MANY mad and wonderful things flit across the mind's eye when you're walking away from a football stadium in Southern Italy on a cushion of air, things that you don't think about every day.

Did the Bari tifosi really boo an Italian manager and raise the roof for the Irish boss before the game started? They did.

After the game, did Marcello Lippi really say with serious gravitas that Italy could have lost that game? He did.

Did the fantastic Irish fans raise a cheeky chant near the end "who are ya?" to rub salt into Italian wounds? Hard to see that one happening again, but wasn't it just perfect and hilarious.

Is Giovanni Trapattoni the luckiest manager ever to walk the earth? He could well be.

Only a man who has a hotline to a higher place can hope to watch a German referee -- part of an officials' team with names straight out of Dickens: Stark, Salver and Pickel -- brandishing a red card for very little reason in the opening minutes of a World Cup qualifying fixture in Italy.

Only Trapattoni could rely on bizarre penalty awards; an outbreak of war in Georgia and a woefully out of form right-full in Paul McShane and still have an extraordinary 12 points in Group 8.

This was a huge, huge point and could have been an almost unthinkable three. From a base line set against Bulgaria just a handful of days ago, Trapattoni's Ireland scaled heights unimagined in the San Nicola and now we can really believe that automatic qualification is a real prospect.

Sure, Italy lost Giampaolo Pazzini in remarkable circumstances and then took their goal and sat back, doing much the same as Ireland did in Croke Park against the Bulgarians.

Of course the game was turned on its head by the mind-bogglingly fortunate quirk of fate that pitched the Italians on the back foot because of Stark's clanger.

But the potential downside from a remarkable evening in Bari after Iaquinta ghosted across the Irish defence for a beautifully constructed lead goal wasn't easy to contemplate.

Defeat, however narrow and glorious, would have put a major hole in everyone's hopes and dreams.

Instead of travelling to Sofia in June scared to the roots by the possibility that a fantastic start to Group 8 was simply fate playing games with us, Trapattoni leads his team there in a few months with a serious well of confidence and self-belief to draw on.

As he said, the Republic of Ireland is now one of a small group of teams unbeaten so far in World Cup qualifying and with this draw against the Italians banked, the psychological impact on Bulgaria cannot be understated.

With a comfortable 2-0 win over Cyprus last night, they must have believed that the table would make much happier reading for them.

Now they know that they must find points in unlikely places to even challenge for second place and the play-offs.

There are some obvious questions about this result that lean towards the notion of a glass half empty.

Why, for instance, were Irish players pitifully unable to hold onto possession for anything longer than an eyeblink in Croker yet they stroked the ball around with almost nonchalant ease against the World Champions.

This was football of a type we rarely witness when the Republic of Ireland is in action and certainly you have to travel back in time to Paris a few years back for a performance against one of the big guns that came anything close to this.

There is now no doubt but that Trapattoni's system is much more suited to away action than home but that still doesn't explain the step-up in standard and approach.

Trapattoni threw the dice in a big way. Gone were the long balls, although in the end, it was a long bash forward that eventually produced a bounce off Caleb Folan that handed Robbie Keane the chance to do what he did to Germany in Ibaraki back in 2002.

For this game, Trapattoni emptied his bench and threw in lads he didn't trust against Bulgaria to get a goal against Italy.

Caution went out the window and Trapattoni can justifiably say that his calls were the right ones even though we all scratched our heads when he called Kevin Doyle ashore.

But the result makes Trapattoni right; just as every result so far has answered critics in the only effective way possible.

The revelation on the night -- for Trapattoni and the watching nation, was the performance given by Darron Gibson.

If anyone should be given the credit for a precious World Cup point apart from Keane, Gibson was the man.

He brought something we haven't seen before from him to the table and perhaps this is the game that will make him -- internationally at least.

While Italian legs tried manfully to make up for the fact that their team was two short, Gibson arrived into the game and demanded the ball. When he had it, he used it exceptionally well, pinging long passes to feet with an extra yard of pace that completely unhinged what remained of the Italian midfield effort.

For all Trapattoni's perceived negativity and unwillingness to place trust in ball players above hod carriers, Gibson proved that there is subtlety and skill contained in this group of players and it can be used to great profit.

How must Andy Reid feel now? Gibson isn't the type of player that will run 40 yards to make a tackle and he still has a way to go to refine that aspect of his game.

His effectiveness is in his passing accuracy and Trapattoni was more than happy to give him his head.

There were long stretches in the first-half when Reid was the very player Ireland needed -- a man to thread a pass or do something different enough to confuse the fabulous Fabio Cannavaro and Giorgio Chiellini who held the line with some ease and didn't look like they were likely to make a mistake.

Reid would have the biggest challenge of his life on his hands to displace Glenn Whelan, Keith Andrews or indeed Gibson, but at least if he had been in Bari, the option would have been available.

At times, Whelan looked like a very good player indeed, particularly in the second-half and he has been adding to his game incrementally since Trapattoni decided that he was the man to seek and destroy in midfield.

There were other notable efforts too. Stephen Hunt had his best game in an Irish shirt and that's saying something given the fact that he was seeing double for a lot of the first-half and didn't even know Italy had scored.

But concussed or not, Hunt put in a great shift; combining his enthusiasm and energy with a bravura assault on Italian machismo. At one stage, he was even protecting Mr Pickel from irate Italians.

The one worrying aspect of the game was McShane, a man who has lost his confidence and needs regular football.

Three teams have now targeted the Kilpedder man and made inroads and Trapattoni knows he will have to address the issue in a more permanent way than simply shuffling John O'Shea and McShane around the back four.

But that's a thought for another day. Now is the time to bask in the knowledge that the Republic of Ireland went to the home of the reigning World Champions and left with a point in the bag.

In years to come, we will remember this night as one of the great ones, an occasion to match pretty much any of the great moments in Irish football history and for that we owe a debt of gratitude to Trapattoni.

- Paul Hyland