Will Kennys be much better?
I’m sure there was an incident at a training session in Bray before a friendly - I think it was around March 2004
The players didn’t rate the training or something and there was a bit of a row about it
I had a feeling the team was going nowhere after that
If players sniff any weakness in a manager, they will take a mile
That is my fear for Kenny, I think he too will prove out of his depth
Media performances are very important - Kerr was clownish, Kenny is nervous and hesitant
O’Neill was way too arrogant yet paranoid and it ended up being a large part of his undoing
Mick McCarthy is ideal in his media dealings, relaxed, confident and personable
Football is a true meritocracy - if a manager has anything about him, he will thrive at a higher level, but failings are almost always brutally exposed
Kenny has been in the managerial game for well over 15 years, and when he got his chance at Dunfermline, he failed miserably, and never went back to Britain
In terms of his success in Ireland, well, what separates him from Pat Fenlon or David Jeffrey, and nobody is touting those guys for senior international jobs
No and the players won’t have any regard for him either
We had Champions League players then, any current player who doesn’t respect Kenny bar maybe Duffy is dispensable now
That really isn’t the case though - respect or lack of respect tends to be pretty uniform throughout a squad
If a three or four players don’t respect a manager, that spreads like wildfire
Even in a limited squad like Eire’s, you can’t just bomb a load of your better players out the door
The Roy Keane/Mick McCarthy thing was an anomaly - it was based on a personal grudge on Keane’s part which he felt able to indulge in because of his status - and also because Mick stood up to him and asserted his authority - not in a high handed way - but in the way every good manager should - and everybody else respected Mick completely, which showed on the pitch
Who would you take off the current side and put in that team? Duffy probably. You’d be struggling to find an improvement other than that
Duffy for Cunningham, Hendrick for Roy Keane and Didzy for Clint. Not sure which Reid was starting back then, but the rotund one would be replaced.
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the current team is a shit show and Mick is doing a fantastic job with them.
People were giving out about Kerr’s style of football. Mick’s is no better IMO. They did fuck all until they went a goal down against Switzerland and had to come out and go for it.
Mick also said pre game he’d snap your hand off for a draw.
I wouldn’t swap a single player now for that team in 2005
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Hmmm
I would
You seem to be tying yourself up in knots here. The point was made that Mick has worse players available for selection, then you post the team from back then saying it wasn’t great and now you’re saying that none of our current team would get in that team.
The style of football is also obviously dependent on the quality of the players. We had much better players under Kerr as you have agreed so we should have been capable of playing better football. We also played some good stuff against Switzerland in the first half which people seem to have forgotten and played much better against Georgia this time than we did under MON.
This is the point I was referring to you langer
Did everyone have a better team in the early 00’s? International football seems to be gone to shit altogether. The Swiss and the Danes are rubbish really. There was some amount of dross at the World Cup.
There’s maybe a handful of decent international sides at the moment.
You haven’t dealt with that point at all apart from saying other managers’ style was just as bad. The context is that Early is marking Kerr out as progressive compared to the other Irish managers since.
There’s an absence of good strikers around Europe at the moment. A lot of these decent teams like Denmark and Switzerland would go to another level with a good striker
European international football is very boring but the European teams are more effective than they ever have been going on the last World Cup anyway
Club football is king now and has been for a while, in fairness.
It’s a dreadful era for football currently.
I haven’t said Kerr was progressive. He wasn’t.
I said he played pragmatic football and that his results stand up against any Irish manager we have had
He along with Stan are the only Irish managers in the last 33 years to not finish in the top 2 of a qualification campaign
Friendlies are irrelevant
No
The 2002 World Cup was a dreadful tournament
Germany reached the final with a dreadful team
The strength of club football was less concentrated and more diversified in the early 2000s, though less diversified than it had been a decade before
There were more strong leagues and more strong teams than now
Perhaps in relation to the post above, this made international teams appear stronger on paper than they appear now
The decline of Italy is the big difference between then and now
Most other countries are more or less where they were in 2002, some, like Belgium and Croatia, are much stronger