Depressing night and looking ahead to the future is grim. No pace, no creative players, no goal scorers.
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Soccer is shit. Only made palatable for gobdaws by imbibing alcohol whilst looking for a fight.
Serious question. Why is it that Ireland produced world class players like Johnny Giles, Liam Brady, Mark Lawrenson, Paul McGrath, Roy and Robbie Keane and a host of others, and nowadays havenât a single player who can get a game with a decent club side in England? In an era where there is more put into underage coaching and development than ever.
Street football Bill
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Ireland didnât produce one single world class player during John Delaneyâs tenure as FAI Chief Executive, but lads like @peddlerscross canât see the wood from the trees.
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Two answers spring to mind:
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a dysfunctional association with limited attention paid to youth development with a useless, power hungry chief at the helm for a long time.
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English football now gets young players from all around the world. Irish young lads used to be only up against English, Scottish and Welsh fellas when they went over
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This time last year the General narrative was that despite the shit show in the FAI we had some great underage teams coming through , a decent underage set up and a real coach in SK who would play âgood football ââ
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The FAI canât produce world class players . They are born more often than not .
Bazunu
3, Irish football fans put their money and time into English football teamâs
Footix need to accept blame
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Yes, they are part of the problem. I agree.
Iâve been to way more LOI games than EPL games.
Itâs the like of choco and @tazedub I personally blame
The English system is now set up in such a way that kids are signed to their academies at a very young age, in big numbers (starting from 8 years of age), and gradually winnowed out. If not in these systems from a young age, itâs hard to break in, and there are plenty of numbers there. The days where lads went over at 16 or 17 seem to be gone temporarily, by and large.
The academy systems may not survive in their current numbers, but, for an example, my mate Mattyâs lad was at a premier League academy and not getting any games as he was late developing and small. When Matty wanted to move him to another academy (non premier League), he was told heâd have to pay ÂŁ250k to get him out of his contract. This a small 15 year old who they werenât playing anyway. This is what they reckoned they had invested in his development to that point.
Itâs mental.
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I think the Irish soccer journalists and a sizable section of our supporters deserve a lot of criticism for losing the run of themselves over Spock and a young group of players off the back of a handful of under 21 matches. I canât recall one dissenting voice in the media when Kenny got the gig or anyone who exercised caution over the appointment and treatment of big mick.
Now we have a group at senior level who are utterly bereft of confidence and playing a half hearted form of possession football which guarantees that we are far from the sum of our parts. Bazuna, Knight, Parrott, Travers, Idah etc should be nowhere near the senior side and should be key men in the 21s set up. By fast tracking them and jettisoning the older guard Kenny has completely lowered the floor of the team leading us to 10 games without a win and the majority of those games have either been insipid or embarrassing performances.
Some may argue that the current senior players arenât up to it and maybe there is some merit to it but blooding a load of kids who arenât ready is only going to lead to inevitable results.
Kenny will get until the end of the campaign but he needs to get a result or two and a performances along the way - I would find it very hard to have any faith that he can turn this around based on what we have seen so far. His comments about Connolly on Friday followed up by the performance last night show how out of his depth he is.
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Werenât you the fella prattling on about âDiogoalâ in the middle of the match thread last night 
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Duffy, Hendrick, McClean, Brady, Long cannot get a game at club level and are totally out of form. 3 of them came on last night and made zero impact. I do agree in hindsight Kenny should have stayed with 21s until this campaign was over. Kenny will pay the price now.
Iâve been going to loi games since I was 12 , big nose.
This is what pretty much everyone wanted though, for years. For the team to at least try to play positively, for the manager to back younger or more exciting players instead of older steadier players. Pretty much every Irish supporter was crying out for this since trappatoni, thatâs over a decade. No one in the second half of trap, MON, or McCarthyâs respective tenures was saying âhold on now guys, maybe playing shite and not trying to do anything positive and getting some draws is actually the right approach for the teamâ.
It does seem Kenny was promoted too early but he should be let at it now.
One other thing, most everyone has experienced a bad run where confidence is gone and things go from bad to worse. You end up in that place where instead of controlling a simple ball it bounces away from you. Kenny seems like that right now. And if heâd had any bit of positive luck he mightnât be. The six month break might allow him to regather himself.
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