what Bandage said.
Plus Kerr has a dirty skanger accent - just not good enough.
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They were all premiership regulars you mad man
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Kerr had that generation of players in its peak years - Robbie Keane, Duff, Dunne, Given, O’Shea, Finnan, late Roy Keane, and some decent squad depth
The 2006 World Cup was a massive missed opportunity
Trapattoni and O’Neill both at least occasionally knocked some excellent performances out of teams of poor players, Kerr never really did with better players
His teams tended to get early leads and then sit back
But he could not organise a defence and the sitting back was completely kamikaze - the team defended ridiculously deep and always looked likely to concede
Cyprus in the penultimate game was the final straw - it was as bad a performance as the 5-2 defeat under Staunton a year later, yet somehow, miraculously, they held onto a 1-0 lead, Given had to save a penalty
The atmosphere in that final game against Switzerland in 2005 was utterly resigned, right from the start
Everybody knew the team were going out
He was a great man to win friendlies though
You had to have been at those qualifiers under Kerr to know how bad the atmosphere was - that’s where the disenchantment with the team set in, and it has never really gone away properly since then
Albania in June 2003 and Russia in September 2003 were turgid and it continued in that vein right throughout his tenure
The Israel games were unforgivable
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There’s at least 5 players in that team better than our best player now
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a lot of them were around for the next 5 or so years or more.
Yeah — but aged by then.
He seems like a right weirdo and his guff on TV is nauseating. “Did you hear the hilarious analogy Brian Kerr used to describe the time wasting Bayer Leverkusen defender on Virgin Media last night?! Click here!”
I’d discount his underage stuff too. He was one of these oddballs who’d go off and scout opposition child players and devise systems to take the best 14 year old opponent out of the game. Other countries were just there to play and develop.
He got the big job and was a failure.
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Kerr has a few of the crackpots here driven absolutely demented.
+1 to all that.
Who did Kerr beat in a qualifier?
I don’t even remember his team beating France or Croatia in friendlies, they beat Holland alright, so what, it was meaningless
He had great wins in friendlies over Canada and China alright
In the last 33 years he’s the only Eire manager bar Staunton who failed to get top two in a group
I’d give anything for a striker like Clint Morrison now.
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The likes of Andy O’Brien was a regular in a champions leave side during Kerr’s reign. What we wouldn’t give for that again
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David Connolly was a decent striker and couldn’t get much of a game around then. He’d be our main man now. We must have had 3 right backs playing premier league level. Carr, Finnan and kelly.
Kerr set Irish football back 10 years
I like him as an analyst
He has good theoretical knowledge and good knowledge of players and is entertaining
But that does not make a good manager
The first alarm bell that went off was when Gerard Houllier was bigging him up just before he got the Eire job, the two were good friends and shared a similar outlook on football
Houllier was a man of poor character - conservative, paranoid and a blame shifter, and it came across in his turgid style of football
Kerr was cut from similar cloth when he was senior manager
He wasn’t unlucky - his team largely got exactly what it deserved out of all those matches
France in Paris was easily the best performance under him but even in that game the team never really pushed for a win when a rabble of a French team were there for the taking
Raymond Domenech, who managed that French team and was out of his depth, was another apt comparison to Kerr
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I think you’ll find that was Jack Charlton, we’ll never recover from that cunt
Spock will change things, whether it’s for the better is open to debate but we do have a good crop coming through also
Kerr had a ridiculously poor CV for an international manager. It was madness to give him the job in the first place.
Kerr’s Plan B.
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