Tommy Martin: The gods have mocked Irish football’s plans for change but we must keep the faith

Former Republic of Ireland assistant coach Damien Duff with manager Stephen Kenny.

We know what Oscar Wilde would say about Alan Kelly and Damien Duff leaving Stephen Kenny’s management set-up: To lose one member of your backroom team may be regarded as misfortune, to lose two in one week looks like carelessness!

Except he wouldn’t. He’d blame the FAI just like everyone else.

The first law of Irish football states that when anything goes wrong, blame Abbotstown.

This is an accepted truth. Your club goes bust? The FAI did nothing for us. Fixture chaos? The FAI couldn’t organise the proverbial in a brewery. Bust-ups in the international camp? It all goes back to the FAI, you know.

In some ways it has been soothing, in such uncertain times, to have an old-fashioned Irish football fiasco. Something timeless and familiar. Late-night press releases…sources close to the camp…such and such said to be unhappy. Vicious rumours, forthright denials, and swift exits.

It’s almost, I don’t know, comforting?

Of course, not everything is the FAI’s fault. Not now; not even in the high days of the Delaney regime.

But the FAI’s existence as the Supreme Being of Bungling has long been the one true faith of Irish football. The wandering tribes of the domestic game drew consolation from the fact that an all-powerful but extremely incompetent deity was responsible for their woes. It was something to believe in.

The so-called New FAI have attempted to change things, but as other faiths will tell you, no process of reformation is straightforward. We hold on to the old ways, the belief that the arc of the Irish soccer universe bends towards catastrophe. And so it is written (usually in a late-night press release).

In fact, the disasters that have befallen the Stephen Kenny reign so far can be seen as acts of divine retribution. All the calls for change, on and off the field, were clearly sacrilege. How we mocked the gods of Irish football with our talk of financial accountability and good governance and passing out from the back!

It certainly seems as if a plague of locusts is the only thing the Ireland manager hasn’t endured in his short time in charge. At no time has fortune smiled on him, not with the Covid-related withdrawals that have hampered his preparations, nor with the bounce of a ball that might have turned encouraging beginnings into winning momentum.

Those seeking evidence that Kenny’s fate is guided by some sort of ancient, doom-laden prophecy need only look at the fallout from the infamous motivational video ahead of the England game.

This was a case of turning a drama into a crisis in Irish football’s finest traditions. The content of the video and Kenny’s subsequent speech were deemed so mild and inoffensive as to require no further action by his superiors. The whole thing was labelled as Irish football’s favourite beverage: A storm in a teacup.

And yet, according to the holy writ, Duff and Kelly walked. Duff was strongly supportive of Kenny and the video. It is said that his beef was with the FAI’s handling of the affair, coupled with general dissatisfaction at the association’s machinations.

Kelly, on the other hand, was believed to be a bit iffy about the content of the pre-Wembley rabble-rousing. So much so that the scuttlebutt fingered him as the ‘rat’ who went to the English papers with a sensationalised slant on the story.

Not the case, but a lie gets around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on, not helped by what Kenny would later term as shadowy ‘agendas’ operating against him. Kelly denied the accusation and explained that his asthma had become a concern in the escalating Covid crisis, yet it seemed as if the video crystallised reservations held by the goalkeeping coach.

So, two men holding opposite views on the same issue, and both gone. It’s another commandment of this country’s soccer fiascos that there are never any winners.

Believing Irish football to be an innately calamitous creed does not require blind faith — the evidence seems overwhelming, after all. But as with all superstitious hokum, there is always a logical explanation.

The truth is that the reforms afoot in Irish football were at such an early stage when the pandemic hit last year that any momentum was lost. Imagine a flimsy, hastily constructed scaffolding in the teeth of a hurricane.

Off the field, changing the culture of an organisation notorious for its dysfunction cannot be done over Zoom.

A new chief executive operates remotely from England, possible sponsorship deals remain on hold, and domestic leagues are on tenterhooks about their very viability. Old agendas and frictions remain. The new FAI is in a holding pattern; hopefully it is not stillborn.

Kenny’s plans to change how the senior international team went about its business were no less ambitious.

Brendan Rodgers once said that football management was like trying to build an aircraft while it’s flying — Kenny has piloted his plane straight into the Bermuda Triangle.

The pandemic has crippled his fledgling regime in so many ways, not least in breaking that other sacred law: That playing for Ireland should be fun.

It has been said that Covid-19 has most severely affected the weakest in society — those on the margins, in poor health, and financially vulnerable. Everything in Irish football feels weak and ailing at the moment, from the governing body to the under-pressure international manager. But this is not scripture, rather the legacy of the FAI’s own prophet of profligacy. The Delaney regime built the golden calf, then charged it to expenses.

As for Stephen Kenny, while Duff had his reasons for walking, it leaves the manager who he claimed to support a very lonely figure. Keith Andrews remains his loyal disciple but the ranks of the non-believers grow every day. For Kenny and his employers the promised land seems distant, yet the alternative is the purgatory of the past. Now would be a good time to keep the faith.