Kieran Shannon: Sacking Stephen Kenny now would be an act of stupidity
Manager Stephen Kenny speaks to his players during a Republic of Ireland training session at the Aviva Stadium. Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile
At a time when Stephen Kenny apparently could be sacked only a year after his first competitive game, it’s worth recalling how another manager fared in his initial 12 months in the job.
In January 2017 John Kiely began his first campaign over the Limerick senior hurlers and nearly right off the bat had to endure a chastening defeat. In only his team’s second game in the Co-Op Superstores Munster Senior Hurling League, Limerick were hammered by Cork, 7-22 to 1-19, in their very own Gaelic Grounds, prompting a section of the crowd to hurl abuse at him and his players.
The following month the league commenced. At the time Limerick were mired in Division 1B, and their opening game, against Wexford, already seemed a must-win game if they were to gain promotion. But they lost, by a goal: Davy Fitzgerald was the new manager who ended up snatching the valuable W that day.
In fact Limerick finished well out of the promotion race in that campaign as a Galway side who would beat them 1-21 to 1-11 that spring — in the Gaelic Grounds — also ended up ahead of them.
The Championship was even worse, if, like a lot of old soccer pundits tend to, you were to judge it solely on results.
In their first game of that summer an unexceptional Clare side beat them more comfortably than the four-point margin suggested.
Then in their second they were beaten (albeit by just two points) by a Kilkenny side that would become the first in 21 years not to reach at least an All-Ireland quarter-final.
If the Limerick county board had delusions of grandeur, there’d have been no question as to what would have happened after his first full campaign.
While Kiely had obviously been a fine underage manager and the Kilkenny performance hinted that his players were improving, results had clearly showed he wasn’t up to the level.
He and his support staff of Paul Kinnerk, Joe O’Connor and Caroline Currid would have to be moved on.
Thankfully for Limerick GAA, their board, as well as their backer, one JP McManus, didn’t suffer from what Stephen Kenny would describe as “that kind of near-sightedness”.
As Kiely explained on the eve of his first league campaign in the wake of that 21-point drubbing from Cork, anyone booing his charges were “lacking a bit of perspective”.
He and the board had a bigger picture. There was no big squeeze to win promotion straight away. “If we give ourselves an opportunity at some point down the road to gain promotion that would be great,” he said.
“This management team, we’ve been put in place for three years. I think there is a very real understanding of what needs to be done in order for us to become a more competitive team. There are no clear-cut goals set down by us or the county board and we are not under any obligation to achieve x, y and z in any defined timeframe, and that’s very clear.”
Unfortunately for Stephen Kenny, there are rumblings that the FAI may lack that perspective and patience and a real understanding of what needs to be done in order for Ireland to become a more competitive team in the medium and longer term.
While Kenny has an eye to the campaign beyond this one, it now seems he actually was under an obligation to achieve x, y, and z in this particular one: At least win a minimum of four points from your first three home games.
It would not only be an act of cruelty but stupidity if Stephen Kenny was to be relieved of his job before the end of this qualification campaign, let alone as early as this week should Ireland fail to beat Serbia, regardless of how well his team play on Tuesday night.
There are few things as hackneyed and depressing as officials, pundits, and media heads regurgitating the old line about how sport is “a results business”.
It’s a mindset especially prevalent in football, but one that reeks of insularity.
In other sports, especially where there isn’t relegation, there’s a greater appreciation that teams have to be rebuilt and that especially as younger players are blooded, results might take a hit for a while.
On top of that, it shouldn’t quite be as pervasive in the international game, at least for a country like Ireland with the team we have right now.
Yes, we’re not going to qualify for Qatar 2022, but as Kenny pointed out on Monday, we failed to qualify for the previous four World Cups as well.
And we’re not going to be relegated, because there is no relegation like there is in the club game. Your future seeding might be affected but sometimes it can be worth taking that hit by developing players and a playing style.
It’s not that results are insignificant. Should Kenny remain winless after all eight group games, his position may well be untenable. But to sack him just five games into this campaign would be simply premature.
It was a fair point he made on Monday that bar the poor display as well as result against Luxembourg, the performance levels in this campaign have been good — in these eyes, at least the equal of the previous two.
If a club side were to go this long without a win in a competitive game under a manager, you’d expect your share of 2-0 or 3-0 defeats, making his position untenable.
But the only time Kenny’s team has lost by more than a goal was in a friendly to England, eventual Euro 2020 finalists, in Wembley.
He just hasn’t yet had the fortune to get on the right side of that all-so-critical goal, possibly because so far he doesn’t seem to have players to score the kind of goals his team has been conceding.
Those edge-of-box blasters from Luxembourg’s Rodrigues and Azerbaijan’s Makhmudov. A Mitrovic, a Ronaldo.
If anything, those calling for Kenny’s head are the idealists, not him and his supporters.
Because for anyone with a proper understanding of the process of building a team, it requires a thick skin to be pragmatic enough to know that results might have to get worse in order for things to get better.
Take the Mayo team that are contesting a second consecutive All-Ireland final. Everyone is rightly lauding the magnificent rebuilding job James Horan has done, but what tends to be overlooked and even forgotten because of how the first lockdown helped matters cool, is that Mayo only won one of their first five league games in 2020, leading to their eventual relegation.
After a particularly heavy defeat to Monaghan, one of the county’s benefactors, Tim O’Leary, tweeted ‘Horan out’ with the county facing the supposed ignominious prospect of playing outside the top division for the first time in over 20 years.
But while the FAI are now considering cutting Kenny to help attract sponsors, the Mayo board backed Horan and cut their links with O’Leary. They could see beyond the results and that he was blooding and building a new team, a process that continued this year operating in Division Two.
When Team GB and UK Sport went about transforming its Olympic performances at the turn of the millennium, several of its programmes talked about the “tyranny of the normal”, a form of traditional thinking that encouraged you to stay in the pack.
But as Owen Slot explains in his insightful book The Talent Lab, they chose “to jettison the mediocrity of their current group and go for the unknown”.
Like Horan, they favoured potential over current performance; newer and younger athletes over vets. The latter group might have been their best chance to win a competition tomorrow, but the latter were their best bet to win gold at the next Olympics.
After the tyranny of the Delaney era that is much more responsible for the senior team’s current woes than Kenny is, the last thing Irish football needs now is to again default to the tyranny of the normal and discard a progressive manager just to placate the money men and any baying mob.
