It's the Stephen Kenny Thread

The area he needs to improve most is his in game management.

The media stuff is a load of sh*te, if people want to criticise him they'll do so regardless of what he says. You can slice someone's words any way you want - he was criticised for saying he wanted to win the group because supposedly that "put the team under pressure"; but the exact same posters would be bollicking him if he'd dampened expectations by saying he lacked ambition/didn't instill belief/etc.

The reality is this, about 75% of people support Kenny, yet it's the 25% who don't that have been making the most noise. They scream and b*tch and moan and they will continue to do so for as long as he is manager. The whole thing has become ideological rather than rational, most people will never change their minds.

I’m just not a fan of this strawman that creates a Hobson’s choice, that doesn’t exist. It’s been dreamt up that the next manager is automatically somebody who will go back to long punts and backs to the wall defence. And that is with the hindsight that that strategy started to deteriorate rapidly after the Danes hammered us in 2017. At a certain point we actually started getting beaten, and on occasions, badly. It was a sign of the decline of the players from when Trapp had an obvious spine, to now when we have no obvious top class players or even automatic leaders.

The long ball punt as the only tactic has been less and less effective for the past 25 years -it’s the law of diminishing returns 

Without the ball we were the best in the world and many teams now adopt that tactic.  

With the the ball well we were zero risk and only played in the last third.  We had great players too. That style is now redundant for many reasons.  Back pass rule, clamp down on aggressive tackling meaning possession is easier to keep and harder to get off a team, giving the ball away or turning ever tackle into a 50/50 risks not seeing the ball for ages or giving away frees and yellow cards.  VAR has only made that worse.  The blueprint for any modern Irish side for me is our performance in Hannover in 88 against USSR when we had Whelan and Sheedy as centre mids and actually played more football as McGrath was not there in midfield.  McGrath was our greatest ever player but sheedy and Whelan was a more stylish centre mid pairing.  It helps to have some world class players winning European cups and cup winners cups and leagues and fa cups. 

What a load of utter, utter sh*te. 

Reading these posts second time around is far worse 

A league of Ireland fan. 

Friday night merchants