STEPHEN KENNY INSISTS he will remain in charge until the end of Ireland’s Euro 2024 qualification campaign, despite the fact their ambitions to qualify from the group were sundered by tonight’s 2-1 loss to the Netherlands, a fourth defeat in five group games.
Ireland cannot qualify from the group by finishing among the top two, and so will be reliant on results elsewhere across Europe to determine whether their Nations League ranking will be enough to earn them a shot at the backdoor. That won’t be determined until the end of the entire campaign, but Ireland are currently just outside the play-off spots, albeit with a lot of games yet to shake out.
Kenny’s contract runs to the end of Ireland’s campaign, and he expects to see it out.
“Absolutely we’ve two matches in October, Greece and Gibraltar, and then Holland in Amsterdam. After that, that’s certainly not my decision. We have to see if we have the play-off in March, there’s still a chance.”
Asked whether Kenny fears that a future Ireland manager will profit from his squad-building across his tenure so far, Kenny replied, “Listen from my point of view, I’m not thinking about that now. I’m just very disappointed that we can’t finish in the top two in the group. I’m just very, very disappointed with that and it’s gut-wrenching that we can’t, you know?
“I think France are the best team in the world, up a level. Holland are probably not at the level of France, but they’re still… Argentina beat them in the World Cup on penalties.
“They have a lot of world-class players, but it’s still one that when you take the lead like we did, you are capable of winning. But we didn’t defend well enough overall to do that.”
On the match itself, Kenny praised his side’s first-half performance but bemoaned the concession of the two goals.
“I think the first half, we were absolutely excellent, I felt”, he said. “We committed incredibly aggressively to how to play against Holland. We pressed them right to the edge of their goal-line and every player gave everything of themselves in that period.
“They struggled to play out through us. We got the goal early on, which was a great confidence-booster for us. I thought in that period then, again we relentlessly pressed and I thought we should have capitalised on maybe a couple of opportunities that we didn’t in that period to try to go two up, and I just couldn’t believe that we conceded a goal.
“It was just such a frustrating goal to concede. It was hard to believe it. Gavin had to make a good save going into half-time, but I thought we were absolutely excellent first half overall, excellent. Second half, they had a dominant period, for sure. Obviously Gakpo pushed right on and pinned Doc [Doherty] back, and they got a stranglehold on it.
“We didn’t seem to be able to replicate the level of energy we had in the first half, we didn’t seem to be able to replicate that in our pressing.
“But we should have been good enough. Sometimes when you’re playing teams who are superior overall to yourselves, you’ll have periods when they’re on top of you, but you need to see it out and the fact that Doc had to play lower down should have meant we would have been in a back five and been able to see that out. We just needed to see out that period when they were on top. We didn’t, they scored and it killed us.
“But we kept going until the end, the effort was great, obviously a lot of crosses, but they’re a big team, they defended their box well, a lot of individual players running at the Dutch defence and we caused them problems, but we needed to create more than we did in that end period.”
Dutch manager Ronald Koeman, meanwhile, praised his own half-time switch from a back three to a back four in determining the game for his side.
“The start was really poor”, said Koeman of his side’s performance. “We expected high pressing from the Irish team, but we lost many balls in our possession and we did not have control in the game.
“After 20, 25 minutes, it was a little bit more calmed down and the decision at half-time to change the system to play four at the back was a good decision.
“After half-time, we controlled the game. Only in the last 10 minutes, maybe they brought the same pressing, but they did not create any chance to score and we defended well in the last part of the game, and finally I think it’s a fair result.”
