Goalless can be a world removed from soulless. Big Republic of Ireland football nights are divided into two distinct pageants.
The first takes place in the actual theatre, the glass bowl of the new Lansdowne Road. Thursday night marked a long-awaited return to the gorgeous atmosphere that falls over the streets around Lansdowne in the two hours before kick-off. The city sky is turning, the rush-hour traffic thickens along the canals and the fans who have driven from across the country are fumbling in front of parking meters along the leafy lamp-lit boulevards of Wellington and Raglan roads. The merch’ men shout their wares and there’s a quickening of anticipation as you get closer to kick off.
Youngsters gathered outside the Portuguese team hotel around tea-time, hoping for a glimpse of genuine superstardom. The Aviva blazes like a torch. The beer sellers get busy. At some point, to the sound of Sirius, the old Chicago Bulls theme tune, the Ireland team is announced on the loudspeakers and the place feels brilliant and alive. That’s the in-house event.
Brady is not alone in a cabal of esteemed former Ireland players who remain sceptical about whether Kenny is 'up to' the task of managing Ireland
But across the country, the same theatre is played out on television. Sport alone has the power to return audiences to the analogue age: everyone gathers in front of the television set at the same time and in Ireland, the vast majority watch Ireland play on RTÉ television.
It is fair to say that Montrose might never fully recapture the strange alchemy and tension of the years when Bill O’Herlihy moderated the view points of Eamon Dunphy, John Giles and Liam Brady. For vital games, their critiques felt not so much as pundit’s views as state-of-the-nation addresses. Dunphy, in particular, used words like ‘soul’ and ‘honesty’ and sounded like he meant them. It was the perfect fusion of commanding performers and a captive national audience, stunned that the lachrymose football team was sweeping world stages.
RTÉ still provides excellent coverage. On Thursday night, the analysts were Richie Sadlier, generally provocative and scrupulously fair along with Brady, the survivor from the holy triumvirate. After watching Ireland draw 0-0 with a Portugal team shorn of several regular starters - a "B team" - Brady was sparing in his praise and suggested the FAI shouldn't rush to offer Stephen Kenny a new contract: that the Ireland manager still had not fully convinced.
Three wins in nineteen games, eight defeats, gone from the World Cup qualifying group almost as soon as it began: the results were hardly glittering on paper.
And this is true. Maybe Brady has a duty to point this out: the voice of caution in a happy room. Brady is not alone in a cabal of esteemed former Ireland players who remain sceptical about whether Kenny is ‘up to’ the task of managing Ireland. As the night fell, the twitterati took to the platform to condemn Brady’s perspective, which they saw as joyless and curmudgeonly. Because those who had been at the stadium had left feeling exhilarated. They had witnessed a callow Irish side persistently trying to pass their way through Portugal - B selection or not - showing a healthy disrespect to the aura of Cristiano Ronaldo, comfortably one of the best footballers in the history of the game, frustrate the veteran defender Pepe to the point where he was red carded and finally almost steal the night with a Matt Doherty goal which was disallowed by a referee’s decision that was questionable at best. It felt like a good night out.
There is a peculiar clash of cultures at the heart of this divide. Liam Brady is one of the best footballers Ireland has produced: a creative wizard, a sun-god at Arsenal and lauded in Italy when Serie A was, literally, in a different league. It seems ironic that Brady, of all people, should have reservations about a manager who from the word go has set about coaching his Ireland team to play football that is expansive and controlled and even, at times, flamboyant.
Kenny speaks of his players with nothing but ardent praise. Some, like Jeff Hendrick at Newcastle, are struggling to get minutes with their club. But Hendrick has looked like a player reborn under Kenny. The host of starlets to whom he has entrusted his future - Gavin Bazunu, Josh Cullen, Adam Idah, Andrew Omobamadele - have flourished. Veterans like Shane Duffy and McClean have never sounded happier.
The mood in the stadium was mischievous, hopeful and completely with the efforts of the team
It flies in the face of the grim, cold statistics which make career football men like Brady anxious. But that is surely because Kenny has been trying to teach a dressing room instructed to be austere and parsimonious that it is okay to go out and spend and enjoy life on the field. Flourish! Show your talents! This message is radically different from the coded communication that dates back to Big Jack through to the Trapattoni era and even under Martin O’Neill and Mick McCarthy: the lads are limited but I’m wringing the most out of them.
Only Brian Kerr fully backed his teams to play. It nearly paid off but in the end he got wrapped on the knuckles. That dramatic shift in approach takes time. It is just over a year since Enda Stevens bemoaned Ireland taking unnecessary risks after a 1-0 defeat to Finland. On Thursday night, Ireland ostensibly took risks with every possession as they backed themselves to think and pass their way through the rushing Portuguese press. Sometimes they couldn’t do it - perhaps substantiating the argument that Ireland simply do not have the ‘quality’ to match Kenny’s ambitious vision. But on other times, as with Robinson’s corner won off a quick throw or Ogbene’s header after a counter-attack that started with a thumping Matt Doherty challenge on Ronaldo, they were thrilling and unpredictable and great fun to watch.
“Yeah, I think everyone has kind of clicked - when to go long, when to go short,” Stevens said on Thursday night of the evolution of the team over the past year.
“In the Finland game we were just naive. We weren’t really set up or ready to play short and we conceded a goal from that. Whereas now we are set to play short, to go long, we know what is coming next. And that’s the difference.”
There were dangerous moments. Yes, Ronaldo ghosted into the Irish penalty area and might easily have destroyed the Irish effort with one of his invincible headers 67 minutes in. But he has been doing that in front of two generations of football lovers, against the most expensive and gilded sides in the world. He might have ruined Ireland’s night again but for a 95th minute save from Bazunu, fast approaching cult-hero status. But in the end, Portugal didn’t beat Ireland. And it didn’t feel like one of those You’ll-Never-Beat-the-Irish nights - a national chant that is, at heart, about frustrating classier opponents. It felt more ambitious than that. The mood in the stadium was mischievous, hopeful and completely with the efforts of the team.
“It wasn’t ecstatic,” Shane Duffy noted of the atmosphere in the Ireland dressing room afterwards.
“The music wasn’t blaring. Shows how far we have come. Played against a really good team and kept them to limited chances.”
The shame is that the World Cup campaign is ending this weekend just when it seems as though Kenny’s era is truly beginning. The stop-start nature of international management means he must now hope they can take up where they left off. Kenny knows the obligation to qualify for Euro 2024 will be absolute. That has always been the task of Republic of Ireland managers: to deliver the carnival that accompanies just being there at big international tournaments. To. Get. There.
The national team is the showpiece and that's what he has been trying to make everyone see. It's not just about the next win anymore: Ireland has tried that for long enough
Over the past 14 months, Kenny has quietly and persistently asked Ireland’s football public to think about it differently: to imagine a national team playing the world game in a way that is more than mere combative, reductive spoiling with a big ‘un up front’: to engage and thrill the many tens of thousands of football purists who go and see the team play and to dare to believe that sometimes the game is bigger than the result.
Now, the results have started to come too. But even that is not the point. This is still very early in the Kenny experiment. If it goes well, it could transform the way football children like Addison Whelan, who dodged security for her moment with Ronaldo, interpret what it means to play for Ireland. It is about the future. Kenny hasn’t elaborated on this but given his long brilliant career in domestic football, his dream surely revolves around a radical overhaul and improvement of football coaching at all levels in this country.
The national team is the showpiece and that’s what he has been trying to make everyone see. It’s not just about the next win anymore: Ireland has tried that for long enough. The thrill of just being there has worn off. No, the promise of Thursday evening is that if Stephen Kenny’s vision for the Ireland football team catches fire, then someday this country might again produce a footballer as gifted and breathtaking as Liam Brady.
