IN THE AFTERMATH of the sodden and lonely sundering of a campaign against Luxembourg in March, Stephen Kenny took his press conference over Zoom with journalists interrogating him from the press box overhead.
The questions were brutal and Kenny was diffident to the point of morose.
After it ended, he sat alone in the press conference room for 10 minutes, gazing vacantly ahead of him and ruminating on the disaster until an FAI staffer returned to tell him the bus was about to leave.
Contrast that to the mood of last night’s press conference in the Stade de Luxembourg, where he spoke of Ireland’s ambition to be “brilliant”, abashedly thanked the fans for singing his name and rounded on Luc Holtz’ comments about Ireland’s alleged reversion to a “British style.”
Earlier, Irish fans interrupted Holtz’ press conference by banging on the other side of a glass wall, singing, “There’s only one Stephen Kenny.”
Kenny’s reign to now has seemingly split Irish football, but last night everyone was on the same side. Holtz, said Kenny, had “denigrated” all the great players in the history of Irish football and his roll call was a cast of his sceptics, critics and those recently out of a senior coaching job at the FAI: Liam Brady, Paul McGrath, Robbie Keane, Damien Duff and Mick McCarthy all got a mention, along with Denis Irwin, John Giles and Roy Keane.
Unity is breaking out more generally, with fewer voices than ever clamouring for his dismissal. And that is with good reason: the FAI would now be mad not to extend his contract to include the Euro 2024 campaign.
There is also no benefit to waiting to make a decision until next summer: a couple of March friendlies won’t tell us anything more than we already know.
There is nobody better qualified available candidate than the incumbent, the players like working with him, the match-going fans keep singing his name and, above all, the team is getting better.
Progress is most pithily measured by the fact Ireland improved on all of their initial results against their qualifier opponents.
Defeats away to Serbia and Portugal became draws at home; a home draw with Azerbaijan was followed by a win in Baku; and Luxembourg have now mercifully been beaten. Ireland are scoring goals at a rate not seen in years – there’s been more in 2021 than in the previous three years combined – and in a style not seen in decades.
There have been perceptible tweaks in style since the March nadir, but Kenny hasn’t entirely shredded his principles. Instead he stuck to the approach he took at the start of the qualifying campaign but made it better.
Having spent last year with a back four, Ireland played a back three in Serbia in the opening game of the group and have played it in every game this year since bar the 4-1 win in Andorra, and the most important ingredient added to it has been time.
Without the astonishing run of injuries, Covid cases and muddled seating plans the team have finally found some rhythm and consistency. “It was just one of them one that was going to take time”, says Enda Stevens. “He needed time to find out how he wanted to play and get it across to us. I think the team looks like we’ve all clicked, we’re all on the same page and we’re all building strong attachments all over the pitch.”
Only Jason Knight missing three games because of an injury inflicted by his own manager really registered on the Kenny Cosmic Misfortune Scale this year.
There are game-by-game tweaks to the system but, for the first time in years, the Irish players are approaching games with a clear map in hand and a clear picture of where each other will be on the pitch.
It’s not accurate to say he has totally reverse-ferreted on his promotion of young players, either: the average age of the starting line-up in both games against Luxembourg was 26.
What he has done is found new players for his system. In the early days of his reign he consistently spoke about the need to add pace to the Irish attack, which was one of the primary reasons for picking Aaron Connolly. As his career stalled, Kenny has unearthed a replacement in Chiedozie Ogbene.
It was on his second day as senior manager that Kenny went to the FAI to demand they chase Ogbene’s eligibility, and he was cleared to play almost a year later, just prior to the June training camp in Spain. Kenny has since admitted Ogbene wasn’t picked on form: he missed most of last season with a knee injury but Kenny and Keith Andrews decided he could offer something the squad didn’t have and was brought in to be sized up. Other fresh faces were drafted in for that camp too – Jamie McGrath, Andrew Omobamidele, Sammie Szmodics, and Danny Mandroiu – with varying degrees of success.
The Spain training camp afforded Kenny a rare opportunity of nine days’ worth of almost uninterrupted work with the squad and with Covid protocols less onerous, it seems to have bonded the players together.
Its final act was significant: a goalless draw away to a Euros-bound Hungary in which Shane Duffy was lifted from the misery of his spell at Celtic to reclaim the Man of the Match award he monopolised between 2017 and 2019. Duffy’s resurgence has been vital for Ireland, and he has played every minute of the qualification campaign since and scored thrice, while the stadium announcer generously awarded him Serbia’s comedy own goal at the Aviva.
He has helped to steel an improving defence, which has now kept four clean sheets in a row and – one for the purists – has recorded its lowest Expected Goals Against tally across a calendar year since 2015.
Partly through abnormal circumstance and partly through design the squad now has some genuine depth, particularly at wing back, centre back and of course at goalkeeper, at which the rest of Europe is presumably watching on with envy.
(Jack Charlton named a striker as a goalkeeper at Italia ’90 – perhaps Kenny will go full circle and try to accommodate Caoimhin Kelleher in midfield.)
Kenny overstated his number of debutants last night – it’s 12, rather than 16 – but he is right to describe it as a necessary and radical overhaul, given youth promotion was somewhere beneath Enthusiastic Press Engagements in previous managers’ job description.
Its practical benefit was in effect last night: Jason Knight changed the game.
The style of play has changed somewhat, though Kenny won’t want to hear it called direct. A more palatable description might be a favourite of Luis Enrique’s: Ireland are playing with more ‘verticality.’
They played 5.75% of their passes long (further than 25 metres) at home to Luxembourg in March, and the average figure for the same stat across the 10 games since is twice that. This is partly a consequence of having more pace in the team and facing sides like Portugal and Serbia with high defensive lines, and as Kenny said this week, ” a long pass is a good pass as well, if everyone commits and crowds in space and leaves Chiedozie one-on-one.”
This year Ireland averaged a hundred fewer passes a game than they did the year before but they have become more effective: beating Azerbaijan with just 36% possession, for instance.
There are still issues. The front line lacks goals without Robinson, pace without Ogbene, physicality without Idah and cohesion without either Knight or Jamie McGrath, and the current system means Ireland have to sacrifice at least one of those qualities.
They were also nervy moments in Luxembourg, and the angst of being forced to wait for the opening goal does become manifest as a game wears on. (Which is a change from the latter days of the Martin O’Neill era, when the team frequently managed to ‘if anything, score too early’ when they managed to score at all.)
This years results were not good enough, and that the World Cup campaign was dead after two games and we were left keeping ourselves interested by talking about a potential contract extension for eight months is…regrettable.
But while Kenny failed in qualification, he has succeeded in making the country care about its national football team once again after years of dreary apathy.
The last two home games have sold out; RTÉ attracted an additional 50,000 viewers for last night’s game compared to the home game with Luxembourg, which could only be watched on TV.
Let’s finish with a citation from Irish football’s own Book of Revelations, Champagne Football, which tells us that after the last time the Irish rugby team beat the All Blacks, John Delaney told the FAI board that he feared the result would have a negative impact on how the Irish football team was viewed.
It was another classic example of Getting it Totally Wrong: the Irish football team was having a negative impact on how the Irish football team was viewed.
Three years on, the rugby team have repeated their trick but the mood around the Irish football team has completely changed.
Kenny deserves a contract extension to keep that rolling at the very least.