You can be convinced by Kenny’s vision... and not convinced he is the man to deliver it
THE WORLD CUP doesn’t help, but the fortunes of Ireland and their manager feel muffled and remote now. The noise that has provided an incessant soundtrack to the Stephen Kenny years is abating. It’s like in one of those courtroom dramas when Hollywood attorneys shout at witnesses and cross-examine ruthlessly, but then the jury leaves to consider its verdict and the clamour dies down. Everyone sits and fidgets and waits for judgement. There are no arguments left.
France now threaten to play the role of jurors in the case of Stephen Kenny’s new Ireland versus the past. On March 27 next, they come to Dublin for the first game in qualifying for the 2024 European Championships. Irish teams have never had a right to expect victory against a traditional heavyweight, but a significant defeat in that game, and with almost a three-month wait to the next competitive match, away in Greece, means the consequences could be significant.
That might feel unfair; France are defending champions at the World Cup, and the sporting order dictates that they beat a lesser side like Ireland most times they meet.
But the problem for Kenny is that that game will come following a tepid autumn, which did nothing to address the ongoing concerns around consistency, or to counter the feeling that the more progressive style he faithfully champions is not reflected in attractive or even effective performances. Snatches of good play are seized on by the manager, but he increasingly sounds like a salesman with a full boot who has spent the day ringing unanswered door bells.
His routine is well practiced, but the patter is not convincing many to buy what he’s selling. Worse, from his perspective, there are signs that some among his most ardent advocates are starting to equivocate. Noisy voices in the media, who rubbished doubters and insisted this was the future, are getting quiet.
There were reports of some boos from the few hundred Irish fans in Malta when the half-time whistle sounded last Sunday night. That, in fairness, needs to be balanced against a crowd of over 40,000 in Dublin for the Norway game three nights earlier. To deduce from a few cat-calls in Malta that Kenny has lost the people would be unfair. But there was always the sense, too, that the levels of public support for his project were unrealistically gauged.
Extensive backing for what he was trying to do, for the depth of his beliefs, and for the relevant fact that he was an Irishman who had thrived in the domestic game, was obvious to those in attendance on grand days like the rout of Scotland last June. Yet support for the national team is a pastime for the majority of fans; it is not an article of faith. They want to be entertained and they lose interest when times are difficult.
The argument that there is a large constituency that will offer unstinting backing to Kenny is not a persuasive one. The national team is most popular in the country, and there are hundreds of thousands of people willing to be charmed by their successes. That does not equate to a standing army ready to defend the cause of progressive soccer.
Nor are they swayed by the pseuds who see the game not as entertainment, but as an immersion in competing theories. That is more likely at club level, where fans see their team play a couple of times a week, and hear from managers and players explaining their methods and defending them.
The international game is episodic; there are short periods in which an impression has to be made, and if a team is struggling, there is not an extended run of games to play themselves into form or, perhaps as importantly, to buoy their fans.
And that’s what made the long-term claims for the Kenny project doubtful, too; international soccer is not a laboratory in which managers tinker towards a target years in advance. Kenny has actually done well to get this far into an unremarkable reign without feeling more intense pressure, but tomorrow eventually comes.
Many of his predecessors learned what could be a hard spring lesson for Kenny: difficult times are also lonely ones. When the wretched early difficulties of his time bottomed out with that mortifying loss to Luxembourg in Dublin, it was argued that results were not a fair measure of what he was trying to do.
He was trying to undo years of tactical neglect, argued some. And like a renovator peeling back walls and finding more damp and decay, the startling extent of the decline had to be understood before it could be repaired. But the Ireland doerupper remains scaffolded and half completed, with an unclear completion date and murmurs about the rate of progress.
To be fair to Kenny, his ambitions are clear, and not just because he now talks about them in practically every press conference, like a barrister with a well-practised closing speech.
When Ireland have clicked, the play has been fluent and sometimes buoyant.
It has never been sustained for a convincing period though, and this raises again the issue of available resources and tactics, and the mismatch therein. What the World Cup will show, just as the Champions League does when it reaches its latter stages each spring, is that midfield decides the biggest matches.
At the elite level, keeping possession and using it effectively time and again is what distinguishes the best. Trying to ape that style with inferior players is bold and not entirely detached from good sense: keeping the ball away from better sides by holding on to it yourself has an appealing logic. It is wickedly difficult to do, though.
Ireland’s most encouraging performances, home and away against Portugal in World Cup qualifying, and away to Serbia in the same campaign, came when playing on the counterattack. That won’t work against minnows, but against better sides, or those around Ireland’s level, it has obvious appeal. It allows the manager to fortify his defence, and it is a relatively straightforward tactic to drill in the very limited preparation periods in the international game.
It is also the kind of pragmatic outlook that fits better for a manager who now needs results. After years of commentary around the value of building over results, the importance of the latter is now stark. The manager’s most passion the ate champions belatedly concede two points: one, there is no more running away from the importance of results. They are the main determinant now. And secondly, that there has been an extended drop in performance levels since the fine draw with Ukraine in Lodz last June.
Ireland have played four matches since then, losing in Hamden Park, beating Armenia in a most unconvincing fashion, losing to Norway on a drab night in Dublin last week, and collapsing past Malta on Sunday night. There have been some forgettable matches involving the national team over the years, but few wins as cold and uninspiring as that one a week ago. Had Kenny experimented and still scrapped a win, then it would have been more valuable. As it was, the selection betrayed a manager in need of results, but the effort exposed a painful lack of quality.
And this brings us around to a point raised here before, but worth stating again. It is possible to be convinced by Kenny’s vision, and also unconvinced that he is the man to deliver it. He doesn’t have the copyright on ball retention and progressive play. Others can coach that way, too.
His job, starting with the forbidding form of France, is to show that he remains better suited to it than any alternatives.
Kenny doesn’t have copyright on ball retention, others can coach that way, too