John Fallon: Kenny's Ireland reign moves along the spectrum from dismal to delusional

DISMAL: Ireland manager Stephen Kenny during Friday night's home loss to the Greeks. 

Stephen Kenny isn’t alone in the FAI in being delusional, because his employers believed the lowest point in 50 years an opportune moment to raise the price of tickets.

Ireland’s current trajectory, losing every game in the Euro campaign bar to lowly Gibraltar, counts as the worst series of qualifiers since the 1972 campaign.

Should - as the FAI seem intent on facilitating - the slow death of this manager’s reign stumble on for next month’s concluding fixture against Netherlands, expect Kenny to talk up Ireland’s prospects of winning in Amsterdam.

He’s incapable of confronting the reality of the malaise he’s overseen, still hyping up missed chances against Greece on Friday when Gus Poyet’s were content to remain in first gear and protect their 2-0 lead interval lead.

After three years of future promises, he’s leaned heavily of late on what he inherited. The stagnation of budding talent over a period we know all about but if that was eradicated by a generation emerging in recent years, why has he failed to fuse them into a winning team?

Five wins from 27 competitive games, all but one against minnows, summarises the chasm between self-delusion and points. Whereas the performance was there in some earlier losses, notably away to Portugal, not even they can compensate for the recent reverses. Both the Dutch and Greeks scored twice at the Aviva and saw out the game comfortably.

Even the late sieges of old were absent, mirroring the waning enthusiasm for this regime. Next year is a fallow one for the international team, given the backdoor playoff aspirations are basically sunk. Notions of a 1988 influx of Irish into Germany have been dashed, rendering Ireland’s role as statuettes to qualifiers seeking pre-tournament warm-ups.

Friendlies in March and June will precede the latest Nations League campaign, consisting of six matches between September and November. League B it is again for Ireland but the fanciful talk from Kenny of topping the group last year will be replaced with pragmatism of their status by his successor.

While we can anticipate the FAI’s marketeers to trumpet a top nation visiting Dublin in the first half of the year, the most imaginative PR can't dress League B opponents up as anything but mid-ranking fare. It hasn’t stopped them hitting loyal family season-ticket holders with a €100 hike to renew.

This is where Ireland have plummeted to under Kenny, tumbling towards the sixties in FIFA rankings and paddling around seeking the scalp of a mediocre nation.

A similar stint off-broadway occurred in 2022, with Belgium sending their second string with a view to building for the World Cup. What was their first meaningful match in June, the Nations League opener away to Armenia, concluded with a result that relegated the remainder to being meaningless.

A similar juncture has been reached here, formally on Friday night but in reality, back in June when Ireland also lost to Greece in their second qualifier. The predictability of Kenny using powerhouses France and Netherlands as excuses is redundant for the losses in both games against the fourth seeds. Beating teams seeded beneath is a prerequisite to mounting any sort of qualification quest.

As Metalica’s Enter Sandman bounded out from the speakers inside the stadium to drown out the boos, everyone could see the sands of time had run on Kenny.