Kieran Shannon: Even before a ball has been kicked, Stephen Kenny has impressed
Republic of Ireland manager Stephen Kenny in training at Abbotstown ahead of his first game in charge against Bulgaria. Picture Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile
The nation is hardly holding its breath right now. It’s just quietly hoped that someday again that it might.
Stephen Kenny’s first match as Ireland manager is tomorrow in Sofia, and if you were unaware of that fact until now, don’t beat yourself up. With the longest, most disrupted season in European club football having just finished, it can be still hard to get the head around the fact that another is already starting. But while you’re only awakening from your slumber, you should take some comfort in learning that Kenny himself is fully alert, mad for road.
On Monday morning as the press cameras were furiously clicking as he addressed his players on the training ground for their first on-field session under his management, Kenny could be heard to say, “Everything we do, we do with intensity.”
Everything he has done in the job so far has also been with intensity. And passion. But a strong rationale as well. Kenny is a romantic pragmatist and a pragmatic romanticist. While even someone as clinical as Jim Gavin has talked about how he hated telling players that they didn’t make matchday panels and the likes of Martin O’Neill and Mick McCarthy carried huge 37-man squads, Kenny has had no hesitation in having a much trimmer squad and telling players they haven’t made it — and why. “I’m really straight with people,” he said at the weekend. I try to give them some feedback on an individual basis, not a generic call.”
And yet, like Martin Luther King, Kenny understands the urgency of now. When Mick McCarthy succeeded Jack Charlton in early 1996, he had eight warm-up friendly games before his first-ever competitive qualifying game. Martin O’Neill’s first warm-up game was three months out from his first competitive match. And even then those opening competitive games weren’t campaign-defining; if you drew or lost, you could make up for it in latter matches. Kenny is just five weeks out from a campaign-defining match. Lose to Slovakia in Bratislava on October 8 and Ireland will not be at the Euros party which we’re meant to be partly-hosting. And as Kenny’s said himself, if he and his team are to have the impact that they want to have and “capture the imagination of the nation in a major way”, that means “going to major tournaments”. Euro 2020 in 2021 represents such a glorious opportunity — two wins and we’re there. But with that opportunity comes a certain pressure too.
That’s why Sofia tomorrow means so much more than most opening games of a new Irish manager. It wouldn’t be true to say that no one remembers that Ireland lost 1-0 to an Ian Rush goal against Wales in their first game under Jack, or that Ireland lost 2-0 and had Roy Keane sent off in their first game under McCarthy, or that the late Liam Miller was on the scoresheet when Ireland swept the Swedes 3-0 in Steve Staunton’s first game in charge — most die-hards do. But they didn’t have any real significance. They were still too early on and too far removed from a competitive game to be truly meaningful. But Slovakia is only five weeks away. And all Kenny has to prepare for it is Sofia tomorrow and Finland at home on Sunday.
Although we don’t tend to think of it in such terms, in many ways our expectations of the national team can be benchmarked by the achievements of Northern Ireland. Sometimes down here we can forget that it wasn’t Jack Charlton that introduced the country to World Cups, it was Billy Bingham’s teams of ’82 and ’86. Most of the populist and shorthand accounts of the Charlton years that have been served up even this year don’t tend to feature any mention or footage of Gerry Armstrong putting the ball in the Spanish net, but at the time of Charlton’s appointment, the overriding sentiment and frustration among Irish footballing people was: why can’t we have a team maxing out and making major tournaments like the North have?
For decades then, the Northern Ireland national team become largely irrelevant not just in European football but down here as well, barely registering in our consciousness. But that changed again during Michael O’Neill’s tenure. While the Republic qualified for the same major tournament that the North did and also progressed to the last-16 stage at Euro 2016, what made the Martin O’Neill years, especially post-Lyon, so unsatisfying and frustrating for what Dunphy would call "real football people" was the nagging sense that the team across the border was playing better football with lesser players.
That pretty much ended Martin O’Neill’s tenure. In his penultimate game, the North came to the Aviva and outplayed us, even if the scoreboard remained 0-0. Only one set of supporters could have left the ground proud of their team that night.
Contrary to how it is often presented, especially in this country, football is not an either or: It is not a case of having to choose between results over style, or style over results. As Michael O’Neill proved with the North, you can have both. Mick McCarthy the first time around proved likewise.
We even had flashes under Martin O'Neill and in the second coming of Mick McCarthy. When David McGoldrick headed home that cross from James McClean this day last year against Switzerland, was there a person you knew who stayed in their seat? Only the national football team can make so many of us feel so good at once.
We just want to have more moments like that. We want a team that wants to play, not one that waits until the last 15 minutes and for it to go 1-0 down before having a proper go. We want to see the team occasionally score a goal from something other than a header or from a setpiece.
We just want the journey to be watchable again, wherever it takes us.
In Kenny we have a manager who understands that.
