Scotland v Ireland, Saturday - 7.45pm

Hilarious. If you take away all his terrible and bad results then hes done ok i suppose…
What games did we do really well in? Scotland ? Portugal when we lost? Qatar maybe?

Ye’re right lads, we need to go back to the days when we were getting outplayed regularly by Georgia and stuttering to wins against Gibraltar and just rely on big Shane Duffy to get us a late winner/equaliser.

I’d prefer to lose 2-1 to Scotland playing how we played last Saturday night instead of that shite, thank you very much. Because I know those games we’re losing while playing really decent football will eventually turn to wins.

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I’ll give you the sloppy goals one. It was a huge feature early in his tenure but less so in recent games until the penalty the other night which was brainless from Browne with the hands up.

I don’t know would I agree with you on the disjointed press, I think it depends on the opposition. I thought it was good in the 1st half on Saturday night but not as good second half, I’m not sure Kenny can be blamed for that, I think he tried to change personnel in order to rectify it as some players were visibly tiring

I have to say I completely disagree with the aimless square ball comment. I’d agree in the early stages of his tenure there was a lot of this but in all fairness I think that has been improved hugely in the past 6 or 7 games, Scotland at home and last Saturday night we moved the ball forward really well, against Ukraine too in Poland. Yes we retain when we need to but much better now at advancing forward into attacking areas than previous. There’s still huge room for improvement but definitely moving in right direction in that regard I would have thought

Who is advocating for that?

Also think you are doing a disservice to Georgia. They are ranked around a similar level to the likes of Armenia and Bulgaria which Kenny’s ireland have failed to perform against.

Plenty of sides have struggled in against Georgia especially in Tbilisi, it isn’t just an irish issue, Scotland lost there in Euro 2016 qualifying, Ireland, Wales and Austria all dropped points to them in 2018 qualifying, Denmark drew with them in Euro 2020 qualifying and beat Sweden and drew with Greece in the last campaign. All teams in and around our level and they have struggled to grind them down.

They played us off the pitch in the Aviva more than once, in both 2015 and 2016, not Tbilisi. It was embarrassing, we were camped on our own box while they ran rings around us.

But we won both games 1-0, so all was fine :person_shrugging:

It all boils down to, do we think Kenny will get us to Euro 2024 and if not, who would?

Personally I don’t think he will. If Big Mick would come back then great, if not, I’d be on the phone to Sean Dyche.

Marco Tardelli is who I’d go after.

If we want a style that would potentially suit the players at our disposal and our footballing culture then you go over to Leeds and beg Marcelo Bielsa to take the gig. He may well be crazy enough to take it as he seems to like strange projects, but it is a very long shot, failing that you ask him to go and find us one of his disciples who could look to get us playing an high tempo pressing game which would would play more to our strengths at centre half and the emergence of pace up top and possibly cover up for our lack of creativity in central midfield.

Martin O’Neill, who’s admittedly biased, was positive post match on Saturday night but he said Kenny’s a bit selective with the games he refers to when talking about positive strides being made. I think that’s a fair point. Kenny spoke about the positives of the last three games - Scotland win Ukraine draw, narrow Scotland defeat - and that’s fair. But before that there were the awful displays in Armenia and at home to Ukraine. I think that’s the issue myself - we have these little positive runs but they’ve generally come after a run of negative results where we’re already out of contention to qualify.

However, I personally think we’re on the right track. I thought we had a very solid shape the other night and I thought we pressed well as a team. I think Scotland got on top of us before they equalised early in the second half and they had us wobbling for 5-10 minutes afterwards too. I thought we regained a foothold then and looked just as, if not more, likely to win it. I think we definitely need to develop a harder edge though. No more silly concessions like the giveaway penalty and we need an ability to ride out these spells when we’re under pressure without conceding. We were also 1-0 up at half time against Ukraine in Poland and conceded early in the second half.

Another thing is how we’ve struggled to break down lower ranked teams at home. We’ve a bit of pace now on the counter with Obafemi and Ogbene amongst others but we probably lack the guile and creativity to get through teams that defend in numbers on the edge of their own box. That’s the test that will probably face us tomorrow so it’d be good to get a convincing win.

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Would you say that to Graham Kavanagh’s face?

That’s not true. They were excellent in the 2018 World Cup

They had good results too.

That’s the difference

As has Kenny. The 3-0 win at home to Scotland and the 3-0 win away to Azerbaijan were good results, as was the 1-1 draw away to Ukraine but we should have actually won that game after out playing them. The draw at home to genuine top class side Portugal also.

We actually played really well in all of those results too.

We weren’t away to ukraine. It was a neutral venue.

Azerbaijan are muck.

Scotland was a good result at the time but has turned out to be a blip. A 4 goal turnaround between the 2 games

fuckin hell, am i reading this right, is @Breaking_my_balls giving equivalence between beating world champions Germany and beating Azerbijan?

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So an Irish team winning 3_0 away from home and completely dominating the game, even against ‘muck’, isn’t a good result now??

Anyone recall our away games against muck like Gibraltar under previous managements??

Go way to fuck

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They were a dour defensive team in 2018. Play much better football now.

You can’t defend Kenny with results. Performance and potential, sure but not results.

He is operating at around a 20% win rate.
To put this in context, Brian Kerr was sacked with a 55% win rate, he only ever lost 4 games in 30 odd internationals as Irish manager. The best performing irish manager in history. And he got ran out of it by the same hacks that are adamant on defending Kenny

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You asked for good results. I gave you 4 of them in recent games