EURO 2024 Qualifier GROUP B

While the NL is important, a bit of perspective is required here, the team absolutely needed a complete rebuild, it simply had to be done, young lads had to be introduced, senior lads dispensed with. There is no ideal time to schedule a rebuild in international football, but obviously the NL is preferrable to an actual campaign. The draw was unlucky, we had an 80% chance of avoiding Fra/Eng and an 80% chance of avoiding Tur/Gre, we managed to avoid neither, that's bad luck. We now have a young team which is only going to improve as they gain experience - I think only 3 players had 25 caps or more in the last starting XI, 7 were 23 or under - this is the background to our last two underwhelming NL campaigns, campaigns I might add where we finished exactly where our seeding suggested we would i.e. 3rd of 4. Thats not to excuse poor performances therein and yes it would be great if we had gotten better results along the way, but context is still important.

Btw, being 2nd seeds would have guaranteed nothing, we have been second seeds or better on three occasions in the last 10 WCQ/ECQ campaigns - Euro 2004 1st seeds, WC 2006 2nd Seeds, Euro 2016 2nd seeds - We finished 3rd, 4th and 3rd respectively in those 3 campaigns. We have finished Top 2 in qualification groups only 3 times in the last 10 attempts (20 years), each time was from a seeding position of 3rd or worse. We have qualified for just 2 of the last 10 major tournaments. Some people seem to have a very elevated opinion of the abilities of the Irish team - we have been pretty much in gradual decline since 2002, hopefully 2021 represented the end of that cycle and we can now start to improve again - we are certainly in a much better place now imo than we were at the end of Mick II's campaign - it has taken longer than we would all like, but Kenny's been at it 2 odd years and there are significant green shoots emerging. The draw was a kick in the teeth.