It started with the most depressing night in Irish football, a shameful unprecedented humiliation against a minnow – at home and in silence – and it ended with the deafening roars of a packed Lansdowne Road who believed they had just seen Ireland take the lead against Portugal.
Throw in the feel-good buzz around the best attended domestic fixture in generations and the absolute battering handed out by the Women’s team to Georgia among other positive results, and the game finally feels healthy in this country for the first time in a long, long time. 2021 may be the year we finally fell back in love with football in Ireland. It was the year in which many Irish people decided, by accident or by design, to give something a chance – to allow themselves to sit back and let football be football. People I know who have never set foot inside a domestic football ground; whose parents and grandparents may never done so either, spoke to me about how much they loved the FAI Cup Final, and how much their kids loved it. And said they would be back. Significant numbers tuned in to see the women’s team play live on RTE. And on the senior men’s front, we finally have a manager who believes in the quality of what this nation can produce and is willing to give youth a chance to shine. His faith, stubborn and persistent through the horrors of March, is beginning to pay off.
And it’s March where we begin. The second major lockdown of the pandemic was just beginning to ease when Ireland travelled to Serbia and came away with nothing despite a decent enough showing. We felt another performance like that the following week might be enough for Kenny’s first win. There were signs of a new approach but nothing substantial yet. 2 goals in Belgrade should never be sniffed at however. Surely we’d get that win against Luxembourg.
But in the cavernous, soulless empty bowl of Lansdowne Road that night, the wheels very nearly came off entirely. We had no complaints. Luxembourg were the better side, or at least the more dangerous side, and a snapshot from distance out of nothing covered the entire Irish football family in a blanket of despair. It was one of those historic nights for all the wrong reasons. It raised to the forefront 2 questions that we hadn’t asked for generations – can we turn this football team around; and does anyone even care any more?
If you think the answer to the second question was a resounding yes of course, then you may have forgotten exactly how even the most loyal and weather-beaten among us felt. Scrap the whole thing and start again! Forget about the senior team for a generation! Rebuild everything! Sack Kenny!
It was desperate in its most literal sense. All hope was lost. A national football breakdown was underway, just as we were emerging from the longest and most severe lockdown of all; just as glimmers of normality were returning, our football team was showing the world that even in modern, rich Ireland, the peasants were still present. Fifteen years of neglect; Fifteen years of theft; Fifteen years of ‘sure it’ll be grand’. Millions blown on malignant oul’ chancers like Trap, Keane and O’Neill. No players primed. No fans excited.
Only something like a run of 1 defeat in the next 10 games; 18 goals scored; 6 conceded; and not just the discovery, but the nurturing, of the guts of an entire squad from inexperienced debutants into lads who could look the likes of Ronaldo, Bruno Fernandes and Pepe square in the eye and think “we’re doin’ you here”, could possibly salvage this year.
And that is exactly what happened.
A slow burning revolution started with a decent performance against Qatar in solemn silence 3 days after Luxembourg. Regrouping in June, while the big boys readied themselves for Euro 2020, two nothing games against Hungary and Andorra steadied the ship – the latter bringing more Irish goals in one game than the previous ten. Obliging opponents but Finland, Bulgaria and Luxembourg hardly strike fear into anyone either. 4 Irish goals, even in a post-season friendly in Andorra, are not nothing.
3 qualifiers over 7 days in September followed and it was down in the Algarve where we saw a true coming of age take its first tentative steps. We saw a 19 year old goalkeeper stand up to the overwhelming presence of Cristiano Ronaldo, bringing us to our feet as he kept out his penalty. We saw John Egan, who brought only 12 caps into 2021 grab the lead for Ireland. We saw Aaron Connolly bundled to the ground denied a spot kick to make it 2-0 and we saw a referee playing on and on and on until the messiah crafted the final line of his story. Robbed, perhaps not on paper, but certainly on grass. We deserved a point. But the chink of light was beginning to break through the curtains. We needed to build on that.
Unfortunately we failed to do that. Stephen Kenny’s first game in front of a home crowd, albeit limited to 25,000, failed to produce a decent result but instead we were subject to a late Shane Duffy header to salvage a point. Post-match pints and post-match recriminations – how could the same team that had Portugal on the rack away not be able to see of the Azeris at home a few days later?? Sober reflections later on revealed some positives – 21 shots, 495 passes and 59% possession. This compares well to the 10 shots, 365 passes and 42% possession upon which we built one of our worst ever home wins against Georgia in 2016 – a defining game of the late MonKeano reign where many of us remember walking away from Lansdowne with the sheepish grins of 17 year olds leaving the offie with the bags of cans you wanted – we got away with it. But surely if we continue to outplay teams, we will learn to outscore them – from where, however would these goals come?
3 days later, it was a similar story on the surface – a late goal from someone on the pitch to score for the opposition, which he also did, salvaging a point against Serbia – a much, much better side than Azerbaijan. But scratch the surface and there were few, if any positives. Outplayed, out-passed and out-thought, to the extent O’Neill’s men were against Georgia, but without any of the good fortune required to win.
Gavin Bazunu was one shining light during what was beginning to feel like a slight transition. We had stopped losing and green shoots of a coherent group playing a coherent way were beginning to emerge from this Irish soccer nursery in which, alongside the kids, established players like Hendrick and McClean were playing better than they had for 5 years. It was never going to be enough to dislodge either Portugal or Serbia in this group, but going into the October games, I think it was fair to say that we needed goals; we needed results; and we needed performances. For the first time, Kenny really needed to deliver.
The first 45 minutes in Baku put all the ghosts of Dublin to bed. 2-0 up away from home and the game looked up for the Azeris. While the home team dominated possession over the 90, it was because they had been blown away by Ireland and Callum Robinson so comprehensively in the first half. A third from Ogbene gave us our first 3 goal haul away from home since the play-off in Estonia in 2011, with the exception of Gibraltar and Faroe Islands. A decent night all round for everyone involved in Irish football. Apart of course from Didi Hamann, who carried on like he had a lot of money on a 4-0 win. We now had goalscorers, one of whom was a complete unknown at this level before summer 2021.
And then came Portugal. A night to remember, for all the right reasons. Almost everything about this game and this match experience felt like an Irish football community emerging from its cocoon. A full house to look forward to; pubs open and full of pre-match drinks, food, nonsense. A reunion; a return to a sense of normality. Town buzzin’. Away fans. Streams of people along the canal and the streets of Dublin 4 packed. It was a night off from Covid-19, maybe only in our heads and hearts, but let’s leave it for an evening and revel in all that we’d missed so much for so long. A proper football night in Dublin against one of the big boys, with the biggest star of all on display.
And display was all he did. Once again, we put it up to Portugal, matched them for shots, possession and passes. Pepe pepe’d up the night with his inevitable red card while Shane Duffy helped strangle Ronaldo, metaphorically and literally.
Despite there being nothing to play for, it felt like this was a huge match. A fact reflected by the biggest roar in years greeting the Matt Doherty goal, harshly ruled out for a foul on the keeper by Will Keane. The final whistle blew moments later, not before Ronaldo had one last go, but it was not to be for either team. A night that felt like concrete progress came to an end not with a win but with yet another creditable performance. It was a night where for the first time in a long time we felt like peers of teams like Portugal, and despite great results against Germany and a second-string Italy over the years, when did we last feel like we matched a top-seeded side on the pitch and deserved to win? France 2009?
The campaign wrapped up in Luxembourg where we strolled to our second 3-0 away win of the campaign. Ogbene and Robinson getting on the scoresheet again, the former ending a fine move involving a rejuvenated Hendrick and an emergent Jason Knight, who went on to set up the latter with another deft, mature and brilliant touch. This night was about much, much more than revenge. This was about putting down a marker and setting the bar for 2022.
No one is daft enough to think 2021 was a vintage year for Irish football. We’re not going to Qatar and there is no hindsight or revisionism of what our objective was at the start of the campaign that can justify taking 1 point from 2 home games against Luxembourg and Azerbaijan; or can excuse the campaign effectively ending before it really began.
Context, however, is everything, and in 2021 Stephen Kenny has changed the narrative around this team completely. We improved significantly over the year, of that there can be no doubt, and while many managers have “performed” better than Kenny in their first full campaigns, none have had to do the job Kenny has had to do.
No Irish manager in my lifetime ever had to rebuild a squad almost from scratch. No Irish manager in my lifetime could skip straight to reports from the 2nd and 3rd tier of the English game to track his players. And no manager has had to step into a financial wreck of a bailed out FAI which had completely ignored the changing football landscape for 15 years; scandalously blowing millions upon millions of our money on managers with zero interest in developing our game; our players; our clubs and our league. A decade and a half of Italian ignorance “In Ireland there is no league”. (A comment that should have seen him sacked, or at least forced to explain how it was lost in translation) A decade and a half of rancour – Martin O’Neill’s petty, weak and pathetic treatment of Tony O’Donoghue and Roy Keane’s staged faux macho bravado in dealing with the players. And a decade in bed with Denis O’Brien. All the while, the Delaney lad was tearing the association to ribbons while plastering his comically yokelled face all over the society rags – an embarrassment, a sporting vandal, a peasant and a bloody fool.
All of this matters, because all of this contributed to the state of the squad Kenny inherited. Tell me you’re not more excited by Jason Knight than Paul Green? By Ogbene more than Simon Cox? So many years failing to nurture Ireland ‘s football culture. So many years spent not producing the next Damien, Duff, Wes Hoolahan, Andy Reid, Roy Keane, Liam Brady or Paul McGrath!!! How many did we lose to the GAA? It’s no coincidence that Dublin completely dominated during the period that the FAI was being led by a donkey. How many Wes’s were out there, and even he was neglected by the dinosaurs in charge.
Throw Covid into the mix. A first home game with a full house over a year into his tenure. Players missing with close contacts, false-positives and the overbearing pressure on all to keep their distance in a team game where squads are not built on the training ground but in the hotel rooms, bars and restaurants, and yes even in today’s elite sporting culture, a few drinks on a night out. None of this could happen.
Stephen Kenny walked eyes wide open into Irish footballing carnage at a time when the entire world was in a state of chaos. He hasn’t done a good job, he has done a great job. He has earned a go at 2024, and he has earned the respect of the entire Irish football community. Now he, and his players have to deliver in 2022.
Happy New Year.
A Yard of Grass 