Dion Fanning: Stephen Kenny is a manager with notions undone by painful reality
I took my son to his first Ireland game, a World Cup qualifier against Azerbaijan.
It was the first time Ireland had played in front of a crowd at the Aviva since November 2019 and, even though the stadium was only at 50 per cent capacity, it was a significant moment.
This new Ireland team was exposed to the public for the first time and the encounter was uplifting.
The game should have felt like a disappointment. Ireland needed a late goal to take a point. This was not enough.
It was, everyone agreed, a result that effectively brought an end to Ireland’s hopes of qualifying for the World Cup.
There had been an heroic loss in Portugal a few days beforehand and back then we could look upon heroic defeats as a sign of progress, not just an indication that Ireland could lose in many different ways.
That moral victory hadn’t been the problem. Defeats in the opening two games of the qualifiers, bravely against Serbia, hopelessly at home to Luxembourg, had done that.
After all that, Ireland needed to win against Azerbaijan and they failed. But yet, on a lovely September afternoon, it didn’t feel like a failure, it felt hopeful. It might simply have been that I was there with my son and his joy concealed the truth from me.
But all around me people appeared to feel the same. They were joyous too. We were all hopeful, we were all happy. Were we all deluded?
Maybe it was simply that we were emerging from lockdown or maybe it was the promise that Stephen Kenny was bringing to the side. Or maybe it was a combination of the two.
The boredom of lockdown was one thing; the boredom of Mick McCarthy’s Ireland playing Gibraltar was something else.
Kenny was promising change and we needed that. So we believed in this future that seemed so
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