Newstalk: Off The Ball

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.

I'd get a ban if I was honest....but even in its current state I'd rather 25mins be spent waffling to John than some of the topics that are being discussed. I agree with all the criticism but they are obviously due to the age of the man. If you want cutting edge there are plenty options.

Exactly, he shouldn't be compared to the stat bots who often just recycle the opinion they've heard elsewhere in the 24/7 world of podcasts and fan channels. Mostly quite boring.

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!

I'm not a subscriber but look a few of the short clips on YouTube these days, is Ger on leave for personal reasons? Presume he wouldn't be taking 2 weeks off this time of the year.

How long until the lads climb down on the subscription?

I think they'd have got away with 4 euro a month. Really poor research and decision making to go 10 across the board. It'll finish them.

Michael McCarthy will have to go. Really tough to listen too.

I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason that he's still on is because of how he left RTE.

I remember at the time he went on OTB within a couple days of RTE announcing that he wouldn't be returning with them and John said how it was RTE's choice and that he was keen to continue but they weren't interested.

I remember thinking at that time that he was going to be on OTB as long as he wanted after that because Nathan definitely allowed John to let off some steam about feeling hard done by.

I still like him, mostly for nostalgia reasons to be fair but I also like the no nonsense approach that he suggests football and football management can be. There's no shortage of the analysis by death pundits and at the end of the day, it's all just subjective opinions.

I'm surprised they haven't transitioned his slot in to a magazine type piece where he discusses things outside of recent match analysis. As others have said, during Covid, he did a couple of pieces on legendary teams of old and they were entertaining.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing on Saturday afternoon - they had a sort of sorrowful wake for Stephen kenny and raking over the ashes of how things went so wrong for him.

Lots of depressed sighs and almost crying over how it didn’t work out for him...

They read out texts along the lines of “OTB was wrong in backing SK, he failed, get over it” and by god was there a narky, bad tempered attitude from them over it.

Yeah i like him. There are endless hours of the latest and greatest analysts out there. It's less than 30 mins a week including ads. I like him and so what if his mind wanders a bit.

Ok. As ive said before we have huge issues if our players are buying into that level of failure. Any player worth his salt would have kicked up blue murder in the dressing room. The players got comfortable under Kenny, he didnt ask the hard questions or make the demands required of them. They were delighted with this. Thats the way dressing rooms go with weak players. No way would a John Walters or Glen whelan have accepted it. And they were fairly limited. It stinks.

Thats not good. I can accept players being limited but that sort of weak mentatlity is toxic and is a much bigger issue than the poor manager.

Remember the players backed Staunton to the hilt? Players even went on the late late show to defend him. He also gave debuts to loads of players and tried to introduce a new style. How is Staunton remembered as Ireland manager?

Kenny will be viewed the same, a failure who was way out of his depth and extremely inarticulate.

99.99 a year deal now on according to Ritchie last night before he went straight to the cash machine which he would recommend you to enter.

On Pat Kenny today they were discussing tech gifts for Christmas.

Shamelessly included was an annual subscription to Off The Ball for the low-los price of 99 euro, instead of the usual 130 euro 🙂

That’s rather pathetic