Voices
On Sunday night, Virgin are broadcasting the outstanding documentary Finding Jack Charlton.
It could understandably lead to another outpouring of nostalgia, as well as that curious sensation we all experience now whenever we see alien footage of human beings gathered together in close proximity.
Some will be unable to resist comparisons to Irish football today, especially if Ireland fail to beat Luxembourg on Saturday evening.
Stephen Kenny watched his team score their first goal in seven games on Wednesday night so he will be hopeful that Ireland can get their first victory since he took over this weekend.
If Ireland win maybe Kenny will take another step towards acceptance from his critics who make the reasonable point that a manager should be judged on results.
Charlton could be said to have done more to advance the results-based tradition in Irish football than any other figure. The manner in which he did so might have shocked to the close-knit football community in Ireland who had, until that time, assumed there was only one way of doing things.
Results, too, weren’t always part of that tradition. Results were something exotic, a concept beyond the control of the Irish team, like turbulence on the flight to the match or a bad pint.
The old tradition had always been accompanied by a certain fatalism. Things didn’t go Ireland’s way, there were injustices, but there was nothing to be done about that, that was the world order with Ireland on the receiving end.
Occasionally we were angered by the most egregious mistakes, but they were our lot until Charlton came along.
Kenny, it is safe to say, follows in the original Irish footballing tradition. He comes from the League of Ireland, he believes in a certain way of football and, unfortunately, so far, his time has been accompanied by the kind of bad luck which is reminiscent of this old era too.
Ireland have lost players to covid and to covid regulations while they have rarely caught a break during games either.
As Ireland complained about the penalty which should have been theirs last Wednesday when Aaron Connolly was brought down by Stefan Mitrovic, it felt as if the moral victory was back.
The accompanying sounds to the 3-2 defeat were also worryingly reminiscent of the commentary that surrounds the Irish rugby team during one of their regular and even more glorious failures.
For periods in both halves on Wednesday, Ireland played excellently. The opening goal was superb and there were passages of play which were as exciting as anything witnessed by an Ireland team in years.
Ireland faded in the second half and as they did, some of the problems for Kenny were underlined. 21-year-old Connolly left the field with cramp after an hour. Connolly was said to be missing the game against Luxembourg on Friday morning, before Stephen Kenny said he hadn’t been ruled out definitively, a stance undermined by pictures Connolly posted on Instagram from Brighton beach. But his withdrawal against Serbia indicated one of the consequences of not having players who play regularly or don’t have a lot demanded of them from clubs.
Ireland are vulnerable while they try to manage a squad of brittleness and it is Kenny who is now trying to do that while advancing a better way of playing.
His time in charge has been relentless but also, thanks to the pandemic, curiously detached.
Yet he remains the best candidate now as he was when it was announced in 2018 that he would take over from Mick McCarthy following the European Championships.
There was a time when people were sceptical about the succession plan as it was laid out by the FAI under John Delaney in 2018.
McCarthy was going to manager Ireland until the European Championships and then, having led Ireland to a tournament which was due to take place partly in Ireland, he would make way for Kenny.
Kenny had fought hard for this deal. It wasn’t aspirational, it was binding.
And there were those who worried if it was too binding, if a little give wasn’t needed to respond to potential events?
What if Mick McCarthy went and won the European Championships, what would the country do then with this embarrassing succession plan?
Would McCarthy have to make way? This wouldn’t be fair they said but as it turned out the FAI had bigger problems.
Some of these people may now be commenting that Stephen Kenny is getting an easy ride, protected as he is in their eyes by some kind of perverse football hipsterism which views Kenny as a poster boy for a philosophy.
Or it may be that those who back Kenny are not the romantics, but pragmatists and those who want action are living in a fantasy land.
Under McCarthy, Ireland beat Georgia, Gibraltar and New Zealand and failed to qualify automatically for the European Championships. They reached the play off for the Euros thanks to a convoluted process which saw their position at the bottom of the Nations League – which had taken place before McCarthy took over – earn Ireland a play-off game. Man hands on misery to man, as the poet said. Kenny’s Ireland lost that play-off on penalties.
So this isn’t David Moyes taking over from Alex Ferguson and being overwhelmed by the enormity of it all.
It is not simply that there are so few plausible alternatives to Kenny, although this is also true.
It is that the reality, as it existed before he took over, was more dismal which is saying something given that Ireland have yet to win a game and are playing every match in pandemic conditions.
Ireland haven’t qualified for a World Cup since 2002. They have only come close once, in 2009 when Thierry Henry’s handball contributed to Ireland’s defeat in a play-off.
On that night, Ireland had a moral victory in keeping with one of the finest traditions.
But World Cup qualification is something Ireland can dream about, rather than demand. This is a campaign for a manager to be given the opportunity to show there is another way.
This is not to demand that a manager needs time for time’s sake. It is an understanding of the world Ireland currently inhabit and the reality any manager of this side would be unable to escape right now.
