STEPHEN KENNY ASKED the journalists around him to take a step back and then he vehemently defended his record and decision-making, standing in defiance of a pressure he has courted.
Kenny talked boldly of the potential of the Irish players, and the defeat in Athens became another night in which that potential was not delivered. He has failed to deliver upon the expectation he himself has created, but creating that expectation was a necessary condition of getting the job.
When Kenny says he believes the Irish team can achieve great things while playing good football, it is because he believes it. But equally, he was never going to get the Ireland job by keeping shtum on that. Other national team coaches who play progressive football don’t have to shout about it because it’s baked into the culture to the point it doesn’t have to be said too often.
It was different in Ireland in 2018 when Kenny was advocating for the job. A League of Ireland manager wasn’t going to get the gig by under-promising and over-delivering, following the vague creeds of ‘getting us organised’, or ‘putting a smile back on our face.’
The barrier to entry for domestic managers was so high that only the promise of a full-scale revolution would create a swell of support large enough to bring the former FAI regime to the table. This all resonates in Kenny’s assertion on Monday night that, “I’ve taken on a lot.”
There is a tendency in some places to write off Kenny’s promises as amounting to little more than an effective PR campaign but that is grossly unfair. He clearly believes what he says, and he has the CV and past accomplishments to back it all up. But he has so far failed to affect it with Ireland.
Some of his young players are proving that they are not quite ready to help qualify Ireland for a major tournament. They have developed at different rates: Gavin Bazunu, Nathan Collins, Dara O’Shea, and Evan Ferguson are at the level Ireland need them to be at, but Jayson Molumby, Jason Knight, Troy Parrott, and Adam Idah are not quite there yet.
Ireland also don’t have the midfield quality to dominate games as Kenny had promised, but this is largely a consequence of Ireland’s historic abnegation of responsibility for player development.
Anyone paying even passing attention to the Irish team’s development since Kenny took the job will have realised there has been a constant process of compromise and adjustment to mitigate against the limitations of the squad.
Kenny began playing 4-3-3 but had to change, given Ireland were deficient in wide players and high-calibre midfielders and had an excess of quality at centre-back and wing-back. They have evolved to play fewer passes and to play more direct. Yes, Ireland play more football than their predecessors, but nor are they the kind of team that would open Pep Guardiola’s eyes wide in beatific wonder.
At no point can Kenny say that his players are not good enough, or even that individual players let him down in Athens on Friday night, because his reign is founded on a firm belief in their ability. Irish managers of the past could criticise the players on an individual or collective level, as they did not have to promise so much to be considered for the job. Kenny, however, has had to burden more responsibility for the failures in Athens than is fair.
That’s not to clear him of responsibility either. Kenny and his staff were comprehensively out-thought by Gus Poyet, and, most damningly, could not react in game. A string of bad results winnowed Kenny’s band of supporters, and Friday’s game shook the belief of even the most ardent. But it’s not all on him: some of the individual errors on the pitch were inexplicable, and any player facing the media after the game said they should accept responsibility.
There is a gathering sense of resignation about Kenny’s reign, a growing acceptance that it won’t work out.
Kenny’s five-minute monologue after the Gibraltar game was unlike anything another Irish manager has delivered before. But has any other Irish manager ever felt the need to speak like this? Where else would the most successful manager in the modern history of a country’s domestic league still feel the need to justify himself as being worthy of the national team job?
This would surely only happen in Ireland, which is only now rubbing its eyes and waking up to the fact it is the most belated football culture in Europe.
Greece was damaging for Kenny not just in the context of qualification, but because everyone reasonably expected that this would be the kind of game Ireland should be ready to win.
They weren’t ready to win. In fact, they could hardly compete.
Initially I wrote that this game was a failure on the management’s own terms, but I’m now regretting that phrase. Perhaps the expectation heaped on the team in Athens was not a realistic reflection of its quality, or at least how they would be expected to perform given their lack of match sharpness in comparison to the Greece players, which is a product of having many more players in the English Championship.
Instead, maybe the expectation is the product of the far higher entry tarriff heaped upon a League of Ireland manager by the FAI’s former leadership?
“I wouldn’t have got to where I got, into this job, if I didn’t believe you can achieve extraordinary things”, said Kenny after his speech on Monday night.
He and we are still living with a legacy of the FAI demanding extraordinary things from a League of Ireland manager, where managers from other backgrounds were allowed to justify themselves according to the qualities of their players.
That will change some day, but that day will come too late for Stephen Kenny.