea it was for the players to have Wednesday off raised its head yesterday after the squad trained at Gdynia’s municipal stadium, with Marco Tardelli and Keith Andrews providing somewhat different takes on things.

“Nobody asked not to train,” said Tardelli fairly emphatically as he made his way towards the team bus. “Giovanni decided.”

Just a few feet away, however, Andrews said the players had collectively sought to take a break from training after what they felt had been a reasonably hard couple of weeks as well as Monday’s game in Budapest and a flight to Gdansk that touched down at 3am.

“I think it’s been built up to be more than it is,” he said. “You don’t train every single day when you’re at your club. It was a case of . . . we have an itinerary and it was pencilled in as a day’s training. But the lads spoke to the manager and came to the conclusion that a day off would be best for all concerned. It was just as simple as that, really.”

The question of whether players were tired had arisen on Monday night when Andrews and Aiden McGeady mentioned it after the game. Trapattoni reacted with surprise when their comments were mentioned to him and insisted he would not be changing his schedule in any way. Within a couple of hours, however, training for the next day was cancelled.

Yesterday Tardelli was pretty dismissive of the suggestion that the players could have been suffering from fatigue as a result of their preparations for the tournament in the first place.

Rather, he put the problem down to the conditions in Budapest where heavy rain in the build-up to the kick-off time had made the playing surface quite heavy, before insisting that they are all fine now.

“You saw the training?” he asked. “Are the players weak? No. It is normal [immediately] after a match and after the rain on the pitch. It is possible the players are weak but I don’t think so.”