It doesn’t really matter how Ireland play, though obviously I’d prefer us to play attractive football. What matters are results. Spock has had his free campaign. He must now achieve qualification for the euros.
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As was I. We had a tough group. Both teams who made it out got to the final. Your argument is that our teams under McCarthy/ONeill/Trap came up short… well than what is success? Winning a tournament? Getting out of the group stage at a major tournament? O Neill did that. Kenny has guided us to unbeliwvable defeats. Luxembourg, Armenia, drew with Azerbaijan, conceding to Andorra. Your definition of coming up short is clearly different for him than any of the other managers you mention.
And we’re not a laughing stock for losing to Luxembourg and Armenia?
What do you consider something of note?
O’Neill got us to France. Regardless of how it ended I’ll remember that tournament for the rest of my life and so will many others.
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It will be harder not to qualify for the Euros.
24 teams at it i think
spock will find a way
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Agreed, the big problem is the lack of a hard edge to grind out results. Doherty got deserved stick for the first goal last night but id be more annoyed by the gaping hole in our central defence. Hendry scored but McRominay was behind him waiting to score. We’ve 3 centre halves for fucks sake. That’s a lack of organisation and a lack of a pigheaded, horrible fucker, hates-to-lose centre half. That game could have gone either way. We lost. And its not the first time we’ve come up the wrong side of a 50/50 like that.
If anything we had the better chances. Should have been no worse than a draw .
It’s like Spock, and his media disciplines, rate a performance ahead of a result when it should, always, be the other way around
O’Neill should have left after the Euros. He had done as much as he could. They had some terrific nights but he stayed on too long and wasn’t building for the future. He had chances to cap Rice and didn’t in meaningless qualifiers.
It got very bad towards the end for him.
I’m wavering on Kenny at this stage. I like his ideas but i just don’t think he has what it takes to implement them at this level, we’re still too sloppy and have a tendency to concede after scoring, or let teams back into a game we are on top in because half time comes too soon. We noticeably sat off Scotland start of second half last night and gave them the edge. It was only after they equalised we woke up again. Thats on Kenny.
He’s been let down by individual errros but that’s been happening all the time under him. I don’t know are lads fully sure of what is expected of them in their positions.
There are no viable alternatives, it isn’t a job there’ll be a queue for. And the money isn’t there to twist someones arm
If sean dyche doesnt get a job he might be a man to go after. I think he would suit this bunch of players down to the ground. He seemed to like having Irish lads around at Burnley too
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There’s no shame in losing to Scotland at Hampden Park. It’s always been a tough place to get a result as the visiting team.
We’d have had a decent chance of beating Iceland in the quarters and sure we’d already taken 4 points off World Champions Germany in qualifying……Portugal were no great shakes in 2016 either.
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Context is everything.
Kenny started off with a really disjointed side, a cabal of older players who we were consistently told by many experts and ex managers could not play decent football and that’s why they never tried. Kenny has proven you can, look at Hendrick under Kenny and previously. Duffy actually passing the ball into midfield. None of this took place under other management teams.
Posters on here seem to think that playing how we used to was the only way, that we made ourselves ‘hard to beat’ and qualified for tournaments. It was a means to an end, the end being we were always going to be an honest tough side who were awful to watch. A dead end. I genuinely believe that given time, after a couple of years of this complete reset in playing style and culture, that we can go really far into tournaments, playing decent exciting football. Posters on here will laugh at that but it’s absolutely not impossible or implausible.
We cannot continue to play in the way we had been. Jesus Christ it was dreadful. Dead stuff.
People still throwing the Luxembourg result around is laughable. We’re a completely different team since then. Armenia away, fair enough. Poor result. But we’ve improved further still since.
We shouldn’t have lost last night and we shouldn’t have lost to Portugal away. And we should have beaten Ukraine away. But we haven’t and you can see that’s a real point of frustration for the players, Molumby was visibly pissed off last night and rightly so, we’re losing games we should be winning.
But it’s coming. Have patience, we were long enough looking at pure fucking tripe and some awful results in those campaigns too by the way.
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Doesn’t pretty much everyone qualify for the euros?
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You are arguing with fellas here who still think it’s funny to put an absolute rotten cunt like John Delaney on a pedestal.
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Kenny has us absolutely purring lads. We completely dominated a Scottish team who recently hammered Ukraine who last year drew with world cup favourites france.
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You’re right. Context is key. However, you want to provide only your context. Looking at this group.
Armenia away…great mood before. Appalling performance. No excuse. Pure shit. Horrendous goal given away with nobody closing their lad at all.
Ukraine at home. Very poor again. Ukrsine were shite. He dropped Parrott. Gave away shit goal, a free thst nobody claimed, defensive lapse.
Scotland. Ridiculous. Out of this world. Parrott back out of necessity and had a stormer. Scotland barely able to string 2 passes together. Obafemi in and ogbene dropped after great performances.
Ukraine away, good performance in patches. Wondergoal and then defensive lapse.
Scotland away. Ok performance. Bad defensive lapses for both goals. Multuple brainfarts.
That’s our context. Occassional patches of decent play, regular defensive lapses, as in in every game. Inconsistent dropping/ selection of players. Id argue that a world class goal from Collins and a great display from obafemi and parrott against a clearly asleep Scotland are all that has kept us from being absolute whipping boys.
Context. We have 2 players regulalry getting a game in the Premier league and the rest are a motley crew of lower league players, how many would you realistically say are even top championship players?
You could see the difference in conditioning from about 70 minutes last night. Scotland have a load of lads playing premier league or european football with scottish clubs at the highest level. They are exposed to better conditioning and conditions so they’re a level above.
Even at that the results have been poor, unforgivable nearly against Armenia and Luxembourg.
He needs to start getting results
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Just to confirm, kenny took over an ireland team 90 mins away from the euros
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OOOFT
Incorrect. They were 180 mins away from the Euros, the winner had to play Northern Ireland.
That was the campaign we drew 0-0 away to Georgia wasn’t it??
And failed to beat Denmark and Switzerland at home in a soft enough group.
Indeed.