Newstalk: Off The Ball

Those figures are very arbitary! I'd say you can take a couple of zeroes off the first and then you might have the reality.

This is the real situation. I'd rename your categories

1. Suckers
2. Measured people, happy to pay a reasonable price for good content (ME)
3. Paul Murphy brigade

If you start with a subscription model, you start with a low price and deliver good content - and make it quality stuff, where people say "I am happy to pay for the top presenter and great guest on whatever sport you like". Then, when you reach a critical mass you add an extra euro to their subscription and people say "yeah, I like their stuff so I'm happy to do so".

Not throwing the Crappy Quiz onto a podcast and a load of other crap and expecting them to pay €10 a month.

That Mick guy on Off the ball needs to give his opinion more

Duggan is truly a halfwit

Collins

Bazunu

Ogbene

Ebolese

Ferguson

All players who can play in the PL or a top european league.

Along with

Smallbone

Obafemi

Omabamadele

O shea

Cullen

Knight

Players who can make a differ

We're not as poor as some are making out. We badly need young Moran to push on.

However kenny failed to deal with the fact that midfield is our weak link and he kept trying to play through them. Utter madness. Otb fail to mention or focus on his inability to change systems.

There are no serious excuses for how poor the guy has done. He has set us back even further.

I'm pretty sure a large portion of people are completely unsurprised at how badly he did. He's completely out of his depth as he's never had any experience of top level football in any way.

He was completely delusional about himself propped up by the sycophantic LOI fans.The delusions of the LOI fans can be summed up from this quote from the below piece by Eamonn Sweeney in the Independent when he says:

"What is Kenny going to learn from managing the Irish U-21 team that he hasn't already learned with Dundalk in Europe?"

Eamonn Sweeney: 'FAI's Irish solution to an Irish problem leaves Stephen Kenny in no-man's land'

https://www.independent.ie/sport/soccer/international-soccer/eamonn-sweeney-fais-irish-solution-to-an-irish-problem-leaves-stephen-kenny-in-no-mans-land/37564821.html

Apparently managing a bunch of semi-professionals who play at a standard similar to the 5th tier in the English game and play once every 3 or 4 years a couple of games against a good European team , provides the same experience as managing the u-21 team who compete against the best u-21 teams from all across Europe.

If Kenny had been left in charge of the u-19/u-21 team for 5 or 6 years and showed some positive results and developed as a coach he might have been a good manager for the senior side but the FAI stupidly thought throwing him in at the deep end was a better idea.

Kenny also was quoted early on in his reign of saying he wanted to change the perception of Irish football internationally which shows an insane degree of delusional as 1 nobody outside of Ireland gives a fiddlers about Irish football and 2 he obviously thought he was some sort of tactical whizz who could transform Ireland.

If he'd been more pragmatic as manager he might have had some chance of success.He clearly had no idea how difficult international football is which of course is not unexpected as he has had no experience of top level football before as either a player or manager.

If they ant to use the LOI as a pathway for developing coaches for the national team (like maybe for Duff in th future) then it needs to be done by bringing them in from the LOI to first to coach in the underage ranks and working their way up to the senior team.

A lot of the non top tier countries are made up of players that play at those levels. The Championship is still a very high level....in the past the Premier League wouldn't have had the amount of players from outside of Britain and Ireland so it makes sense that more of them could play at the top level.

He was also much less of a spoofer than Kenny, and came across much better in his media performances. In fairness though he did have much better players

He did have a better squad, but Kenny has made the current group look an awful lot worse than they are.Almost all of our players now are with clubs in the premier league and top half of the championship.

Again you're lacking context. Bar Evan Ferguson, the rest of our PL players are playing for some of the worst PL teams we've ever seen. Our players aren't good and their clubs/status at those clubs shows that.

Kenny not having the team playing as well as they can or above themselves is a different issue.

But being on the worst premier league teams today are better than playing on a mid-table team 20 years ago considering the squashing of talent into the top leagues compared to the past. People arguing our team was so good in the 80's we had players winning titles with Liverpool ,Everton,Arsenal forget that back in the day the English league consisted solely of all the best players in UK and Ireland, now it consists of the best players from around the world.

We may not have the best selection of players we've ever had, but Kenny has made them look a hell of a lot worse than they are.

Is Michael McCarthy Clare or a Dub? Confused

How so?

Ya Football pod appeared in mine yesterday and they said they will have a Monday pod free and the other behind the paywall

Listening to Johnny Giles is a bit of a car crash nowadays. Its like NT keep him on as a charity case because he offers little insight into the game. He really should just hang it up at this stage.

Anyone hear David Connolly last Sun afternoon he was hilariously bad

The problem is that these Kenny supporters will be out in force if/when we get bad results with our next manager. Some will actually hope it goes wrong for them. It really has been a poisonous few years following Ireland and listening to the absolute crap of how great Kenny was doing despite what we were seeing with our own eyes. Well we're now down to 60th in the World rankings, some of our best emerging players in a generation have been brought into a losing culture, bereft of confidence where excuses for failure and poor performances were accepted.

The new manager has some tough job turning it around. It can't get worse than Kenny but expect Off the ball and his other media pals to be on the back of the new manager from day 1.

Johnny has been like this for years, he prefers to go back to the 70s and tell anecdotes of Leeds, Don Revie and Clough.

He uses catch all general phrases like player x or manager y is not “doing the business” - a lot.

However, any time he is asked about the “John Giles Foundation” and its connections with Delaney era FAI, Gilesy immediately goes on the defensive and gets very waspish.

People should have a read of Mark Tighe’s pieces on the Giles Foundation - very odd arrangements...

Again, no genuine insight into the game and he frequently either can't remember or pronounce players' names. It just comes across as really unprofessional. Nathan does indeed sound bored of his yanzie talking to Johnny.

Odd comment to make considering you literally had people gloating in the ROI thread about Kenny not being good enough as soon as he was appointed.

Exactly!! Agree with this and what an earlier poster said about the current crop just constantly quoting stats. If you are listening to John for cutting edge insight then you are listiening to the wrong thing. The slot is there so we can hear a player from a totally different era, but basically the same game, make comparisons to todays game and how it is so different.

The man is a national hero, and by jesus we shall miss him when he is gone!