Some of the performances under Mick, particularly in his first campaign, were poor. The squad, due to age, lost a number of players from the previous campaign. I realise that generally this happens at the end of a campaign, that some players will call it a day, but this really was the end of an era. On top of this, there were several players that stayed on who were clearly past their best (Aldridge, Houghton, Townsend etc). I am not mentioning these players to criticise them for staying on, more to highlight that even at the age that these guys were at we still didn’t have anyone better coming through to take their place. Despite all this we still managed to get 2nd in the group and qualify for the play-offs going out by 1 goal over the two legs to Belgium.
In his next campaign we were very good at home beating Croatia and Yugoslavia but our away form cost us as we again lost out in the play-offs, this time on the away goals rule, having been only seconds away from topping the group outright. We all know how well his final campaign went. The point I’m really trying to make is that I think Mick lost a lot more in terms of players and experience than Brian Kerr did when he took over. Crucially Mick seemed to learn from his mistakes and made efforts to change things when he realised he was wrong i.e. when he initially took the job he tried 3 at the back but it didn’t work so, admittedly after a couple of shocking performances, he reverted to 4 at the back, after the Euro 2000 campaign he changed to playing 2 up front away from home and we went from carrying literally no threat to any half decent team away from home to being a dangerous attack minded team. Brian just did not seem to be able to get decent performances from the players and he didn’t seem to learn from his mistakes going back to his defensive tactics once Ireland took the lead. It gives me no pleasure in saying it but I don’t think that anyone can regard the performances of the team in the majority of competitive games under Brian Kerr as acceptable.
