Malachy Clerkin: Results show Stephen Kenny just wasn’t up to the job

Ryanair’s lunchtime flight to Amsterdam was delayed on Friday. The board said it would be half an hour but none of the Ireland fans looking out the window were buying it – they could see the incoming flight hadn’t even arrived yet.

“Come on, we might as well get a pint,” said one chap to his mate.

“But sure boarding might start soon,” came the reply.

“Ach, you’re way too optimistic,” said the first guy.

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And off they went.

When you follow the Ireland soccer team around the place, optimism is like extra cabin baggage. You’re welcome to carry it on board but it’ll usually end up costing you. At the end of a long campaign – or maybe just a short campaign that has felt like a long campaign – there weren’t many in the travelling party still willing to take the hit.

As much as any other factor, that’s why it’s all but over for Stephen Kenny. Not qualifying for next year’s Euros didn’t necessarily have to mean goodbye. When you’re drawn against France and the Netherlands, people are mostly willing to make allowances. But once the optimism falls off a cliff, it can only be a deadweight strapped to the manager’s ankles.

This is especially true of Kenny, for whom optimism was the starting point, long before he ever took over the Ireland job. It was the backbone of any stump speech he ever made as Dundalk manager or when he was in charge of the under-21s. Whereas a succession of Irish senior managers talked down the standard of the players at their disposal, he went the other way.

[ The Stephen Kenny project began with optimism but crashed into reality ]

This is no frippery. It’s not a small thing. Match-going Ireland supporters are very possibly the section of the Irish sporting public most familiar with the realities of sport. They know where the ceiling is. They know that Irish teams can only rise to a certain level. They’re fine with that. Even at its highest height, the optimism of the Ireland soccer fan only stretches so far.

That’s why they stuck with Kenny for so much of the way. When they heard him talk up the abilities of his Ireland players, they didn’t hear a Pollyanna. They heard someone speaking about modern football as an attainable, reachable thing for players that plenty had dismissed as incapable of it.

It wasn’t just talk, either. He consistently brought players into the Ireland squad in whom he saw something that wasn’t obvious to others. Chiedozie Ogbene was a jobbing wing back with Rotherham in League One when Kenny took over. Josh Cullen has just returned to the West Ham reserves after a spell on loan to Charlton and was considering a move to Anderlecht in Belgium. Andrew Omobamidele had played just nine senior games for Norwich in the Championship when Kenny called him into the squad.

Across three and a half years, he gave 24 players their first Ireland cap. By the end of this window, Andy Moran will most likely make that 25. The glaring lack of an elite midfielder – either defensive or attacking – has been the killer deficiency. But in general, the Ireland squad now is filled with players whose club careers are trending in a positive direction. That’s not nothing.

He had another thing going for him too. There was never a sense that the Ireland job was a stepping stone for him, or just another staging post in his career. Managing Ireland was – and might well end up being – the pinnacle of Kenny’s working life. It’s never good when Ireland managers make you feel like they’re doing you a favour by banking a fat FAI cheque. Whatever Kenny’s failings, you could never accuse him of that.

Ultimately though, the failings were too heavy for the parachute of optimism to keep from crashing to the ground. It wasn’t just that Ireland lost matches and gave up goals. It was that they increasingly did so in the same way.

Ireland have conceded 11 goals from shots taken outside the box since the start of 2021. The xG-ification of modern football generally forbids players from taking potshots from distance and yet Kenny’s Ireland somehow became a coconut shy for anyone who wanted to have a go.

[ Mikey Johnston: ‘All the lads love Stephen Kenny. We would love to try to keep him here’ ]

And if it hasn’t been goals from outside the box, it has been goals soon after the half-time interval. In this campaign alone, they’ve conceded against France at home (50th minute), Greece away (49th), France away (48th) and Netherlands at home (56th). In seven games, they’ve only won the second half twice, against Gibraltar both times.

Losing is bad. Losing in the same manner time and again is way worse. It suggests that you are either (a) failing to notice persistent problems or (b) incapable of fixing them. Either way, there can’t be any future in it.

And so here we are. This campaign was always going to have a clarifying simplicity to it. The presence of the two big hitters meant there was no wiggle room. Kenny’s Ireland had to finish above Greece for him to have any future. Not only did they not manage it but Kenny got comprehensively outcoached home and away by Gus Poyet. There’s no gainsaying that, no talking around it.

Ultimately, there should be no outrage here. We can all be adult about this. Stephen Kenny was the right appointment and he had his go. But in the end, he wasn’t up to it.

The Ireland squad has evolved massively across his time in the job but results have been so bad that it’s difficult to say he’s left the job in better shape than he found it. The next guy has a long road back.

There’s no level of optimism capable of surviving that cold reality.