Dion Fanning: Stephen Kenny can’t save Irish football, nobody can
When Stephen Kenny was announced in November 2018 as the man who would lead the Irish national team from the start of the 2020-21 season, the arrangement spoke to the dysfunction at the FAI.
Mick McCarthy was back as manager, the football man who would command respect in the dressing room. But his successor was also named: Stephen Kenny, a progressive and enlightened voice who would take over from McCarthy after the 2020 European Championships.
This was change, uncomfortable as that might be for those who traded on the idea that a managerial change was all it took to make a profound difference.
Within a few months, the FAI was in freefall, a crash summed up by a Saturday afternoon in Gibraltar when John Delaney stepped aside as chief executive, but stepped into the newly imagined role of Executive Vice President.
It was another old-school move from the FAI, but they no longer had any legitimacy as the revelations continued and the strokes no longer paid off.
The events were stunning and, as is so often the case in Irish football, they took attention away from what was happening on the field.
In this case what was happening on the field wasn’t much at all, a disappointing 1-0 win over Gibraltar.
“We can only gain momentum by winning a game and I would have taken a 1-0 win any time,” McCarthy said afterwards. "I don't want that. I want us to score more goals and play better, but it's three points and we move on."
McCarthy’s Ireland never really did move on and the fears expressed when the two appointments were announced that Ireland might have to lose a manager who had just won the European Championships soon entered the bracket of unnecessary fantasy.
There were no European Championships at all in 2020, so Kenny took over
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