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Stephen Kenny has set himself what he described as “lofty” ambition for his time in charge of the Ireland national team.
He wants to divert Ireland from its long-standing adherence to the ‘British way’ of play just two months after the death of the man who did more than anyone to get us hooked on the British way of play.
Eamon Dunphy always maintained that the traditional Irish style was based on tricky players and skilled wingers. It was always, he said, different from the more active and physical English approach.
If we had a glitch back then, and we should have, it was because of the preponderance of little guys on the team. Joe Haverty, the skilled Arsenal winger, was the example of the archetypal Irish footballer of the 1950s and 1960s.
No one under 40 can really remember this. Jack Charlton arrived in 1986 and immediately introduced an English style of play, in keeping with his vision of the game to be played. The POMO (Position of Maximum Opportunity) approach, based on the rather flawed work of amateur statistician Charles Reep, was adopted wholesale.
On Rocky Road, Dunphy detailed a famous showdown between Liam Tuohy, then the under-21 boss and the epitome of a pre-Charlton soccer player, and Charlton midway through an England youth team game in Yorkshire.
Ireland, according to Dunphy, was “a small team playing fair football” and found themselves 2-0 down at half-time.
Charlton was horrified by the spectacle of the midfielder coming up short to pick up the ball from the winger and burst into the locker room at half-time, arrogantly ignoring the presence of the current U21 manager, and demanded that they stop this. craic at the same time.
Tuohy was completely dismayed and tendered his resignation upon returning to Dublin. Maurice Setters was installed as U21 manager.
With Ireland successfully hitting the world stage for the first time with Charlton, the long ball became our signature style. It would probably be news to the rest of the world, as well as the Irish under 35, that Ireland was once associated with a different style of play.
The day after Ireland’s first World Cup game against England in Sardinia, the Corriere dello Sport headline said “No to football please, we are British.”
Today’s Irish citizens of Twitter lose the rag once every fortnight every time some silly (or devilishly mischievous) British broadcaster misidentifies one of our Oscar nominees or shortlisted Booker Prize authors as British.
But we could hardly argue too much with the verdict of the Italian press in June 1990.
Ireland has flirted with more ambitious and trendy approaches in the meantime, especially around the turn of the century, but the Charlton style has made a big mark, and has certainly returned to being the predominant style since Giovanni Trapattoni was appointed technical director. in 2008.
Stephen Kenny would likely have his differences with Gilesy and Dunphy, mostly due to their dismissive attitude towards what Eamo used to gleefully label the ‘League of Chickens’.
But they all belong to that purist school of soccer men who still cringe when a foreign coach in glasses is asked what kind of challenge his team can expect from the Irish.
They usually respond in a way that suggests they are preparing to face 11 Terry Butchers. If we can survive a few corners and as long as our goalkeeper isn’t maimed by the opposing central half, we should be fine, kind of thing.
Ireland has had five coaches since Jack Charlton (Mick McCarthy got two passes) and has never strayed this far from the “British” style.
Given his closeness to Jack Charlton, and the widespread perception that he owed his 57 caps to Jack’s bias towards the uncomplicated media, McCarthy’s identification as a manager with a more engaging style of play feels somewhat incongruous.
On the day he was appointed, Peter Byrne wrote in the Irish times that at Millwall, where he was coach from 1992 to 1996, McCarthy had fostered “an attractive brand of soccer, astonishing many of his critics who thought he would focus on the long ball game.”
Although McCarthy never exactly relinquished the ‘son of Jack’ label, he insisted before his first game in charge, a friendly against Russia in February 1996, that he would follow a different path.
“The Irish spirit has to stay,” he told reporters before the game. “But I want us to play a more subtle game. The ball won’t just be thrown to the forwards. We’re going to put the ball down and try to play football. And right away … Anyone who thinks I’m going to be the next Jack Charlton should to know that it’s silly. I won’t copy anyone. “
There were major initial problems. McCarthy had to bleed a slew of young players after Charlton’s debacle last season and the team went seven games without a win. And they may not have made the France 98 play-offs if they had been placed in a less forgiving group.
But it was with McCarthy that Ireland came closest to marrying a relatively attractive style of play with success.
Ireland’s qualification for the 2002 World Cup in a group that includes Portugal and the Netherlands, at the latter’s expense, remains one of our best achievements in qualifying.
“It was a time when Dutch football really thought it was the biggest on the planet, the smartest, the most attacking, the most morally correct,” Dutch author Simon Kuper told this writer in 2016, emphasizing the scale of the achievements of Ireland.
Nor would one want to exaggerate the case. When necessary, the ‘ball out’ until Niall Quinn continued to be a key weapon in the armory, as seen in Ibaraki and elsewhere.
He was succeeded by Brian Kerr, appointed amid much public goodwill in early 2003.
Kerr had achieved great success with youth teams, winning the U16 and U18 European Championships in 1998.
He had also been Liam Tuohy’s assistant coach in the infamous afternoon of 1986 and thus was representative of that branch of footballers frozen during the Charlton era.
It was assumed that Kerr would follow the progressive mindset advocated by the anti-Charlton wing of Irish football, but in interviews the new coach emphasized that he would be happy to mix it up when necessary.
Stylistically, Ireland played along the same lines as McCarthy had, but Kerr was criticized for his habit of switching to a defensive formation once in a winning position.
This proved costly in home and away matches against Israel in the 2006 campaign, particularly at Lansdowne Road, where Ireland gave up a two-goal lead and inexplicably failed to score three points.
The appointment of Steve Staunton, with aging statesman Bobby Robson installed as his guardian and mentor, was deeply associated with new CEO John Delaney.
Delaney had controversially fired Brian Kerr after his first full season and brought Staunton out of obscurity as a coach at Walsall, where, according to the jokes, his main responsibility was to place the traffic cones in training.
There were whispers, right or wrong, that players were reluctant to have Kerr stuff their heads with too many tactical instructions, and arch-sentimentalist Delaney spoke of how he wanted Ireland to go back to the old ‘whip it’ squad.
Ireland certainly played like they were free from any tactical instruction during the Staunton era, most notoriously at the Cyprus game in October 2006.
Although he resorted to the tactic of the four-year plan, he came out of his misery after two.
Giovanni Trapattoni considered that his initial task was to correct this tactical clumsiness, which he did with his fixation on “small details” and his obsessive practice of arranging pieces.
While it was fashionable to poke fun at Big Jack’s work in the early 1990s, Trap immediately identified him as the man he wanted to emulate.
Trapattoni was the most successful coach in Serie A history, but his heyday was in the 1980s and his time at the helm of the Italian team from 2000-04 was a notorious failure.
He represented the Italian business stereotype in its most extreme incarnation.
Once again, Ireland became little fun to play with and extremely difficult to beat. They only lost two qualifying games in four years and it was a record eight games without conceding a goal in mid-2011.
However, with the aging of key players like Keane and Duff, the team’s technical ability seemed to diminish as time went on.
Under Martin O’Neill, Ireland has traditionally been more “British” than at any time since the Charlton era, ironically at a time when England was moving away from this approach.
O’Neill promised a more optimistic approach after the excruciatingly sterile conclusion of the Trapattoni regime.
Generally speaking, this was met and a number of encouraging results (victories over Germany, Bosnia, Italy and Austria) were achieved in 2015 and 2016.
At times, it was a bit like management through an after-dinner speech
Nonetheless, the overall style of the team remained crude and there was considerable bewilderment surrounding the coach’s remarkably laissez-faire approach, which reportedly seemed to consist of telling players the starting eleven an hour before kick-off and letting them go. solve the problem. rest.
Through it all, there wasn’t a problem so thorny that it couldn’t be answered with an anecdote from Brian Clough. At times, it was a bit like management through an after-dinner speech.
Stephen Kenny boldly promises a break with the past. After all, this is a man who has spoken before about how little he enjoyed the Charlton era.
In an interview with Emmet Malone of the Irish Times in late 2018 that could have served as an argument for the main job, the manager of Dundalk spoke about mixing the “best virtues of the Irish sides: honesty, work pace and passion that has been shown over the years, but introducing a more European style of play, a more fluid and expansive form. “
Optimistically, he is not talking about four-year plans and admits that he is “impatient” to achieve his goals. With one high profile exception, his Irish League record indicates that this is a manager used to more or less instant success.
We will have the first indication of how the next week will go.
Follow Bulgaria v Republic of Ireland this Thursday via our live blog on RTÉ.ie and the RTÉ News app or listen to live commentary on RTÉ 2FM’s Game On.
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