With hindsight was sacking Kenny a mistake?

William Hondermarck has made the bench for Northampton. #GreenShoots #FutureIsLookingBright #KennysKids #OnFire🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

The Netherlands are a decent side, but they're not the 7th best. The FIFA rankings system isn't good.

Belgium are still ranked 3rd and USA are 11th. Not a hope that's a true reflection of the current landscape.

France is as tough as it gets. We did well in the home game. No complaints. We didn't compete well enough vs a limited Netherlands team. Especially the one we played away. They were without Aké, de Ligt, de Jong and Memphis.

Reminds me a bit of the “Corbyn was right” mantra in the UK. Bojo making a bags of the UK political realm post 2019 doesn’t mean that Corbyn wouldn’t have.

We dispatched them more easily than at any stage since we walloped them just after they started competing in international football. We beat them 3-nil in Dublin and it was completely textbook, they put up stout defence in the first half while offering no threat of their own, then they tired in the second and we dispatched of them. Beating Gibraltar easily is not a key KPI, but it is relevant considering how we've struggled past them in recent years.

Losing by narrow margins against 2 of the worlds best sides is just not unusual for Ireland - we have at times got draws against top sides, but in general we lose and we basically never win. Was there not a 5+ year period between Trap and O'Neill where we failed to beat a single team ranked higher than us? We're not even talking about world class sides like France and the Netherlands there, it's literally any side ranked in about the top 30/40 in the world. People seem to have this rose tinted view of the past where we were holding our own against top sides and pulling off great results on a consistent basis, but that hasn't been the case in 20+ years....

We’ve generally held our own over the past 20 years. It may not have been wins, but we were unlucky not to qualify for WC ‘10 and WC ‘18. We did make it to two European Championships at the time. MM even managed to get 3/4 draws from the Swiss and the Danes in 2019. Kenny got 2 draws against Portugal and the Serbs in 2021. So we generally didn’t lose. I would argue that our relationship with losing has only really crept in to the national team over the past 3 years, and especially over the past 2.

I'm fairly sure beating Germany was the result that ended our years long run of never beating a single side ranked even 1 position higher than us. It was an aberration, not the norm. That's without even getting into the fact that the quality of that German side is more akin to the Netherlands side we faced recently than the French side we lost narrowly to twice, who are one of the top international sides in the history of the game.

Reigning World Champions Germany, who put 7 goals past Brazil in a World Cup Semi Final just 3 months before we played them away in the qualifiers, are akin to todays Netherlands.

I know I try not to take any notice of his nonsense (and it's always nonsense) but every so often he comes out with some absolute peach lines.