I’m okay with that too
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He omitted Blind so he could really feel the victimhood.
One thing that concerns me is the lack of “leaks” from the players about any possible misgivings about Kenny. This either means that the players are actually happy with the coaching and are themselves at fault for the failures of the past 3 years, are happy to let Kenny be a lightening rod for their ineptitude or are in a comfort zone unwilling to step outside same, meaning that any new coach is going to have the same problems trying to get improvement from them.
In contrast, the breakdown of the relationship between Vera Pauw and her players was rumoured even in the run up to the World Cup.
I’d be interested to see the breakdown of Kenny’s matches into good results/bad results/expected results.
So far this campaign he’s had five matches with 4 expected results 3 losses and a win and one bad result. Might expect a draw in Greece. The job is to turn expected results into good ones and he just can’t seem to do that but his reign has hardly been as disastrous as some are making out.
It’s a list which includes pretty much every good signing O’Neill made. What other good signings did he make that I haven’t mentioned? Ramon Vega on loan?
Of course Celtic had some misses in terms of signings in the 1995-99 period (Regi Blinker, Harald Brattbakk and Rafael Scheidt spring to mind) but they were bringing in good players from a wider array of sources. That pretty much went when O’Neill came in and the signing policy became deeply conservative.
In terms of competitiveness in Europe, yes O’Neill can point to reaching the UEFA Cup final, but he never qualified from a Champions League group in four attempts. Gordon Strachan who is not particularly fondly remembered by a lot of Celtic supporters reached the last 16 of the Champions League twice and nearly eliminated eventual winners AC Milan in 2007 with a hastily and cheaply assembled squad.
O’Neill had undoubted strengths as a manager - he wouldn’t have had a good managerial career otherwise - but he also had an inherent conservative streak in him which only became more apparent as his career progressed. He retreated into what he felt comfortable with rather than moving with the times.
You’ve dreadfully childlike outlook young man
The same lads cheer rapists and abusers. In a fake Manc accent. Innit.
Very strange people.
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A fair pivot from calling him a poor manager who burned bright early then fell away because it was only about his ‘messianic’ personality.
Most managers win nothing in their careers. O Neill won a shitload with a few different teams. He was a good/great manager for 5 different teams… the opposite of your initial argument.
O’Neill was a good manager, not a great manager.
Personally I consider Gordon Strachan to have done a superior job to him at Celtic with inferior players.
Would Wee Gordon be an option for us? I thought he got Scotland playing some nice ball when he was their manager and he had the better of the two head to head encounters against O’Neill’s Ireland team before Scotland’s inherent Scottishness screwed them over.
Lads ye’re arguing over nothing.
O’Neill was a “good” manager by any definition. His palmares are better than 95% of managers. I wouldn’t call him a “great” manager as I’d reserve that for fellas that won a title in a big league and a European comp or two, and/or took a national team on a deep run in a major championship.
All that said, the style of play he managed was by and large very old school and conservative.
Trap’s Carling Nations Cup heroics consigned to history.
I was there to see us make history that evening.
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O’Neill suffered from the same thing the likes of Pulis suffered from, his style went out of fashion and their relative success fucked them. Pulis consistently overachieved with Stoke and they went looking to do it with modern football, and fucked themselves.
2016 was so negative in set up and approach that the media went nuts looking to do it with modern football and kind of created this monster.
You’d swear he was some kind of visionary to be blooding these young players. They were simply better than their older alternatives in the vast majority of cases. The likes of Darren Randolph, Shane Long and Glenn Whelan were coming to an end which freed up space for players such as Gav Baz, Adam Idah and Jason Knight to slot into the team. Robbie Brady and Jeff Hendrick had seen their careers stall and Big Mick probably would have moved them aside too. Evan Ferguson was a non-brainer. Richie Keogh, Harry Arter and Ciaran Clark were easily dispensed with for younger and better alternatives such as Nathan Collins, Jason Molumpy and Andrew Obamidele.
I’d give great credit to Spock for entrusting Ogbene with so much gametime whilst still a League One player but aside from that I don’t think he’s done anything that any other manager wouldn’t have considered.
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Poor Gordon Strachan with his inferior players seems to completely escape responsibility for his transfer dealings in your weird bubble. O’Neill has the best win record of any Celtic manager ever. There have been some very good managers in that list. O’Neill also inherited a team that (while it had some good players) had won one league title in 13 years. And he turned that around instantly.
More weird selectiveness in the international comparisons. It would be pertinent to mention that Ireland actually finished ahead of Scotland in the qualifying group when they came up against each other. You might even point out that Ireland qualified for Euro 2016 in that time when they played each other. Most people don’t assess managerial records on a random head-to-head basis.
Strachan won three league titles in a row with a squad that had to be completely overhauled on the cheap after O’Neill left it in a terrible state. Strachan brought in Nakamura, Vennegoor of Hesselink, Evander Sno, Artur Boruc, Georgios Samaras. O’Neill wouldn’t have signed these players.
Three league titles from four attempts is better than three from five. Two Champions League group qualifications from four attempts is better than none from four. he beat Manchester United and AC Milan in the Champions League. O’Neill did not beat that calibre of team in the Champions League.
Win ratios are in the same category as head to heads. Most people don’t assess managerial records on win ratios. By that rationale Brian Kerr was a better Ireland manager than Jack Charlton and Noel King was a better Ireland manager than Martin O’Neill.
I have a couple of friends who are still Pro-Kenny (one who laps up all those association football podcasts like OTB and Second Captains) and another couple who are on the fence and reckon nobody else could do much better either. There’s an awful lot of people burying their head in the sand regarding Kenny. The difficult group can alter perception. We needed a Wales/Austria/Serbia/Georgia and Moldova type group to utterly expose Kenny. He’d have ended up with about 9 points from 10 games. These 5 team groups don’t have enough matches to clear a grey area. The only disasters we can pick at are Luxembourg and Azerbaijan (H).
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Kenny’s backers made his tenure a culture war thing from the off. They spouted slogans about “standing on our own two feet” and “building a culture” and “believing in ourselves” like they had eaten a load of Tony Robbins videos.
It was all tied up this guff about “having a defined system, an Irish football philosophy which teams from underage up to senior all play” and the deluded belief that the League Of Ireland could become an actual alternative to playing in England, that players in the League Of Ireland might play for Ireland.
That’s not how senior international football works. The brief of the senior international manager is to win matches and qualify Ireland for tournaments. You can’t play an off the shelf system dictated by some arbitrary “football philosophy”. You’ve got to cut your cloth and come up with a system which best suits your players. And you’ve got to give the players the moral courage to use their heads. The players last night were clearly blindly following a system they had no belief in. They were playing by rote, going through the motions, passing the buck.
Our attacking game is so fucking powder puff it’s depressing.
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I think there were a good few leaks early doors. There was a bit of upheaval after that video before the friendly against England in late 2020 and a few murmurs over the Covid debacle before the Serbia play-off. In general I’d say we have a group of good lads who are just happy to represent their nation. Seamus Coleman was sent out to toe the party line on countless occasions after poor results in the first couple of years.
Over the last 20 odd years Ireland have always been a team who would acquire about 13-14 points from 8 games in a qualification group or roughly 17-18 points from 10 games. Usually enough to acquire a play-off place. Under Kenny that has slipped to 9 points from 8 games in the last campaign and I’ll hazard a guess that we’ll finish with 7 points from 8 games in this campaign.
Shortly before O’Neill took over Rangers had hockeyed Celtic. Celtics centre backs were Tebily and Scheidt. A Rangers wag suggested Celtic should sign David Weir so that their back three would be Weir Tebily Scheidt.
O’Neill was infamously cruel to Scheidt for some reason and delighted in humiliating him. Wasn’t a particularly nice trait.
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Incorrect. O’Neill after a game said to Scheidt, there is no difference between you and me defending….but I’m nearly 50
Scheidt was shite. He had given him plenty of chances.
Henrik Larsson says the best team talk he ever listened to was Martin O’Neill against Liverpool. Celtic won.
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