Ken Early: Stephen Kenny should forget past and concentrate on present

Going into Saturday’s game against Armenia, Ireland had conceded 12 goals since the start of 2021, which by convention is generally regarded as the true start of Stephen Kenny’s time in charge. The most common way for teams to score against Ireland is with a header from a cross. Cristiano Ronaldo (twice), Aleksandar Mitrović, Marc Vales, Sergej Milinković-Savić and Hans Vanaken have all headed in crosses from varying angles against Ireland over the last 15 months.

The second most common type of goal conceded by Ireland is a miracle shot from way downtown. Mark Travers’ positioning was poor when Mitrović chipped him from 35 yards in Belgrade, but Gavin Bazunu couldn’t do much about the 25-yarder Gerson Rodrigues hammered past him for Luxembourg, or Emin Mahmudov’s astonishing curling strike for Azerbaijan. On Saturday, yet another blameless Irish keeper was left helpless by yet another phenomenal strike. Armenia had only two more shots on target besides Eduard Spertsyan’s 74th-minute wondergoal. But that was one more than Ireland managed on what was the most deflating afternoon for the team since the loss to Luxembourg last March.

Most fans have been happy to buy a narrative of slow and steady progress, but this was an evening to test the faith. Kenny’s team dominated possession as McCarthy’s, O’Neill’s or Trapattoni’s teams seldom did in the past, but that just made their lack of creativity more glaring and painful. Trapattoni used to say: “We have no the famous, the creative players.” But creativity doesn’t have to mean a kind of magic which flows from the special insight and skills of a gifted individual like Michel Platini or Liam Brady. There’s a simpler kind of team-engineered creativity, which essentially is all about working good crossing positions.

Of the 23 goals Ireland have scored since the start of last year, 15 came from crosses, and nine of those had been finished with headers. Some people think Ireland are only dangerous at set pieces, but actually only five of the 23 goals came from dead balls. Most of the goal-creating crosses originated in open play. By contrast only two of the 23 goals were assisted by through-balls in central areas: if Ireland are going to score they generally need to work a crossing angle first.

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Target-rich environment

Stephen Kenny has talked about wanting to see more “Kevin de Bruyne crosses” – that is, rather than “traditional” crosses delivered from close to the byline, he likes those diagonal balls whipped into the areas between the penalty spot and either post. But some of the crosses Ireland actually put in in Yerevan would have given de Bruyne a migraine, especially the high looping slow balls that were difficult to direct at goal with any pace. With Duffy, Collins and Egan towering over their markers at set-pieces, the Armenian box was often a target-rich environment. Yet Ireland crossed 34 times without ever producing a killer ball. Chasing a goal late on, Ireland tried flooding the box with centre forwards but were never able to work the right angle to cross the ball in to them.

The one big chance they created was when Ogbene headed Cullen’s free kick over the bar in first-half injury time. Ogbene headed that ball like a man who wasn’t expecting the defender just in front of him to have missed it. Ogbene himself put in more crosses than anyone else in the game, but too often he was hitting them with his weaker left foot, after he had been forced to cut back and his team-mates had failed to give him a better option.

Afterwards, Stephen Kenny struggled to find the words to adequately express his disappointment. He had given a higher-energy performance the day before the game, when he had been asked: “You’ve set your team the challenge of winning this group; mind you, you’ve never won a game in this competition. How important is it to get that monkey off your back?” For some reason Kenny bristled at this, and his answer took us back to the time of which we have agreed not to speak: the autumn of 2020.

Stump speech

“It’s not fair to assess that campaign at all,” he complained. “Completely unfair. Two windows with minus, so many players minus, for two of the windows. So it’s not a fair assessment. I know people want to criticise that period, and people really went after us in that period. But I think we’ve shown over the last year, the players have played brilliantly. The Irish public really identify with this team now, it’s a new style of play, it’s a vibrant style of play, the players have been terrific... We’ve scored 23 goals from March to March, we’ve blooded an awful lot of players who have brought new competition for places... I think we’re going to improve as a team... [etc]” The answer thus morphed into the familiar rhetoric of his stump speech, and the fluency with which he was speaking by the end of it demonstrated his comfort on that terrain.

Most of Kenny’s problems can be traced to the persistent gap between his rhetoric and his results. He came in promising to lead Ireland out of the dark ages, and promptly presided over the longest scoreless run in Irish football history. He hailed the 3-2 defeat away to Serbia as one of Ireland’s best qualifying performances in years and a sign of good things to come, only to lose the next game 1-0 at home to Luxembourg. The 2-1 defeat away to Portugal was “nearly” our best result in decades, but the 1-1 draw against Azerbaijan three days later would have been a bad result in any decade.

Since the pattern Kenny himself has established is to overpromise and underdeliver, it seemed reasonable to ask a question which boiled down to “if Ireland are going to achieve the goal you have set of winning the group, how important is it to win a game first?”

Kenny somehow decided this was the moment to relitigate the autumn of 2020. Why? Who was the intended audience for this? Who was the last person who voluntarily thought about that dismal time? Who’s in the mood to listen to whinges about the old Covid close-contact rules now? All fair-minded people accept there were obvious mitigating factors for the terrible start the team made under Kenny in the time of which we no longer speak. Kenny already won that argument, which is why the FAI gave him a new contract three months ago. Why reopen it now and insist that actually the start wasn’t even that terrible, given all the circumstances and so on and so forth?

Even if that were all true, it’s for other people to say. For Kenny to say it himself sounds defensive – or at least that’s how it sounded before the match. After the match, in the context of another defeat to nil against a much-lower-ranked nation, it sounds laughable. He should not be wasting any more energy complaining about the unfair criticism he may or may not have received in the autumn of 2020. Save it for the flak that will be coming his way in the summer of 2022, if the team can’t start living up to their manager’s hype.