UNLESS the FAI knows something the rest of us don’t, it feels like Stephen Kenny is a dead man walking in international football terms.
Friday’s home game with Greece will be a strange affair. After winning just one Euro 2024 qualifying game – against Gibraltar - and losing four, Ireland’s race is already run.
And with a play-off via the Nations League looking forlorn, it is generally accepted that Kenny won’t be offered a new contract once the current campaign concludes in the Netherlands next month.
All seemed lost on that balmy night in Athens back in June when the Greeks played Ireland off the park.
Tactically, Gus Poyet completely outflanked Kenny. Probably the biggest concern on the night was that the Ireland manager didn’t react to the glaring need to move from a 3-5-2 to a flat back four, reconfigure the right side of the team and fix the problem.
A lot of people get what Stephen Kenny has been trying to do over the last three years. We all get it.
But the realpolitik of international football is results. For Kenny’s critics, it doesn’t matter how they’re achieved, as long as you get them and keep the Green Army bobbing along and dreaming of appearances at major tournaments.
Mick McCarthy gets international football. He probably understood it better the second time round with Ireland.
Instead of investing in the future, McCarthy brought Glenn Whelan – a 35-year-old midfielder out of international retirement – for a crack at Euro 2020 qualification.
There was no messing about with McCarthy.
Handing out debuts and caps for the sake of giving lads experience were for the birds.
The former captain wasn’t in the business of digging foundations that would help reap results somewhere down the line. It has always been about the here and now.
He’d leave that looking-to-the future stuff for the next man.
Kenny has always been a football idealist, someone who envisions a better way for Irish football, but couldn’t manage it because of a lack of resources coming through the ranks over the last couple of generations.
After beating Gibraltar in June, Kenny told reporters: “We’ve given 18 players their debut - 18 players their debut through our own system. We’d nine years with nothing through – nothing. We brought 18 players through from the system. We finished third in the [World Cup qualifying] group which was probably parity.”
What was the Dubliner expected to do? Persevere with the Jeff Hendricks of the world and hope the injury-plagued Robbie Brady regained his fitness?
That Euro 2016 boat sailed some time ago.
Given Ireland's predicament, it required a manager who was prepared to promote youth and suffer the pain of inconsistent performances that comes with inexperience.
Kenny’s contribution to Irish football will probably be felt a few years after he’s vacated the senior post in a moment when the international team re-emerges and is competitive again.
Roy Keane once said it took him 25 caps before he felt comfortable at international level. If it takes Keane 25 games, you can rest assured it’ll take considerably more for the team that Kenny’s blooded.
Few can argue with any conviction for the retention of Stephen Kenny after this turbulent campaign because results and performances have fallen considerably short of expectations.
His reign has felt like two steps forward and three back - probably in keeping with a squad that doesn't have the necessary quality at this time to challenge.
It reaches a moment where your time is up - and once that moment comes it’s hard to resist the mood for change. That’s the territory Kenny unfortunately treads right now.
But what must be rejected is this notion that he’s a bad manager and out of his depth, something that has been eagerly nurtured by a host of ex-internationals who’ve looked down their noses at Kenny since the day and hour he took over from McCarthy.
It was as if his achievements in the League of Ireland, especially with Derry City and Dundalk, didn’t happen.
I attended Dundalk’s home games in the 2016 Europa League in Tallaght where Kenny moulded a group of players – some of whom may even have been regarded as journeymen – and turned them into a brilliant, expansive team that played with awesome courage and skill.
On paper, Dundalk shouldn’t have been on the same pitch with the likes of Zenit St Petersburg and Legia Warsaw – and yet on the field they matched them and out-passed them for periods.
While Kenny enjoyed strong, almost evangelical support from a significant portion of the print media over the last three years, there was an equal amount of opposition in the television studios.
I’ve watched Stephen Kenny’s team home and away for the last three years and you sometimes wonder do these ex-international players not see what so many of us see when we look down from the fifth floor of the Aviva Stadium.
Josh Cullen, William Smallbone, Jason Knight and Alan Browne are solid professionals but the quality in the Irish midfield is simply not there.
It’s as meagre as it’s ever been in over two decades.
The Greece defeat was when the air seeped out of the balloon. It was particularly disappointing because the Irish squad had just spent several weeks together in warm weather training camps, every box had been ticked and they produced a passive display in Athens.
If Ireland and Greece played each other 10 times, they’d probably clock up the same number of wins each with a couple of score draws thrown in.
That’s where this Irish team is at right now. They’re a barely average international team achieving barely average results – a squad that will undoubtedly improve over time, but not quick enough to save the man who was brave enough to start digging the foundations when his predecessors baulked at the idea.
It'll be no walk in the park for the next man either.
