Tony Leen: Stephen Kenny will be given the time to turn us into believers

BOUNCE OF THE BALL: Republic of Ireland manager Stephen Kenny mightn't have had many breaks but ten games without a win is a wretched run of results. 

YOU remember. End of November three years ago. The day it emerged Stephen Kenny, via an oddly circuitous baton handover, was going to be the Ireland manager.

And you said: ‘uh oh, this has disaster written all over it’?

Not really.

You reckoned ‘he’s earned this, he’s one of our own and he needs time with that group of players to give it a proper go’? A proper go.

Something like that.

Then hunker, because the concrete’s set, there’s no money to shift him, and there’s no obvious, brilliant and cheap successor waiting by the phone. You can blame Kenny or John Delaney or the Irish players or coronavirus once it convinces that you’re woke more than everyone else, but Irish football is down a pit with a limited talent pool and it’s going to take Kenny and co more than a while to figure the route out of this mess.

If at all.

FAI chairman Roy Barrett delivered the obligatory vote of confidence, but don’t kid yourself either that if Abbottstown was flush — hah — and at the sharp edge of corporate strategy, that they wouldn’t already be drawing up a sketch of what Kenny’s exit would look like, and how it would play.

Ten games without so much as a win, a total of three goals, and a depressing string of inappropriate superlatives from Kenny himself — ‘brilliant’, ‘superb’ — regarding the losing performance in Serbia, seems conclusive evidence that this Ireland manager is excruciatingly out of his depth.

That things are ‘different’ has been sold as better, as if to indicate that Stephen Kenny is the only way we can move beyond working the channels and second balls. Every new coach or manager has a notion of their ability to turn sow’s ears into silk purses. They are each convinced they will make the difference, turn that mercurial snowflake into the heartbeat of the side. Otherwise, aren’t they just someone with a hyper-sensitive appreciation of their own limitations?

Setting aside the respective, and equally embarrassing, agendas of the anti-LOI brigade and Kenny’s media acolytes is a good first step in critically analysing the disastrous run of Kenny’s first 10 games, but even that must be examined in the context of short and long-term.

In the here and now, it’s a national embarrassment, culminating in the worst result since forever. Kenny failed to provide the almost mandatory bounce when he replaced Mick McCarthy, and the project looks like it is already haemorrhaging momentum and belief. Things have become desperate in a hurry and it was surely my misinterpretation that someone in the punditocracy last week described Alan Browne’s goal in Belgrade as one of the finest ever Irish goals.

The only thing in Kenny’s favour in the wake of Saturday’s Luxembourg nadir is time. It’s over five months to the Republic’s next World Cup qualifier, on September 1 in Portugal, and it affords the manager space to talk and listen to his players and coaches.

The Irish public, on the other hand, doesn’t need anything like five months to get over the weekend embarrassment.

The relationship between results and the nation’s mood has long since curdled to the point of inconsequence, beyond Davy Keogh and the hardcore support. I’m one of the guilty ones. While Gavin Bazunu was keeping out the attempted lob from match-winner Rodriguez before half-time, some were watching Liverpool’s Diogo Jota put Portugal two up in Belgrade.

Republic of Ireland manager Stephen Kenny appears dejected after Luxembourg's Gerson Rodrigues scored the winner

It’s not as if the threat of better times is illusory. Bazunu, and his colleague Caoimhin Kelleher, are among a band of starlets capable of restoring credibility and relevance to our efforts.

Of becoming, Heaven forfend Premier League regulars. It only seems a month since we were buttressed by a Premier League back four (or three, as Kenny might have it) with the likes of Obafemi, Idah, Parrott and Connolly poised to unleash attacking hell.

All the Republic were short was a ball-playing ten and intelligent width. But from the moment Idah and Connolly were swabbed and sidelined for sitting inches too close on a flight to Slovakia, the delicate rebuild has been destabilised.

If the patter from the players that they like what they’ve seen from Kenny is true — what else would they say? — there is no alternative but to believe that the source of their Saturday slackness will be found in the GPS readings, as Kenny indicated. That the dearth of club minutes compromised too many legs.

The manager must accept that the shape and strategy is his, but the torpor inside the white lines against a nation with half a dozen World Cup qualifier wins in its entire football history, is beyond inexplicable. And the replacements did little to shift the gears. It says something that even the most elemental Irish football quality — spirit - seemed to have vaporised.

Luxembourg were braced for a battering but were hit instead by scented tissues.

There’s little upside to revisionism here, but once Ireland returned from Belgrade empty-handed, three points at home to the worst team in the group became a non-negotiable, necessitating pragmatism and demanding a momentary pause on advancing the exuberance of youth.

It was here that the rookie international manager needed a settling word in his shell-like. Three points guaranteed group relevance until the autumn at least and tempted a few punters to stay on board.

In another time, today’s early houses would be chirping the style v substance debate, whether the manager has the players at his disposal to play possession triangles. And in the matter of changing shapes and personnel, whether he has got the rhythms of evolution and revolution all wrong.

The Ireland team during the national anthems. Picture: INPHO/Tommy Dickson

But as hapless as we looked against the 98th ranked team in football, two World Cup qualifiers don’t comprise a book of evidence, and a game against Qatar in an unfathomable excursion to Debrecen in Hungary Tuesday night will hardly change the narrative either way. Kenny is there for the qualification campaign now, and the FAI has no option but to grit this one out (it’s not like they’re short of practice).

It would be some comfort, of course, to believe that the expressed confidence of Roy Barrett, Jonathan Hill and some Irish players is based on things not yet visible to the rest of us. That they are holding their nerve for a better reason than the evidence of the last ten games under Stephen Kenny.

That good old Billy Beane is in Abbottstown somewhere, standing firm with his convictions and piloting a new course for Irish football at a moment when everyone’s saying he’s a goner.

“I don’t think we’re asking the right question,” he’d tell the suits in an FAI remake of Moneyball. “I think the question we should be asking now is, ‘do you believe in what we’re doing or not’? So what are we talking about? I’m going to see this through, for better or for worse.”

Hunker down it is so.