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Brendan Crossan: Stephen Kenny deserves more time to get things right with Ireland

Republic of Ireland manager Stephen Kenny should get more time to prove his worth despite a rocky beginning
Republic of Ireland manager Stephen Kenny should get more time to prove his worth despite a rocky beginning Republic of Ireland manager Stephen Kenny should get more time to prove his worth despite a rocky beginning

I LIKE Stephen Kenny. I want him to be a big success as Republic of Ireland senior team manager. That's not to say that I didn’t like Mick McCarthy.

I liked Mick the first time around and probably warmed to him even more in his second stint as boss.

By the time I became this newspaper’s Republic of Ireland correspondent in 2001, McCarthy had moulded a talented group of players into a decent team that played some really decent football.

It took Mick a while but he got there.

I liked Martin O’Neill too. At his press conferences, I sensed some northern brotherhood with the Kilrea man.

He seemed to relax and engage a little more when he heard the accent. I’d sussed the former Celtic manager out long before my southern colleagues.

I noted O’Neill was always in better form the further out his press conferences were from the game.

He’d shoot the breeze with reporters, crack a joke, recite another Brian Clough tale and leave reporters with enough quotes to fill a two-page spread in the following day’s newspapers.

His press conferences the day before a big game, however, were usually a waste of time.

He'd be distant and monosyllabic. His mind had already turned to team selection and the task at hand.

I also noted from an early stage that O’Neill didn’t like closed questions from reporters.

The trick was never to begin a question with: ‘Don’t you think?’ or ‘Would you not agree?’

O’Neill never liked being hemmed in by a reporter. The more open-ended the question, the better the answer.

For a couple of years, we couldn’t get enough of O’Neill and Roy Keane before the wheels came off in 2018.

I liked Brian Kerr too. Even though his short-lived reign was fraught with difficulties and dissent, I wanted him to get another contract.

Instead, the Drimnagh man was ditched and we got Steve Staunton in his place before the FAI plumped for a serial Scudetto winner in Giovanni Trapattoni.

The football was terrible, actually dysfunctional – Euro 2012 was utterly joyless - but the likeable Italian still got a contract renewal.

I liked the fact that Brian Kerr had climbed every rung on the slippery international ladder to reach the top job.

His ascension proved dreams were possible.

There are many similarities between Kerr and Stephen Kenny. Neither man scaled any great heights in their playing days but they were celebrated by every grassroots coach and League of Ireland club for getting a chance to lead the senior national team.

There was something romantically blue-collar about these men – but among Ireland's football intelligentsia there has always been a deep suspicion of coaches who never played the game at the highest level.

Ex-pros are quick to look down their noses at the likes of Kerr and Kenny while at the same time engaging in old pal’s acts with Mick McCarthy and Martin O’Neill.

A classic example of this was Chris Sutton sticking up for his former boss O’Neill on BBC Five Live, while deriding Irish Times journalist Ken Early who kind of had the upper hand on the former Celtic striker in the debate by being, well, better informed about the Irish situation and the meagre €80,000 the FAI had ring-fenced for player development.

The ex-pros sniff at Kenny’s exploits at Dundalk without actually studying the depth of those achievements, especially on the European stage in 2016 and how he assembled a team – many of the players were regarded as journeymen by the time they arrived at Oriel Park – and yet punched above their weight against BATE Borisov, Legia Warsaw, Zenit, Maccabi Tel Aviv and AZ Alkmaar.

Of course, there were harsh lessons at Shamrock Rovers and Dunfermline along the way for Kenny – and starting revolutions in places like the Brandywell and Oriel Park are quite different to trying to start one on a nation-wide basis.

The bluebloods – Ireland’s ex-pros – don’t make it easy, and so the debate becomes unbalanced because unbalanced debates get more air-time and column space.

As time passes, the statistic of no wins in 11 is thrown out there with little or no context.

Injuries and COVID-related issues almost brought the Irish squad down last autumn with the manager being forced to make wholesale changes from one game to the next.

By the time the squad headed to Bratislava for their Euro play-off semi-final with Slovakia, the team had trained together less than 10 times.

And when they got off the plane their best striker Aaron Connolly and Adam Idah were ruled out because of strict Covid protocols.

Those who were keen to draw a line through the first part of Kenny’s tenure because of COVID are perhaps less inclined to do so now following the Luxembourg defeat last weekend.

Kenny made some bad errors during the Luxembourg game. He was too slow in making tactical and personnel changes.

Maybe Stephen Kenny’s template is the right one going forward - and maybe he’s simply the wrong man to implement it.

Time will tell.

Maybe we’ll continue to get angry and frustrated with the under-fire manager every international window and not view Ireland’s woes through a wider lens and accept that what we're seeing are the results you harvest after years of neglect.

Maybe Stephen Kenny should have hedged his bets a bit more, like his predecessors did, and lowered expectations.

Instead, he spoke passionately about the infinite possibilities of this coming era.

When Kenny speaks to the media, his audience is invariably his players.

He never misses an opportunity to sing their praises, whereas his predecessors often lamented the lack of quality in front of them.

“Sometimes I answer questions too honestly but it’s not a deliberate strategy,” Kenny said in the autumn about what was achievable.

“Maybe it's not wise, maybe other people are wiser than me, you know. But I do believe that we have a lot of potential coming through the ranks, I think we've got a lot of good players, exciting players, exciting attacking players coming through. We want to do the best that we can.”

Kenny is trying to win football matches another, more effective way. He's certainly not trying to find a harder way to win games.

The harder way is route one football. Chasing lost causes all night, praying for a Shane Duffy header, and killing a nation's spirit in the process.

If it is accepted that this Irish squad is in transition, then the new manager needs time to work his way through it during this qualification campaign.

That doesn't mean Stephen Kenny is above scrutiny and can repeat the mistakes of Luxembourg.

Every move, every tactical tweak will be pored over - but the best kind of scrutiny always comes with a wider lens.