SOME MAY POINT to Ireland spiking their hard-earned momentum with a loss to Armenia as proof of their inconsistency but the opposite is true.
Ireland remain as consistent as Javier Zanetti’s hair. When given space by team who attack them, Ireland have proven they have the pace and the intelligence to create chances and score goals.
Handed the initiative by the opposition and asked to break down opponents who deny them space, however, and they desperately struggle.
That issue pre-dates Stephen Kenny but that does not absolve him from responsibility, and Saturday’s defeat in Armenia played out in freakishly familiar circumstances. A tepid Ireland toil and create little and are then sucker-punched by a stunning goal from distance.
It has happened twice at home, first in defeat to Luxembourg and then in a draw with Azerbaijan, and the sorry script has now played out at the beginning of Ireland’s Nations League campaign.
Three stunning goals from range may be an aberration, but the fact they are continually decisive is the trend. Ireland are not creating enough chances and nor are they scoring enough goals to avoid these screamers denying them victory.
The secret is out there for the sides who still view Ireland as a scalp: give them the ball, let them try to cause you problems, and you’ll probably be fine.
Since the start of the World Cup qualifiers last year, Ireland’s three highest individual shares of possession in competitive games came in the aforementioned three games with Luxembourg, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, none of which were won. These three games were also those in which Ireland their highest number of passes per game.
There’s no doubt that Ireland lack the world class talent that can instantly make these minnows’ effort moot, and Ireland also lack a creative No.10 who can unpick deep-lying defences. Jack Byrne, Connor Ronan, Danny Mandroiu and Mark Sykes are all either injured, unproven, out of form, or a mixture of all three.
There were problems specific to the Armenian game over which Kenny has less control. The biggest problem was Ireland’s alarming lack of match sharpness: clumsy touches and errant passes in the opening minutes gave way to a terrible fatigue in the second half. Matt Doherty was an enormous absence at right wing-back. Seamus Coleman, at the end of a physically and emotionally draining season at Everton, lacked Doherty’s thrust up the right wing and doesn’t have his singular, clever positioning. Doherty is adept at drifting into midfield and linking up with Jeff Hendrick in particular.
Hendrick looked most likely to play the pass that would bring Ireland’s opening goal in the first-half but he utterly wilted as the game wore on, which was a product of playing just 69 minutes of club action since Ireland’s last game, a friendly against Lithuania in March.
A recurring issue in these games is also the pace at which Ireland play. They are often too pedestrian in possession, an issue highlighted by Ogbene after the defeat in Armenia.
“We can’t be complacent with keeping the ball. Because we are dominating possession, it’s not that it feels easy, but you feel like you’re in control. Sometimes we have to get the ball forward, penetrate through the lines, and try to get goals as early as possible and then manage it.” Ireland are supposed to be lulling the opposition into a false sense of security, not themselves.
When Ireland score early in these games they usually have little problem exploiting the space the opposition must then leave to kill the game: see the 3-0 win away to Azerbaijan last year and the 4-0 friendly thumping of Qatar. When they don’t score early, however, they struggle to score at all.
The exception was the 3-0 win away to Luxembourg to round out the World Cup qualifying campaign. Ireland were goalless until the midway point of the second half, at which point substitute Jason Knight made an impact, winning the free-kick from which Shane Duffy headed Ireland in front. Knight then assisted twice by brilliantly exploiting the space behind the Luxembourg defence to kill the game.
Kenny had introduced Knight five minutes before the first goal, in a tweak to the system with a perfect pay-off: replacing striker Adam Idah, a 3-4-3 became a 3-5-2 and Ireland won the points that the rankings dictated. The same plan didn’t work in Armenia, however, and further, effective in-game changes have been few and far between.
Kenny hauled his reign back from the brink by evolving his style of play and he may have to repeat the trick now. The first eureka moment being the switch to a back three after the pasting by England at Wembley last November. We’ve already gone in depth on the changes in approach that came with it, but, in distillation, Ireland became more direct. They averaged a hundred fewer passes a game compared to the year previous, hit a higher percentage of those passes long, and generally did more with less of the ball. They averaged almost one pass less for every time they had the ball in 2021 as opposed to 2020.
But a problem with evolution in football is that it can never stop: once you stand still, you fall behind. Another problem is the fact everyone knows what you’ve done, and thus you lose the element of surprise. Kenny admitted to being surprised by how Armenia lined up, changing from the back four they’d started in all but one of their last 20 games to a back five. They played that way in a defeat to Germany (though they reverted to a back five after a first-half sending off in the March friendly against Norway. It’s fair to say it’s easier to break down these low blocks when you have Erling Haaland as Norway went on to score nine goals.)
Ireland were definitely preparing for a back four, as the mannequins laid out to mimic the opposition set up for the tactical work at training the day before the game were arranged in a 4-4-2. Maybe it was a compliment to Ireland that Armenia changed their approach for them, though that rang hollow by full-time.
Ireland had a plan to target Armenia’s weakness at left-back (where they’ve been playing a right-footed right-back who’s been given the runaround by many of the right-wingers across Europe) but the hosts’ set-up protected that problem position and denied Ireland precious space in behind. Every time Ogbene received the ball with his back to goal rather than the other way around was another small victory for the Armenian game-plan.
It is not fair to say Kenny didn’t react during the game. Callum Robinson and Troy Parrott were switched in the hope that Robinson might prise an opening, while he did make substitutions: Michael Obafemi was first on and he was a major disappointment. Knight was brought on too, but the trick that worked in Luxembourg didn’t work again. Some of that failure is on the players: it’s difficult to think of a single Irish player who did themselves justice in the second-half, subs included.
Where the manager now faces criticism is whether he is sticking too slavishly to the back-three system that served him well in many games last year but is continually coming up short in the games in which Ireland are the chief protagonist. Kenny has previously spoken with an air of slight bafflement of Rotherham’s use of Ogbene as a right wing-back, and yet he ended Saturday’s game with Ogbene in that position, a sign perhaps of fidelity to the system triumphing over more natural instincts.
The most alarming part of the Irish performance was their hopeless effort to chase the game after falling behind, nothing but a frantic surge of panicked, low-quality crosses into the penalty area. That tactic broke for Ireland against Azerbaijan last year but not so on Saturday, and Armenia were not remotely clinging on by the end. Perhaps the most damning aspect of the night was that Ireland registered just a single attempt in the 15 minutes they played after falling behind. That attempt wasn’t even on target: it was a John Egan header that went wide.
The defeat raises questions as to whether Ireland need to find another way of playing in these games.
Should they have a back-up plan up their sleeve if these nervy games are still goalless on the hour mark? Or, given the importance of Doherty to the system and the dearth of alternate options, should they have played it at all without him? Do Ireland need to surprise their opponents again?
For now, Kenny is not for turning.
“We need to get better at what we’re doing”, he said. “It doesn’t have to a back four. It can be tactical nuances within it. We did end up with a hybrid of 3-5-2 with Keane and Obafemi, Jason Knight attacking.”
You’ve heard the saying about Plan B reading, ‘Make Plan A better’, but if these struggles against group fodder continue, the case to go back to the drawing board will grow ever more compelling.
