Ireland v Hungary and Armenia - September 2025

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by elatedscum

There’s a guy I’ve known since i was about 4 years old who was a close family friend and friend of his late father - along with being a big Liverpool and Ireland fan (from the north). I can’t remember his exactly quote now but it was something along the lines of “I can’t believe how the FAI have ****ed this up and how he’s not playing for Ireland”. It was certainly his belief that from a very very young age, it was very clear that Conor was the brightest prospect to come out of the north since Norman Whiteside and it would have been very easy to have courted him and made him feel wanted at an early age while the IFA were doing the same thing. And if they had done that, he would have chosen to have played for us. I’ve never heard anything to contradict that.

---

Whats your stance on fast tracking, es? For example, Moorhouse. Hes with us. Hes close to good enough now (for us) by all accounts. I know capping him now wouldnt tie him fully (Rice rules still apply, right?) - but it would make him ours. Make him harder to lose. NI/Wales all move quickly and aggressively on these guys. We seem to kick tyres way too much.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Eirambler

I think people forget how far we have fallen. Our seeding was destroyed by a man (and his merry band of followers) pushing an agenda to play football a certain way at the expense of actually winning games and maintaining our position in European football. It will take years to rebuild our seeding back to where it was.

---

I think that's a little bit harsh - there's absolutely a large element of our fall that's down to having a squad that's been getting noticeably poorer year-on-year for the last 20 years or so.

Kenny absolutely had his faults, but when he had to pick League 1 players or kids who were a couple of years before being club-ready, let alone international-ready, then there's not much he can do about that. You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear (but then you don't have to make what Kenny made out of it either)

I remember in the early days of the Kenny reign saying he should call up McGeady when he had a little Indian summer at Sunderland - I think he had a bit of experience and creativity that we were really badly lacking at times. Maybe it's a black mark against Kenny that he never called McGeady up because he was so focussed on the younger players instead - but it's way more an indictment of our coaching here for decades that we'd gotten to a stage where a decent 35-year-old League One player was a genuine option for us because we had so few other options.

Our seeding has been destroyed by years of neglect at domestic level which has us scrounging around now for any eligible player who shows a turn of form but has been overlooked by other countries (Sammie, Cannon, Barry) - and that's no way to rebuild our seeding unfortunately.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kingdom

Without derailing another match thread with the pro-anti-Kenny contributions, do you afford Kenny any slack whatsoever? In the context of picking and continuing to pick the players who are both mainstays and seasoned internationals now.

---

I would cut him a little bit of slack to the extent that he wasn't dealt a good hand in terms of the quality of players we had available at the time.

However, in consciously deciding to pull apart the McCarthy 2.0 team (limited and all as it was) and bringing in his young guns who were nowhere near ready to perform at that level, he made about as bad a job of the situation as it was possible to make.

From 2020 to 2023 we needed a wise old hand to guide us through what was always going to be a rough patch and steadily bring through some new faces as and when the time was right. Instead we got Stephen Kenny. The players he brought through would mostly have come through anyway (except for the occasional mad-cap pick like CJ Hamilton). They'd probably have been better served being introduced more slowly by a McCarthy type of manager into a more experienced, defensively set up team. It would likely have protected our ranking and seeding to some extent also.

Incidentally I saw some quotes this week from the Ireland camp about how much the players were enjoying the "clear and concise" instructions they were being given by the current management. Rightly or wrongly I took it as a bit of a subtle dig at Kenny, clear and concise were certainly not words I would ever have associated with him.

Maybe it was for the best that his time in charge coincided with one of our weakest ever periods in terms of squad strength. Possibly that limited the damage he could do to some extent, as we weren't going to qualify for anything anyway. But he absolutely hammered our seeding to a level it didn't need to drop to and we're paying the price for it now despite having a better team on the park.

Just one edit to my above comments on reflection - I actually think we might have squeezed into Euro 2020+1 under McCarthy. His solid, pragmatic style might have gotten us past Slovakia and the north. We'd have done nothing of note at the finals though.

Stephen didn't know when to make a substitution or tactically change formation and didn't even know how to conduct an interview.

He was extremely good at finding ways to lose a football match.

Can we just move on and look forward to tomorrow

I'm excited, I'm nervous and really confident we can win this football game tomorrow

Fair play lads, that was as civil as could be expected.

***
I'm excited, very nervous but not confident because I think we're over-egging average performances in 1) end-of-season friendlies against a) a second-string African side, and b) a **** Luxembourg side; 2) dogged rather than good performances against an awful Bulgarian side; and 3) we're missing Parrott.

Of course I want a positive result, but depending on team selection, I can see the ball being moved through us quickly early in the game and if we don't get a good start and get our foot on the ball a bit, our heads could be spinning - without trying to over-egg how good Hungary are (they aren't that good).

Go Ireland!

I think its fair to say that even though Hallgrimsson has been in the job for a while now, we dont have a firm idea of what to expect from him and his teams. We have shown signs of improvement but we still have to see what it looks like in a game that actually matters. I dont think we have over egged the previous performances because we were pretty good at times and you can only judge on what we've seen.

Im cautiously optimistic