Trap would be a Shanahan’s on the Green man.
MON probably an O’Brien’s sandwich regular.
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Your burger Mr.Kenny
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The motorway services are pretty brutal in fairness. There are times when a Burger King is the best of a bad lot.
I was also confused by that reference. I remember his cup final against Celtic when John Joel Perrier-Doumbé scored the only goal late on. Was that in 2007? I think it may have been the same day as an anti-G7/globalisation protest/riot & not to be confused with the Love Ulster riots when Charlie Bird disgracefully received a dig in the head. I only stirred in the afternoon & headed into town to watch the game but I’d missed all the morning shenanigans. I recall town being deserted & getting the bus down to Wexford at 6pm from the top of O’Connell Street. Neil Lennon was substituted by Strachan after around an hour & Celtic were playing some fairly dour stuff. Spock’s lads didn’t really have a shot in the game. Did he relegate Dunfermline?
Hang on, he is in a national leadership role and is eating beef burgers?
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Yeah Dunfermline got relegated that season. From memory I think he took over around November with them stranded at the bottom of the league so he had a tough task keeping them up. Probably took over just after the 2006 FAI Cup final with Derry City actually.
He did
So they kept him on the next season where he qualified for the Challenge Cup thing but I think that might have been finished mid-season. I think they sacked him then when he didn’t have them in the promotion shake up but I can’t remember these things.
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We need a manager who will send out a balanced, organised, hard working, hard to beat team.
We never win many matches, and no matter who’s in charge, that won’t change. So try scrapping the odd draw against the bigger teams and then beat the shit teams in the group. These days it’s easier to qualify than not, so we could scrape a play off place.
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He’s a stuttering numpty with a bad haircut. Ranting away like Mike Bassett after beating Gibraltar shows he doesn’t have the stuff. Nobody cares what he did with Dundalk or what dressing rooms he was locked out of, just don’t be so tactically inept after 10 days of a training camp.
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That was very much the case for me watching the game Monday night. All very slow movement of the ball. Fellas taking too much out of it in-terms of touches and time on the ball before picking a pass.
I also thought that Cullen was on the ball way too much against a packed Gibraltar defence. It’s not his fault but you want a player who can pick a positive forward pass and I don’t think that’s his strong point. I think at present we don’t have an obvious player to be on the ball and dictating the play in a positive way. We just seem slow, ponderous and cautious on the ball when trying to pass it about and retain possession.
46 champions league wins would put Spock between Ottmar Hitzfeld and Diego Simeone
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Kenny took 13 points out of 42 in the Scottish championship after Dunfermline were relegated in 2007.
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The YBIG & OTB brigades would be up in arms if Simeone was in charge of Ireland. There’s no place in football for cynicism & hard-edged, results at all costs football.
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He’d call up a load of Tyrone lads straight off
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Ian O’Doherty: Back him or sack him – Stephen Kenny experiment isn’t working, but indecision helps no one
Republic of Ireland head coach Stephen Kenny. Photo: Niall Carson/PA Wire.
One step forward, two steps back. That seems to be the script with this current Irish team, doesn’t it?
As recently as March, I wrote here that our performance – albeit a losing one – against France had signalled a growth in the team. Following a desperately plucky – and desperately unlucky – loss to Portugal, who were rescued at the death by Ronaldo, it looked as if the players were beginning to adapt to Stephen Kenny’s new style of more open football and were beginning to come of age.
Frankly, with the benefit of hindsight and the experience of the last few days, it looks like that optimism was foolish in the extreme.
Don’t get me wrong. I was a supporter of Stephen Kenny from the start and I relished his appointment as manager of the Republic. He is a visibly bright man and a studious thinker of the game, and many of us argued it was a good if risky choice.
Yes, he was surely going to face some of the same problems that beset Brian Kerr on his appointment to the top job in Irish football – the fact that many English-born and English-based players would struggle to take a manager from the League of Ireland seriously.
But Kenny had nurtured many of this young team through the underage ranks and would enjoy a greater level of trust than Kerr received from the more truculent, ageing pros he had to deal with.
Like many, I had also become exasperated by the sterile, dour nature of the way Martin O’Neill sent his teams out in his last campaign, and most football fans were in agreement that we needed a root-and-branch change of philosophy.
Well, Kenny was meant to be the man to usher in this new era of modern football, but after three years, can we say it has been a success? Sadly, but obviously, we can’t.
Kenny is a decent man, but football, like all elite sport, is a results business and he simply hasn’t achieved the results required.
I have no interest in dancing on his grave, and there is no doubt some of the criticism that has been directed towards him has been overly personalised and deeply unfair. But it’s also true he does himself no favours.
During Sunday’s press conference ahead of the Gibraltar game and following the disastrous defeat and truly woeful performance against Greece, he decided to take on the Irish media, demanding more “respect” and claiming that impertinent questions from football reporters shouldn’t be tolerated. Like many of his decisions on the pitch, this was a disastrous tactical blunder.
After all, it’s the job of any reporter in any sphere to ask the questions their readers want the answers to.
Yet his tetchiness, veering on arrogance, in response to those perfectly legitimate questions from the assembled press pack displayed a man who looks increasingly out of his depth.
After all, he has won only four out of 23 competitive matches, and such an abysmal record simply doesn’t give anyone the right to scold the media for simply doing their job.
Friday night’s performance against Greece was abysmal to the point of being embarrassing. It would be folly to suggest we should automatically be beating the likes of Greece, but it was the manner of the defeat that caused so much despair.
After enjoying an expensive 10-day warm-weather training camp in Turkey, the team that went on to the field played as if they had never met each other before. We were lucky it was only a 1-2 defeat, because the Greeks wouldn’t have been flattered if they had put four or five past us.
We’re now in the ignoble situation of spending the last three qualifying campaigns knowing we were out of the running by the second game.
That’s simply not good enough. Nor is it good enough to say we simply don’t have the players. Liam Brady may have been overly despondent when he said this is the worst Irish squad he has seen in his lifetime, as we do have some exciting talent coming through.
Troy Parrott may not have lived up to his early potential, but he is young and still learning his trade.
Meanwhile, the two bright lights of the squad are Nathan Collins and Evan Ferguson, who have managed to excite Irish fans in a way we simply haven’t seen in the last few years.
Our under-age teams have been enjoying great success, and there are some serious young talents on the verge of making the breakthrough.
So, while Brady may have a kernel of a point, the future looks brighter than the present, because the present isn’t looking very bright at all.
If Kenny thought the 3-0 win over Gibraltar would keep the wolves at bay, he was wrong. We were playing a team ranked 201st in the world and it took us 52 minutes to score the first goal.
In fact, as the first half went on, you could hear the murmurings from the crowd and the increasing concern that this would be another one of those days when we failed to properly dispose of the kind of team who would struggle in the League of Ireland.
Bizarrely, there has been talk of Sam Allardyce offering his services to the FAI to become caretaker manager for the rest of the campaign, which will hardly fill the hearts of Irish fans with great joy. But then again, the veteran knows how to grind out a result.
Kenny, like the fans, will endure many sleepless summer nights as we contemplate the next two matches in September – France away, followed by the Netherlands at home.
Following rumours that there were high-level meetings over the weekend about Kenny’s future, the FAI owe it to him to come out with a public statement.
Basically, they should either back him or sack him, because the current state of uncertainty about his future is not doing the game any good.
If they were to plump for the latter option, forget about appointing Allardyce –someone like Lee Carsley makes far more sense in the long term.
The Kenny experiment was exciting – but, sadly, it just hasn’t worked. As a certain controversial pundit used to put it: “That’s football, baby.”
I note from Wikipedia that Stephen Kenny’s experience of playing senior soccer amounts to 4 games with Home Farm.
He had them purring though
I’m surprised that arsehole is still around I haven’t heard of him in years.
I like Cullen but I’d have taken him off at half-time against Gibraltar; he just wasn’t playing well.
Knight offered a threat down the right with his directness and in fairness to McClean, he whipped in some nice crosses. But for a team who were whipping in a lot of crosses, we didn’t commit many bodies into the box and didn’t seem to have many attacking the edge of the box.
Again, I feel, in that game, our centre-backs should have pushed a little bit higher, probably hamstrung by not having a left-footed centre-back.
The formation change at half-time was positive, I felt, and better-suited to breaking them down.