Tommy Martin: Carrying our hopes and dreams, Stephen Kenny begins his impossible job

Thu, 08 Oct, 2020 - 06:30

If you want to properly prepare yourself for a big night of international football, I recommend watching An Impossible Job, the Channel 4 fly-on-the-wall documentary about the late Graham Taylor’s failed attempt to lead England to the 1994 World Cup.

The film is most famous for Taylor’s peculiar dialect of managerspeak, with phrases like ‘Do I not like that?’ and ‘Can we not knock it?’ entering the vernacular for a time. The access enjoyed by director Ken McGill, unimaginable today, picked up Taylor’s every exasperated utterance as his team floundered. These were in turn parroted to comic effect by assistants Phil Neal and Lawrie McMenemy, portraying the trio as a sort of helpless chorus to the on-field tragicomedy.

The ridicule the film earned Taylor was grossly unfair on a man universally liked within the game, but An Impossible Job remains the definitive manual on the realities of international management.

It’s all there. The hopes and dreams. The injury crises and selection dilemmas. Daunting missions to inhospitable foreign climes. The long, tormented gaps between games in which to mull over what went wrong. The unsparing scrutiny of the national press and the inevitable souring of the public mood. The way they always end up paranoid, defensive, and ultimately, going slightly mad. How their entire destiny can be upturned by one unfavourable decision, leaving them muttering bitterly to a linesman: “The referee’s got me the sack. Thank him ever so much for that, won’t you?”

So you really should find it on YouTube before Ireland take the field against Slovakia tonight. Unless your name is Stephen Kenny, of course. For the rest of us it is no harm to remind ourselves of the cruel arc of an international managerial career just as our latest incumbent sets off with his own hopes and dreams.

If it is true, as Enoch Powell said, that all political careers end in failure, then that is certainly the case with Ireland managers.

As Champagne Football, the bestselling account of the John Delaney era reminds us, the end for Ireland managers always seems to come after a fraught, late-night board meeting, dishevelled FAI blazers emerging bleary-eyed to a waiting press pack. The knife still dripping with blood, words of regret are issued, lucrative pay-offs agreed and the chase is soon on for the next man.

The bit before that varies, of course, depending on how successfully the tournament qualification crapshoot has worked out. But they all follow the Taylor template in the end.

For Taylor, the ‘impossible’ part referred to meeting public expectations of world domination with a squad that included Carlton Palmer and Andy Sinton. England’s attitude to its football team was, in retrospect, a dry-run for Brexit, being a hopeless attempt to recapture former glories by getting one over on Johnny Foreigner.

Is being Ireland manager an impossible job? We certainly don’t expect as much. Qualify, give it a decent rattle and deliver one moment of jumping-in-a-fountain-with-your-trousers-on joy. Do that and we’ll put your face on stamps.

Not impossible then, but for Kenny over the next while it might sometimes feel like it. He certainly didn’t opt for an easy life with ambitious rhetoric about changing the perception of Irish football around the world; the prospect of being hoist on one’s own petard looms large. One point from two opening games in which his team dominated possession gave early ammunition to those who say Kenny is a naïve flower-child in a heavy artillery world.

“I’m sorry but this has been awful tonight,” tweeted former Ireland international Ian Harte in the aftermath of the 1-1 draw in Bulgaria. “All for young lads making their debut, but it’s about winning games of football.”

Harte, along with Jason McAteer, might be easily filed into the drawer of Kenny-sceptics unwilling to accept an Ireland manager who is not a graduate of English football’s rugged finishing school.

But the defeat to Finland a few days later showed how soon the clock really begins ticking for an Ireland manager. A low-level but discernible chorus of online grumbles greeted a result that followed 90 turgid minutes typical of a Uefa Nations League weekend which came slap bang in the middle of most players’ preseason training schedules.

None of this is to say that Kenny retains anything but the patient support of the vast majority of Ireland fans. He also enjoys the favour of a large section of the Irish football media.

But as Graham Taylor knew well, those things can quickly distort in the heightened glare of an international night, when things begin slipping out of your control. Events, dear boy, events — what Harold Macmillan said about the fortunes of governments applies equally to international managers, never more so in the current precarious times.

For Taylor, the end came with a particularly cruel flourish. In the crucial qualifier against the Netherlands, the referee failed to send off Ronald Koeman for a deliberate last-man foul. Shortly afterwards, Koeman scored a killer goal from a free-kick. At that moment, Taylor never had less power, but never bore so much responsibility.

Like Taylor, Kenny is a fundamentally decent man who will have the personal respect of his players and will strain every sinew to be a success. But the same things that Taylor complained about still apply. The limitations of your squad, injuries, lack of time with players. Experts whose team selections, unlike yours, are never tested. A capricious public whose mood can turn on dark words from influential pundits. Kenny will need time to do what he wants with this Irish team, but how much he gets is just another of the things he can’t control.

“Once they cross that touchline, they really are on their own,” Taylor says at one point. For all the ambition, planning and hard work on the training ground, the truth is that most of the people who do these impossible jobs will eventually end up standing helplessly on a sideline, shouting some variation of ‘Do I not like that?’