Cult of Stephen Kenny

I knew well you wouldn't be able to bring yourself to say it.

So I will say it for you.

By your barometer Kerr 'absolutely failed', you have predicted that Roy Keane already will fail based on nothing but your biases, and gossip columns anecdotes.

The truth is Kenny was like one of those reality TV stars whose friends convinced him that he could sing. He convinced himself that he could try opera was self trained, he told us that he would bring us his classical style.

But he only ever learnt to sing in the shower, where there was no real pressure. He was the best singer in his household, we were told.

We were promised the young orchestra would grow with him, he told us of his previous records even listed them off, on the verge of tears.

He did not get the record deal, he did not even make it past the first round, but his friends and family blame everyone - but Kenny himself.

It all ended up in a jumble of an incoherent noise, which engendered more pity than anything. And even resorted to throwing Duffy up front in desperation. The antitheses of what we were promised summed up by that move, when the pressure was on and needed a goal.

Not just an absolute failure, but a parody of himself, a bad joke, a footnote, and a picture of a man slowly disintegrating before our very eyes. With the slow dawning and realisation that he might not be as good as he was told he was.

Kenny's dream:

Kenny's reality:

And don't forget:

"We didn't Underestimate Luxembourg"

Martin O'Neill on Stephen Kenny:

"The Irish media have put Stephen in charge and therefore they are still going to peddle this idea that he has changed the course of football. That the Republic of Ireland play a different type of football.

"They put him in charge because they were very strongly in favour of him and the FAI succumbed and went with that, which was fine.

"The whole idea was he would change the course of football. We’re going to be a possession team, we are going to change it. That's very, very difficult to change when you are an international manager. You have players for two or three days.

"You're not going to change a lot of things in that time and it's all very well having possession when your two centre-halves pass the ball to each other on a number of occasions, and you get your stats up.

"The bottom line is you have to win football games. The Republic of Ireland want to qualify.

"I heard them saying this was a difficult group, which it was. France are a very good side. But we qualified from a group in 2016 that featured the world champions Germany. We actually beat Germany."

You're forgetting that Kenny has us nowhere near any of the top 2 teams in the groups we've been in. He has us down with Luxembourg, Armenia, Greece, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan. We have better players than all of them. McCarthy nearly qualified us with a similar or worse squad than Kenny's. And his reign wasn't even good!

No Georgia didn't. Switzerland, who went on to the Quarter finals of the Euros, knocking out France and only losing on penalties to Spain beat us easily away but we could have beaten them at home. We drew twice with Denmark, who went on to the Euro semi finals. We battered them at home in the final game of the group, a win would have put us through.

That's the level we were at directly before Kenny. He took us from being competitive at the top end of qualification to being also rans. The Kenny cult will try to twist, excuse, lie etc but the facts are that he's our worst manager in over 40 years, worse than Staunton and hopefully his miserable reign is finally coming to an end.

Leave SK in place for the rest of the campaign - see where we stand then - either part ways with SK then or back him for another campaign

Kenny's time is up. It's game over. He was given his chance and he failed miserably. It took long enough but the media have finally turned on him, even some of his biggest supporters have accepted that he has to go. It's going to be a really tough job for the next manager to recover from these 3 years.

Yeah I forgot about Gibraltar away. That was painful viewing. Watching Doherty and coleman get in one another's way all game. Amazing what people forget. No doubt Kenny needs to go and it hasn't worked but pretending mccarthy did any good for us is being disingenuous

I think we have differing ideas of the scale of the problems facing Irish football if you think it's all down to 3 years of Kenny. The last time we had a combination of good players and a good manager playing good football was over 20 years ago. Since then we had the financial meltdown and stood by as our playing pool shrank to the point where we now have 4th tier English league players starting.

Even the biggest plastic hammer wielding Ryan Giggs poster on the wall Ole Ole barstooling PL fan would have to admit that at least Kenny changed the style. And for the peanuts the FAI can pay, that's something. I hope the next manager builds on that and harnesses Ferguson effectively. I really can't see many queuing up to work for the FAI though.

Once Anthony Barry left, Kenny's tactics and setup fell apart.

Our defence is now all over the place, we still don't close players down taking a shot, how many goals from outside the box?

Our Defenders are unable to look up and see where the forwards are making runs to play balls to them

Our midfield are afraid to try a killer pass.

McClean is now a League 2 player and in his 30's. He was expected to marshall the left wing, that was too much of an ask and not the players fault.

Our delivery of crosses very rarely beat the first player.

We are afraid to shoot, how many shots on target over the last two games?

Sadly alot of this is down to the mgr, we need to try something different, it might not work, but the current way is not working for sure and we know that.

The importance of Anthony Barry is often overlooked. We could barely score a goal and couldn't win a match until Barry came in and set up the team and tactics. It still wasn't great but if we had just offered Barry the job and ousted Kenny, we'd be in a much better position now.

The problem is sometimes good coaches make poor managers. Look at Paul Clement for that example. Coaching at Chelsea, PSG and Real Madrid. Couldn't really hack it as a manager though.

Although international management might be different in that they won't be dealing with the day to day personnel issues that club management brings.

It's also really worrying why the players are still backing SK to the hilt. It sounds as if they are so comfortable now in the current setup knowing full well that failure and inability to win games is defended by the manager at all costs. We really need someone to come in a ruffle feathers and let them know in no uncertain terms that the results have not been good enough and level of performances won't be tolerated.

people reading way too much into anthony barrys influence on things imo

This is very selective memory. The two games against Gibraltar especially the away game were absolutely horrendous. We were a Darren Randolph wonder save away from drawing with them in that away game. The two Georgia games were also terrible. Switzerland absolutely battered us away and finished 3rd in their group at the finals only beating Turkey. I was at that Denmark game you refer to and we played very well but only equalised with 5 mins left and didn't really create much in the final third for the whole game.

Kenny's time is definitely up and his in game management has been very poor at times but claiming that we were some kind of world force with McCarthy over us is ridiculous. I believe that the next manager will owe a lot to Kenny when he has a squad full of guys in their early-mid 20s with a lot of international experience as compared to what Kenny inherited.

Going to watch Ireland under McCarthy and latter O'Neill was absolutely painful which is why crowds started dropping. That is what really matters to a cash strapped organisation such as the FAI.

How many goals and victories did we have prior to Barry coming in? Do you remember 4-3-3 was Kenny's formation and he stook with it religiously? That changed when Barry came in.

It's comical at times. Could you imagine Gareth Southgate or an England manager coming out with interviews like SK does? We'd be on the floor laughing at them. It's like watching Mike Bassett.