SHORTLY AFTER LEADING Dunfermline out to a Scottish Cup final against Celtic at Hampden Park, an agent approached Stephen Kenny to tell him that it was time for him to learn Spanish, such was the interest from the continent.
No más.
Two-and-a-half years later Kenny was back where it all began, at the bottom of the League of Ireland First Division.
Having been sacked by Dunfermline Kenny returned to Derry City ahead of the 2008 season. Complex financial irregularities, in which the club were found paying players dual contracts to circumvent FAI rules, saw the club engulfed in financial crisis in 2009, after which they were liquidated and forced to start afresh in the First Division.
The ’09 season was fraught and stressful – Kenny and the players went months without being paid, and were in the air on the way to a European tie with Riga when they were told they had to win to save their contracts.
They won that tie, but still it wasn’t enough and so Derry, along with Cork City, were relegated at the end of the year.
(If you’re wondering whether Kenny might struggle with the pressure of international football, consider that he steered Derry to fourth that year as some players fell behind on mortgage payments and others cancelled their weddings.)
When it was all over, Barry Molloy got as stark a phone call as a footballer can get. “I remember getting a call to say the club was gone. Everyone was devastated. It was shocking, and quite a scary period.”
The assumption was that Kenny would leave.
Molloy went on trial at Bristol Rovers and, when that didn’t work out, spoke with a number of Premier Division clubs while James McClean left and signed a contract with Chris Sutton’s Lincoln City.
McClean had only been in England a couple of days when Kenny rang him to tell him he was staying on.
If you’re staying, said McClean, then I’m asking Chris Sutton to cancel my contract, because I want to go home. Sutton obliged.
Molloy got a call too, and turned down a Premier Division contract worth 60% more than what Derry were offering to return home.
“When Stephen said he was staying and there was a plan to get the club into the first division, I knew straight away I didn’t want to play for any other club in Ireland”, says Molloy. “I thought if I can go back and help Derry get back into the First Division it would be amazing.”
“Being one of the top managers in the country at the time, it was a surprise he stayed”, says Mark McChrystal, who was made vice-captain for that First Division season. “But knowing him and knowing how he operates, it wasn’t a surprise.”
Speaking to Kevin Brannigan on The42′s Rise of Kenny podcast series, former editor of the Derry Journal Arthur Duffy says Kenny retained a loyalty to the players and the city of Derry, a community he and his family were very much a part of.
Kenny, meanwhile, looked at a wrecked club and saw the quality that has been a throughline of his entire career: potential.
“I could see a lot of potential in the club” said Kenny of lowly Longford Town in 1998.
“My job is to try and unlock the potential of the whole team”, he said when he was announced as the senior Ireland manager in April.
Thus it was at Derry.
Kenny identified a core of promising young players – McClean, Daniel Lafferty, Patrick and Shane McEleney – and convinced more experienced players to stay on, including Molloy, McChrystal, Gerard Doherty, Kevin Deery, and Mark Farren.
“For him to keep those experienced players says a lot about Stephen and how much they wanted to play for him”, says Molloy.
Influenced by Athletico Bilbao’s policy of picking only Basque players, Kenny recruited local players, to the point that most of the squad grew up within six miles of the city. This was a canny way of attracting players to the First Division, but also gave the squad an identity and immediate unity of purpose.
“He sold it to us”, says McChrystal. “Players could have left, but there was a drive there to get us all back up.”
Kenny began selling it in pre-season, setting each player individual goals and running through the fixture list, showing where they could accumulate the points that would make promotion.
Only one side was guaranteed promotion from the First Division in 2010, and Derry began the season away to Cork City, themselves a shadow of the club that had finished a point ahead of Derry a year earlier. That drew, and were later beaten by Waterford.
“Then we were thinking it would definitely be a difficult season”, remembers Molloy.
But things slowly began to click, and Derry beat Salthill Devon 7-0 away at the beginning of May to go top. They did not look back from there, and were promoted as champions on the final day, winning 1-0 away to Monaghan.
Molloy can only remember one detail of that game: that Mark Farren scored the winner, and that he scored it with his head.
Farren was diagnosed with a brain tumour late in 2008, and returned for the 2010 season following treatment.
Kenny helped to manage the media side of Farren’s illness, ringing Arthur Duffy to inform him of Farren’s illness and then working out a way the media could be kept informed while respecting Farren’s privacy.
It was decided that Duffy would conduct an interview, write a story and disseminate it among the rest of the national press, with any further updates done in the same way.
Faren returned for the 2010 season and was the League’s top scorer, but knew by its end that he would need to take a break after it ended to recover. Kenny said he was “unbelievably courageous”, and the Derry players lifted the league title in t-shirts bearing Farren’s name.
“We knew at that stage that Mark would take a break to concentrate on his recovery. For Mark to score that goal, especially with his head, was…unbelievable”, says Molloy. “It was very emotional, I couldn’t do an interview after the match.
That was probably the most emotional season of my career, in terms of being up against it, everything changing in terms of the finances, and obviously Mark’s situation, but to get promoted was a huge achievement.
“Stephen always spoke about Mark as ‘the diamond in the rough’, and Mark loved that. He was teeing him up as an unbelievable player, which he was. Mark was probably the best striker in Ireland that year and a lot of that had to do with Stephen Kenny and his belief in him.”
Farren returned to play for Derry City in September of the following year, but was diagnosed with a brain tumour once again in 2013.
He passed away in March 2016, aged just 33.
At his unveiling as Irish manager, Kenny remembered Farren along with the late Ryan McBride. “I’ve got a lot of texts from ex-players and so forth who are delighted”, reflected Kenny, “and I know I would have got messages from those two.”
“Stephen was an adopted Derryman”, says Molloy. “He loved Derry and he loved his players. There were a few things he did for me in the past to help me off the pitch, things I’d never expect any manager to do. Stephen is the kind of person that will do anything for anyone.”
Kenny guided Derry to third in the Premier Division the following season, but couldn’t qualify for Europe under Uefa rules around their recent liquidation. He left for Shamrock Rovers at the end of that year, telling Derry he wanted to return home.
The Rovers experience quickly curdled, which sent him to Dundalk for his greatest redemption act yet, and the one largely responsible for earning him the job he will finally begin in earnest tomorrow night.
The Derry 2010 experience, however, should stand to him at international level – he’s already pulled off the trick of rallying a group of players around a local identity against the background of financial turmoil.
Speaking on a corporate webinar earlier this year, Kenny reflected on how he got through the tough times at Derry.
“You have to take a step back and see the potential that exists or hang in there for better times. You have to keep everyone going to know that there will be better days ahead.
“You certainly have to be creative in the way you’re thinking and in relation to how you do things, and things will improve for sure.
“We are in tough times at the moment but you have to see that there are better times to come.”
