Paul Fennessy

IN THE END, the pre-match optimism was deeply misguided.

Prior to the game, there was plenty of talk about it being a “must-win” match for Ireland.

Yet by the conclusion, a draw would have felt like a minor miracle, such was the stark superiority of Greece.

Per the official Uefa statistics, the hosts had 20 attempts to Ireland’s six, and 32 attacks compared to 17 for the visitors.

The visitors actually edged possession with 51% according to the BBC and completed more passes (371 to 366), but there is no doubt Gus Poyet’s side were far more efficient and inventive in their use of the ball.

The manner of the performance, as much as the result, was extremely worrying from an Irish perspective, as the visitors struggled to create a serious chance of note in the second half particularly, allowing Greece to see the game out with relative ease.

Even the most optimistic Irish fan will now struggle to argue that automatic qualification via the group is a remote possibility.

Already, the Boys in Green trail leaders France by nine points and Greece by six. The table will look slightly better on Monday night provided Kenny’s side can get past group minnows Gibraltar as expected.

However, Friday’s loss was the latest in a succession of disappointing results that have unfortunately become all too commonplace for Ireland in recent years.

The morale-boosting 3-0 Nations League win over Scotland, almost a year ago to the day, was easily the best result and performance of the Kenny era. Nonetheless, it is looking increasingly like an anomaly, as there has been nothing remotely comparable before or since.

Of the 23 competitive matches Kenny has presided over, Ireland have won four, drawn seven and lost 12. Aside from the Scots, the other victories were against Luxembourg, Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Inevitably, many people will point to Kenny and say he is “out of his depth,” as Damien Delaney did on Virgin Media last night.

But such accusations are far too simplistic a conclusion to draw from this dire state of affairs.

In reality, a good manager can make his team perhaps 5% better and a bad coach leaves their side marginally worse off.

This is particularly true of international football, where transfers (barring those of the Declan-Rice-to-England variety) are non-existent and tactics are less important than club football, as managers invariably have so little time to work with players.

It’s worth asking, for example, did France reach back-to-back World Cup finals primarily because Didier Deschamps is a genius? Have England become an international powerhouse due largely to the decision to install Gareth Southgate as manager? Was the appointment of Lionel Scaloni the main reason why Argentina won the World Cup last year?

All these individuals mentioned are good coaches, but really, the key reason for their success is players like Kylian Mbappe, Harry Kane and Lionel Messi.

Footballers are usually given most of the credit when a team is doing well, while managers consistently bear the brunt of the criticism when the opposite is the case.

Kenny has certainly made mistakes as Ireland manager, and most of the bold selection calls last night — Will Smallbone, Adam Idah, Callum O’Dowda — didn’t really work out. Additionally, the Greeks all too easily exposed the three-at-the-back system with a mixture of their wide attackers and full-backs wreaking havoc and being afforded far too much space to create overloads on the flanks.

And if Ireland do not qualify for the Euros ultimately, even the former Dundalk coach’s most ardent defenders will find it difficult to make a convincing case for keeping him around.

No Irish manager in history has been part of three successive qualification failures and kept their job — albeit, there is a significant caveat with Kenny in that he was only in charge for one match of the Euro 2020 qualifying campaign.

But anyone who believes the manager is the main source of Ireland’s problems, or that appointing a successor would lead to a sudden, dramatic improvement, has clearly been living under a rock for a lengthy period.

Ireland’s players do not deserve to be denigrated, as they are a professional, hardworking group of people who invariably conduct themselves impeccably on and off the field.

However, not for the first time, their limitations were exposed in Athens — tactically and technically, the Boys in Green were second best for almost the entirety of the 90 minutes.

An alarmingly high volume of the squad have gone six weeks or more without competitive football, either because they play in the Championship, which ended early, or they are not deemed good enough to play regular football for the team they represent at club level. 

Evan Ferguson and arguably a handful of others have the potential to be top-class players, but these up-and-coming individuals are still very young and thereby raw and prone to inconsistency.

Beyond that, there is a dearth of true quality meaning Ireland can no longer expect to regularly qualify for tournaments as was briefly the case during the golden era that Jack Charlton oversaw.

Anyone wondering for reasons behind the team’s gradual descent should not look to Kenny as the scapegoat, nor should they reserve the majority of their scorn for the honest group of players toiling away at the end of an especially exhausting, World-Cup-interrupted season.

For genuine insight into why things have gotten so grim, why Liam Brady was moved to declare after the Greek setback that “this is the worst group of players that any manager has had in my lifetime,” one need only turn to the findings of the FAI’s Facility Investment Vision and Strategy report released earlier this month.

Irish football has been badly mismanaged at the top level for many years.

Managers like Giovanni Trapattoni and Martin O’Neill were paid millions, while the game at large in this country was being severely neglected.

To a degree, their relative success, qualifying Ireland for back-to-back Euros, papered over the cracks.

Despite the best efforts of many skilled, dedicated and well-intentioned individuals, grassroots football has suffered hugely. The problem encompasses the well-documented lack of government support compared to other sports, the inadequacy of the facilities throughout the country, the disconcertingly few full-time coaches and the inability to compete with the industries elsewhere, not to mention the limited contact hours even the best young footballers can devote to the game, all pertinent factors that have resulted in a domino effect.

The situation has improved to a degree, with clearer pathways for young players from underage to League of Ireland level, but not to the extent that it has had a transformative effect.

As other countries have ploughed huge resources into the sport over the years, Ireland have effectively stood still, exacerbated by the FAI’s substantial financial issues, and so it has naturally been a case of diminishing returns at international level.

Even O’Neill’s achievement in reaching the Euros in 2016 was aided by the expanded 24-team format, whereas Ireland were one of just eight teams competing under Charlton in 1988.

So in many respects, it has never been easier to qualify for a major tournament, yet Ireland look further away than with each passing year.

As my colleague Gavin Cooney pointed out recently: “Ireland’s top professional clubs average between zero and one full-time coach in their academies, whereas Greece have between five and seven, which is the average across all of Europe. Only Luxembourg, Andorra, and Northern Ireland are ranked as low as us on this table.”

Ireland have fallen increasingly behind their rivals at international level due to how poorly their footballers have been served compared to the vast majority of youngsters in Europe.

Moreover, the fact that the FAI have cited a figure of €863 million as part of their facilities plan conveys the sheer scale of the problem at present.

These are the limitations Kenny and others have to work with and anticipating that a simple change of manager will solve the multiple complex challenges facing Irish football is at best fanciful and at worst delusional.

In reality, it is the Irish footballing system, rather than Kenny, that is out of its depth when trying to seriously compete with other top European footballing nations.