Last week Stephen Kenny did a highlights reel of his three and a half years and 38 games as Ireland manager: Callum Robinson’s five goals in two games and three days against Azerbaijan and Qatar, Michael Obafemi and Troy Parrott’s goals against Scotland, Gavin Bazunu’s penalty save against Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, Nathan Collins’s solo effort in Poland, Chiedozie Ogbene’s overhead kick against Belgium. The lowlights however were more frequent and too painful to go into in detail, but they will probably hold sway with the board which means that Saturday’s game against Holland will almost certainly be his last competitive one as Ireland manager.
If sentiment were the primary criteria, then Kenny would be a shoo-in for another term as Ireland manager. He remains hugely liked across the country by those outside the football bubble. As he pointed out, he has given competitive debuts to all but four of the 24-man squad he named for the European Championship qualifier against Holland, followed by a friendly against New Zealand. The bravery at times turned to recklessness — his early talk about the need to “control games” was too dismissive of the quality of the opponents he was facing and the limitations of his own players, particularly in midfield.
Had there been genuine signs of improvement an argument could have been made for him staying on as manager, but the curve was downwards rather than upwards — and the only people who seemed to really believe in the end were his loyal band of supporters behind the goal at the Lansdowne Road end of the Aviva Stadium.
While bemoaning the fact that Ireland “only” played an average of ten games a year — it is double what it would have been when Kenny was growing up — he tacitly acknowledges that he has been given plenty of room to turn the ship around, yet still we head deeper into trouble bay. By the time Kenny says his goodbyes after the New Zealand game at home in nine days’ time he will have had 40 games as Ireland manager. It’s the same number that Eoin Hand managed over five and a half years back in the 1980s, when he was in charge of Ireland.
To make ends meet, at the time Hand — who had previously managed Limerick FC — also ran a sports shop in Tallaght in west Dublin, where Kenny was born and raised. Hand complained about a lack of resources, but Kenny can’t level the same charge.
It is somewhat ironic that Kenny has enjoyed more support from the new regime at the FAI rather than the old one which appointed him. When he left Dundalk FC and was installed as manager in waiting by John Delaney in 2018, many at board level felt that he would trip up so badly as under-21 manager that it would be publicly unacceptable for him to rise to become senior manager, a job that was being kept warm by Mick McCarthy until Kenny was deemed ready.
Kenny’s stuttering manner and emotional, unsanctioned utterances also meant that he was virtually written off by the cynical old regime before he had even started the senior post.
However, he was a roaring success as under-21 manager and the disappearance of Delaney followed by the arrival of Roy Barrett as FAI chairman suddenly added extraordinary impetus to his burning ambition to be senior Ireland manager; to the point where he was allowed take over the job in April 2020 before the appointed hour, with McCarthy stepping aside as the European Championships had been postponed because of the pandemic.
It was somewhat disingenuous for Kenny therefore to blame Covid for much of his early travails when he went the first 11 games without a win — squad indiscipline also had something to do with it when two players were struck out for breaching tight Covid regulations. The idea promoted by the manager that he should be judged on his tenure post-Covid over the past two years was another example of how Kenny did himself no favours by presenting a particularly selective series of facts and statistics to give the impression that the team were making progress. The fact is that a probable win rate of less than 30 per cent will be similar to that of Hand’s era and strengthen the argument that the leap is too wide between a job in the League of Ireland and becoming international manager.
Kenny has had skin in the game in five different competitions — two European Championships, two Uefa Nations Leagues and one World Cup qualifying campaign — and come up short each time. Kenny tried to buy himself time by saying he was building towards this European Championship campaign and then found himself in a group of death — as he repeatedly calls it — in part because Ireland’s seeding had dropped because of previous poor performances.
It certainly is a difficult group, but the manner in which Kenny has been tactically outmanoeuvred in the home defeat to Holland by Ronald Koeman and by Gus Poyet in the double header against Greece have dashed the impression that he is developing into the role of an international manager along with this young Ireland side.
There have been a lot of glib assumptions that promising players such as Bazunu and midfielder Jason Knight are sure to reach their potential. Parrott was the anointed one by the manager and many in the media, but that was another example of jumping the gun. There have also been some notable successes, who are a credit to themselves rather than any manager. Kenny insists that his legacy should not be one of bringing through a batch of young players which can be moulded into a winning unit by a better coach and man manager, but that would appear to be the best possible verdict at the moment for all concerned.
“You can say people are complete players come through anyway, [but] that’s not how it works,” Kenny said on Thursday. “Otherwise, what happened the previous eight years?”
It was apt that he should ask that question as we had the latest instalment last week over whether more could have been done to stop Declan Rice jumping ship from Ireland to England. McCarthy deflected responsibility on to Martin O’Neill, who for his part dismisses the notion that he nodded off on his watch when it came to Rice and Jack Grealish.
A return to that sort of management would be a backward step, but that nonetheless raises a caveat over what should happen to Kenny. What is the FAI’s plan? Do they have one? The hierarchy insist they will not even begin the process of finding a new manager until Kenny’s contract is finished and he is ushered out the door, as will probably happen later this month. However, it’s accepted in football and elsewhere that you have a fall-back position when precipitous action is taken. Is there the money available to bring in an alternative manager such as Lee Carsley whose market value is considerably higher?
It is difficult to believe that the FAI’s chief executive Jonathan Hill and Packie Bonner — the one qualified football person on the board — haven’t thought this through. The departure of Barrett as chairman last week also means that Kenny has lost his most staunch supporter. Renewed FAI turmoil does not bode well. Still it looks like there is no way out for Kenny. Other than that, uncertainty reigns.
