“I actually feel sorry for the manager.” Chiedozie Ogbene didn’t mean to be cruel, but in the merciless world of top-level football, pity comes across like a polite form of contempt.
Like the Hemingway line about bankruptcy, the collapse of Stephen Kenny’s credibility as Ireland manager happened gradually, then suddenly.
There were always people who insisted he was never the right man for the job and to give them due credit, they were at no time short of evidence to back up their initial judgment. Kenny started with 11 games without a win, which included a streak of seven games without a goal and a home defeat to Luxembourg.
The World Cup 2022 qualifiers blew up on the launchpad with two defeats in the first two games, before Kenny declared that his goal had always been to build a team for the Euro 2024 qualifiers two years further down the line. He announced that the target was to win the Nations League group in 2022, and again promptly lost the first two matches to Armenia and Ukraine. Those results ultimately cost Ireland second-seed status in the Euro 2024 draw, so that when the long-heralded moment of truth arrived, Kenny found himself drawn in a group alongside France and the Netherlands. In the end, though, his nemesis turned out to be a lower-seeded team: Greece.
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Kenny looked and sounded defeated and depressed as he answered media questions after the defeat to the Netherlands last month that snuffed out his last realistic hopes of saving his job. The one moment when he showed a flash of passion – anger almost – was when there was a question about how long a “rebuilding phase” should realistically be expected to take, and he found himself again talking about the number of new players he has brought into the national set-up. “Absolute jilted generation! Alan Browne, he’s the only player in that eight-year period who came through the under-21s. One player in eight years! I’m after putting 20 in a year, two years!”
It was clear that he feels passionately that this is his biggest achievement as Ireland manager, and that the value and the difficulty of what he has done is still not really recognised. But it also has to be acknowledged that a lot of the young players he put his faith in have not delivered. Maybe they will for another manager, but they didn’t ultimately do it for him.
His first Ireland team back in 2020 featured Aaron Connolly and Adam Idah in the front line. Neither player has since justified that early confidence. Troy Parrott, the once-dazzling prospect whose link-up with Michael Obafemi provided the highlight of Kenny’s whole time in charge against Scotland in June 2022, has not even made the last two squads. Gavin Bazunu needs to make a lot of saves to shake off the reputation he has unfortunately developed as one of the worst shot-stoppers in English football. It was a sign of terminal crisis when Nathan Collins, the supposed new rock of the defence, was subbed off at half-time on Friday after his part in the two Greek goals.
Looking back from this point, it might seem hard to understand how anyone ever believed this was eventually going to work out. And yet the crowd at the games stuck with Kenny all the way, until the tipping point of the shambolic defeat in Athens.
[ Ken Early: Trash talk gives way to rubbish display as Ireland stink out the AvivaOpens in new window ]
How is this to be explained? There is a school of thought that Kenny was the beneficiary of an establishment media stitch-up. Martin O’Neill, for example, said last month that “the media put Stephen in charge” and complained about the generous treatment Kenny received in the Irish press compared to other arguably better managers, such as Martin O’Neill. Maybe he believes that the people singing Kenny’s name at six in the morning on the streets of Łodz last summer were brainwashed into doing so by columns in The Irish Times.
Encouraged as Kenny media cheerleaders such as myself must be by O’Neill’s faith in the enduring power and influence of the mainstream media, I would venture that the Irish supporters were responding to something else.
From the beginning – in fact, well before he started in the job – Kenny had talked about the need for Irish football to find a way out of the dead end into which it had been led by coaches like Trapattoni, O’Neill and McCarthy.
As he told Emmet Malone in this newspaper five years ago: “Do I think that I could take charge of the next generation of Irish players and turn them into a really cohesive team; combining the best virtues of Irish sides – the honesty, work-rate and passion that we’ve shown down the years – but introducing a more European style of play, a more fluid and expansive way? Yes, I do.”
We know now that no, he couldn’t – and he is now paying the price in ridicule for the gap between rhetoric and results. His vision did not long survive contact with reality, but those now putting the boot into him should remember that the crowd responded to him because he had the courage to offer them a vision in the first place.
Maybe at the time it was just populism – and maybe it’s since been exposed as empty populism – but it was still preferable to the grim “there-is-no-alternative” futurelessness offered by the likes of O’Neill. At least Kenny had identified the problems and was promising to do something about them. At least he went down trying.
