Kenny will be just as limited by the quality of players
SECOND acts in Irish soccer stick to an old script, it turns out.
Mick McCarthy goes in 2020 in circumstances similar to those that preceded his departure in 2002.
On both occasions, he remained dignified throughout trying times. Both times, he succumbed to the pressure wrought by an external issue that was doggedly controversial.
And in both cases, the mess was created by those specialists in cackhandedness, the Football Association of Ireland.
If there is a mitigating factor in all of this for Irish soccer fans, it is that the FAI have finally acted with decisiveness and apparent clearsightedness, which suggests that a departure with the bad old days might actually be possible.
It was getting to a point when it was no longer good enough to simply not be the John Delaney era; the new bosses had to make a stark call as part of the clean-up operation after one of Delaney’s most bizarre pieces of business.
And they have done it – helped, of course, by the devastating impact of a global pandemic.
Now all Stephen Kenny has to do is succeed where McCarthy, Martin O’Neill, Giovanni Trapattoni and Stephen Staunton could not.
How success is measured will determine all, though; let us not forget that both Trapattoni and O’Neill brought Ireland to the European Championships.
In both instances, it was brutally clear by the end of their times in charge that the best days had long passed.
The point is this, though: Kenny will eventually come under intense pressure, of a kind he has never dealt with before.
Scrutiny in this job is unflagging, and he follows Brian Kerr in being promoted after excelling within the Irish soccer ecosystem.
That did not protect Kerr in the end, and as successful as he was with Dundalk, and as well as he has the Ireland Under 21s playing, the job he now occupies is of an entirely different order.
He has earned this chance, and there is enormous goodwill for him.
It is hard to see how he will not be confronted by the obstacle that has been most difficult to negotiate for all of his predecessors, going back to the end of the first McCarthy era: the very limited stock of quality players that he can pick.
There are some promising talents, of whom he will be aware, but the roster of established internationals is plainly functional.
The Nations League, scheduled to start in the autumn, will be the proving ground for his methods.
Before then, the play-off against Slovakia, freshly inked in for September, gives him a high-stakes game by which no reasonable person could expect to judge him.
Nobody knows when European leagues will resume, how delayed they will be, and what access an international manager will get to his players in those circumstances.
Further, this is the culmination of a middling qualifying campaign under McCarthy, so Kenny can really only succeed. Beat Slovakia and they are a game away from the Euros. Lose, everyone shrugs and the Kenny era really starts later in the year.
Last June, anticipating a qualifier against Switzerland later in the year, McCarthy talked about what happened when he left the Ireland job the first time.
It was a 2-1 defeat to the Swiss in Dublin that prompted him to go that time, but he said he had his mind made up even before the visitors scored a late winner in the match.
The atmosphere at the game was wretched, and that was because of Saipan.
The most powerful row in the history of Irish sport was still radiating intense heat four months later, in September 2002, and McCarthy was hounded by a section of supporters in the Swiss match.
‘It was right to do,’ he said almost 17 years later. ‘It wasn’t getting any better because of the set of circumstances.’
Those circumstances were in part down to the incompetence of the FAI, with much of Roy Keane’s atomic frustration building up as a result of the inefficiencies he encountered in his dealings with the national team.
And that incompetence has now played its part in ending his second spell in charge of the national team.
The deal struck by Delaney with McCarthy and Kenny was with the agreement and understanding of both men, but that makes it no less ridiculous.
It was a piece of smooth politicking that kept differing constituencies barely satisfied, quick business of a piece with much of the mess that has been exposed over the past year.
Anyone at the press conference in November 2018 when the managers were unveiled should be able to recall the awkwardness. McCarthy, in particular, seemed uneasy with the succession arrangement.
However, he signed up for it and 16 months later he is gone again.
His second spell pales compared to his first, but then 20 years ago he was able to call upon players from some of England’s best clubs, and in Keane the best midfielder in the world.
That said, though, some of the performances of his team this time around were woefully flat. There were times when the standard slipped to the flatlining level of the last days of the O’Neill era.
He was asked about the attacking talent of the likes of Troy Parrott, Aaron Connolly and Michael Obafemi, and any reluctance to select them was criticised as unwieldy conservatism.
McCarthy is a long, long time on the road, however, and understands when a player is ready to be pitched in to critical matches.
Kenny is lauded for the dynamism of his U21s, and if he can nurture that style with the seniors, he will transform the Ireland side.
McCarthy walks away again. And like the last time, he does so deserving of respect, an honourable man who has served his country with distinction.
‘HE’S EARNED HIS CHANCE AND THERE’S ENORMOUS GOODWILL’