Anyone with an accent as posh as Ken can’t be taken seriously discussing the game of soccer
I wouldn’t say Ken Early has a particularly posh accent but he was talking complete horseshit
He is posher than Pat Fenton etc…
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Does he have a posher accent than Liam Brady or John Giles?
The tfk 5 aside team and football manager 2020 aficionados talking about “systems”.
Have you ever read such shite in all your life
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You’re an awful dinosaur. Just throw 11 lads on the field and no more a manager can do
That fella never missed a penalty in his fucking life, so you show a bit of respect you hear me?
Aka the zonal marking crew
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Yes
Vinny Perth made a good point on OTB (I know), I know), about how the last under 21 campaign was allowed to fizzle out after it started with such fanfare.
Kenny has to take massive criticism for how he gutted the squad.
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Jim Crawford was mugged off by losing not just the big names but the likes of Conor Ronan to sit on the bench for Nations League games iirc
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Maybe Ireland managers named Stephen are destined not to work out.
In saying that, I was having a look back over the results during Staunton’s tenure. Apart from the 5-2 in Cyprus which was a disaster - but came over a year before he was sacked, they really weren’t that bad at all.
Some decent results and performances in there - competitive wins over Wales and Slovakia, a 4-0 win away to Denmark, a respectable draw against Germany, and fine performances in the draws against the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The two away defeats to Germany and the Czech Republic were both 1-0.
The other two results apart from Cyprus away which were used as a stick to beat him with were San Marino away (which we still won) and the draw at home to Cyprus in a dead rubber. Cyprus were not a bad side, beating Wales and drawing Germany in that group, and they should have beaten us in Brian Kerr’s penultimate match in charge. Under Trapattoni we did manage to beat them twice but they were both very hard fought one goal wins.
Ireland finished third in the group, one place higher than Kerr had managed in the previous qualification group. There was definitely a sense of progression there during 2007 until the poorish result at home to Cyprus.
We’d kill for those sort of results now.
Should Stan have got another qualification campaign?
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Stan had Robbie Keane, Damian Duff, Shay Given and many more in their pomp.
It wasn’t good enough.
I pointed it out at the time. All the more frustrating that he then either didn’t use the 21s players he pulled like Jason Knight and only gave them a token few minutes at the end of games.
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Sending a terminally ill Bobby Robson out to face the flak after Cyprus was poor form.
But I think any manager would have struggled badly to qualify from that group, the two main opponents in Germany and the Czech Republic were real quality sides. Yes there were a couple of bad results but my point is that during 2007 there did appear to be a clear arc of progression there, and the result that did for Staunton, against Cyprus at home, really wasn’t that terrible in the grand scheme of things - it was a dead rubber and Cyprus were better than given credit for, so while disappointing, it was hardly the end of the world. And he would have had nearly another year to prepare for the World Cup qualifiers, so I think had he remained, people could have been reasonably optimistic that things might have come together.
I think that was after the 2-1 win in San Marino?
To be honest @EstebanSexface has a point
Fine and indeed dandy to talk systems but when players
- are slow to close down opposition
- can’t string passes together
- haven’t a real creative spark
- wingers lacking pace
- lack of a real goal scorer
Those things happen in conjunction with a good system. Teams that are good at pressing are good because they work on it and the manager works on a shape which works with that. It’s easier to string passes together if you have more options which depends on the shape you use.
I’m not saying that it’s the only thing that matters and our players aren’t good enough but it is a very large part of it. Otherwise the team with the best players would just win every game
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Stephen Kenny very defeatist about the group. He questions did anyone expect us to qualify from a group with Serbia and Portugal. The answer of course would be no but with Luxembourg and Azerbaijan there we had a great chance to acquire 12 points from those 4 games. Nick a win at home to Serbia and 15 points along with a potential play-off appearance wouldn’t have been completely out of question.
We were actually quite fortunate with the draw. We got one of the weakest 4th seeds possible and avoided the 6 team groups. A short compact group suits us far better than a 10 game group where our deficiencies would be even more exposed. Just look at the last 8 game campaign where we drew in Georgia, only won 3 games but still almost edged out European semi-finalists Denmark to 2nd spot.
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