It doesn’t take a footix to know the league is second rate and shit
Disagree. This country has a particular history, geography, and set of sociological circumstances which means the League of Ireland is always destined to be a backwater. You could put Michael O’Leary in charge of it and it’d still be a backwater.
You don’t know how bad it is
The truth about the League Of Ireland is that it can never be an end in itself. The best players want to get out of it and go to England. The best managers should too. Kenny had one go in Scotland and it didn’t work out. Then he was back here for another 11 years.
You aren’t going to pick somebody for Ireland based on League Of Ireland form because the standard of the League Of Ireland is equivalent to Vauxhall Conference. The best teams in the League Of Ireland, ie. Shamrock Rovers and nobody else, might hold their own in League Two in England.
In principle it should be the same as regards the manager, because the tactical environment you operate in as a League Of Ireland manager is several rungs below what you face in international football. But there are nuances.
Status is a big advantage for a manager. Damien Duff might have a chance of cutting it as Ireland manager not because he’s proven himself in the League Of Ireland, but because he’s Damien Duff, and none of the players would look at him and ask themselves “who the fuck is this guy?” They know who he is, they know he’s won the Premier League and played under Mourinho and played at the World Cup and played very well.
Ireland’s players aren’t great, but they’re better than what they show under Kenny. The first thing you need to do as an international manager is to make your team difficult to beat. Once you have instilled that framework, where the players are confident they comprise a team which is difficult to beat, you have a chance to play some decent football. That was the pattern which Trapattoni and O’Neill both followed. By the time Ireland went to Paris in 2009 they knew they were difficult to beat, and that gave them the confidence to throw the shackles off. By the time Ireland played Bosnia in 2015, they knew they were difficult to beat. That was what gave them the confidence to bully Bosnia into submission. The problem was both reverted to a caricature of themselves after a year or 18 months of getting the team playing good ball and things started to unravel.
Kenny put the cart before the horse. We’re not difficult to beat and because of that we’re not good at beating teams either. That said a lit of his problems are down to his lack of status in the game and his Apres Match Frank Stapleton speaking style.
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Bollocks, they’re down to his inability to pick the right formation, tactics or his absolute ineptitude at changing the game when it’s so badly going wrong. It has fuck all to do with how he speaks or his personality. Pure fucking nonsense
Kenny’s inability to pick the right formation or change things to the team’s advantage in game is because his grounding in football is at a level way below what he’s now at. He’s not up to the level tactically.
His inability to speak coherently and his personality also has everything to do with his being unable to convince the players that he knows what he’s doing. To me this an even bigger problem than his tactical inadequacies.
Brian Kerr’s speaking style and how he looked was a problem too. These things matter.
Do you think Klopp and Guardiola and Mourinho would have succeeded as managers if they talked like Stephen Kenny? They would in their hoop. The ability to persuade is massive. Kevin Keegan knew less about tactics than my cat but for a long time he was able to wing it successfully because he had a messianic personality which could carry people with him.
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Away and shite. Southgate wouldn’t inspire a wet paper bag and has nearly won multiple tournaments. Roy Hodgson is like father stone and has had a superb managerial career. You’re talking chungum
Gareth Southgate had status in the game. He was a widely respected England international who won 57 caps. He captained three Premier League teams. He was an extremely popular player with a likeable personality, articulate and personable. He is obviously an excellent people person. He has several seasons of Premier League experience as a manager which is worth more than two decades managing in the League of Ireland.
Roy Hodgson slowly built up his career on the continent and achieved respect in England that way. The levels Hodgson built his career at were well ahead of the levels Kenny did.
None of this is difficult to work out.
So you dont have to have personality or tactical accumen if you were a handy player or slowly worked your way up in lesser leagues. How you talk or your personality has nothint to do with anything.
Guardiola and Klopp are absolute cunts. If they werent tactically superior they wouldn’t get a jailbird to play for them
Status and/or personality can mask tactical inadequacies for a certain period. In the long run, status and personality alone is not enough.
Klopp, Guardiola and Mourinho succeeded because they had/have messianic personalities that can carry people with them and a deep tactical knowledge of the game. Jack Charlton had this combination. Brian Clough, Bill Shankly and Don Revie had it.
Personality has everything to do with management. You have to have a personality that players respect. Kenny simply does not have that.
Again, none of this is hard to work out. Confident people get places in the world. If they’re winging it, they tend to be found out before long. Those who endure are those who have the confidence and the knowledge.
If Kenny was tactially adept nobody would give a flying shite what he said or how he spoke. Having a bit of charm might give you a stay of execution but his lack of personality has fuck all to do with poor results.
You’re totally deluded on this. Every post match interview Kenny does, viewers approach with trepidation. It’s car crash stuff. Those silences. If you think players don’t notice that, you’re wrong. If you think a manager’s interviews aren’t a strong pointer to how they act with their players, you’re wrong. If you think that doesn’t affect their confidence in a manager, you’re wrong.
Of course they do, but they’re 1% things. Tactical approach, set up, philosophy, training, that’s 90% of it. The other 1%'s are marginal things but the day to day is vastly more important than a press conference
There were a fair few 90-94 players we didn’t “produce”
I reckon that’s why he said ‘post’.
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RTE’s player rating was interesting. Full of praise for Duffy and no mention of his involvement in the goals. Blamed McLean for the second goal and no mention of the wicked corners he was putting in.
you’d want to be a fair simpleton to put any stock in a papers player ratings
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Or in anything RTÉ say
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The hoganstand team of the week is another one. Lads lose their minds over it
Listened to Frank le Boeuf on ESPN strongly blaming Duffy for Ireland losing the game. Awful move by Kenny starting Duffy.