Portugal V Republic of Ireland - Wednesday, 1st Sep 2021 - 2022 World Cup Qualifier

[TonyD]

Can someone please provide a translation of what Kenny was saying…. He’s taken his usual gibberish to a new level

Oh shut up. Sick of listening to this tripe.

[Neish]

Did Kenny stumble upon or forced into his best formation? Still not sure if he's learning or not, and his subs were very poor.

Lads looking for hope and what not used possession as a stick to defend Kenny with and to beat those opposed to the game plan and implementation we'd seen at the start of his reign. We had 30% possession backs to the wall stuff for most of the second half. Our best bet of winning was when we broke and countered them. The moral victory and self pity and loathing has occured many times under other managers in the past, we lost 2-1 defended resolutely for 35 plus mins of the end of the game, we've seen it before.

That being said some of the young lads looked good.

And it was so different under, McCarthy, O'Neil, Trapattoni etc?

[Bielsa´s irish]

Hard to blame the man for the timing of the subs and then also the subs for the mistakes leading to the goals....

Thought the team were generally fantastic. We are just lacking a bit of quality higher up the field. We had chances to go 2 up, both wasted by Connolly who also probably could have had two penos if he hadn't dived early on. I wonder would Robinson have made a difference because we put together some nice moves and there was clearly a plan to hurt them.

Ref was a joke. He had a narrative in mind and clearly wanted to be there for Ronaldo's big day.

Our back 5 is something to build on though. Some of the blocks and clearances were heroic as was the general application. Thought Omobamidele looked good when he came on. If you lose to a couple of Ronaldo headers you aren't alone in world football. A shame we didn't have better to spring from the bench but that's where we are.

i want all your sport newspapers to talk about it, all the news how the ref was not a joke but malevolent predemitated and purposeful i havent seen in my life a game were the neutral ref wanted to score a goal for a team like today

[The Fly]

That was the best Irish performance I've seen in a long long time.

[zero]

I said it was a good performance. It's still 3 losses on the spin. how many is too many? 10? 20? No upper limit I suspect.

[paul_oshea]

Hard to blame the man for the timing of the subs and then also the subs for the mistakes leading to the goals....

Thought the team were generally fantastic. We are just lacking a bit of quality higher up the field. We had chances to go 2 up, both wasted by Connolly who also probably could have had two penos if he hadn't dived early on. I wonder would Robinson have made a difference because we put together some nice moves and there was clearly a plan to hurt them.

Ref was a joke. He had a narrative in mind and clearly wanted to be there for Ronaldo's big day.

Our back 5 is something to build on though. Some of the blocks and clearances were heroic as was the general application. Thought Omobamidele looked good when he came on. If you lose to a couple of Ronaldo headers you aren't alone in world football. A shame we didn't have better to spring from the bench but that's where we are.

Ciaran Clark would have been a great option to just sit in the last few minutes. We were giving more and more space around the middle of the box as lads tired and didn't pick up players. Would have been perfect to have there for the last ten minutes. Still though all the players were never sold easy and silly dummy's and McClean was straight away for their first goal.

[Bielsa´s irish]

if you irish cant see the robbery of today with an honest performance ,,,,when ? they have to ink it in the newspapers and how this fiasco was cooked just with the first incident, the penalty .... then the yellow to connolly then the yellow on doherty then restricting the irish etc then the extra minutes not a yellow on Palinha when hacked connolly ...strange the penalty on connolly twice twice .... the second was a penalty

[Diggs246]

We now know our formation. Three at the back with Coleman and Doherty as the wing backs
That is a big plus for me

[Calcio Jack]

Oh shut up. Sick of listening to this tripe.

Eh you know… he was were eh you know ,talking , eh , sometimes gibberish , you know

[TonyD]

if you irish cant see the robbery of today with an honest performance ,,,,when ? they have to ink it in the newspapers and how this fiasco was cooked just with the first incident, the penalty .... then the yellow to connolly then the yellow on doherty then restricting the irish etc then the extra minutes not a yellow on Palinha when hacked connolly ...strange the penalty on connolly twice twice .... the second was a penalty

If you were around in the 70’s and early 80’s you’d have seen much worse. I remember blatant robbery in Paris, Sofia and Brussels in particular, made tonight’s ref look fair and balanced.

[brine3]

We now know our formation. Three at the back with Coleman and Doherty as the wing backs
That is a big plus for me

That should have been the formation since five years ago, but it seems a manager had finally stumbled into it

[geysir]

That's my fear. They'll be lower than ever in that dressing room, and now people are fully expecting six points from the next two games.

That's about the first performance in the Kenny era that one can see that there is a genuine team in the making. Firstly an outstanding prospect in Bazunu, a solid experienced defense with albeit some dubious attempts to play out from the back, a midfielder in Cullen (world class by our standards), a real man up front in Idah, and a solid sense of a cohesive collective team ethic.

[brine3]

If you were around in the 70’s and early 80’s you’d have seen much worse. I remember blatant robbery in Paris, Sofia and Brussels in particular, made tonight’s ref look fair and balanced.

Oh yeah we'd have been at Spain 82 if there was any sense of fairness at all. Jack happened to come in when football cleaned itself up a bit.

[Insidetherock]

Excellent performance.. deserved at least a point

But I keep saying.. focus on Germany in 24

Build, build, build.. blood, blood, blood

Mc Clean is now a busted flush, leave him out from here on in.. Connolly will come good, Udah was brilliant, Omabomidele gives us a new option, Cullen is growing into the team, Hendrick growing out.

We've 3 years and another 16-18 games before the qualifiers for 2024.. use them well

[seanfhear]

Oh yeah we'd have been at Spain 82 if there was any sense of fairness at all. Jack happened to come in when football cleaned itself up a bit.

Maybe it helped a bit having someone of Jack Charlton’s standing in the game being able to call out dodgy stuff if it happened !

[mark12345]

Hard to blame the man for the timing of the subs and then also the subs for the mistakes leading to the goals....

Thought the team were generally fantastic. We are just lacking a bit of quality higher up the field. We had chances to go 2 up, both wasted by Connolly who also probably could have had two penos if he hadn't dived early on. I wonder would Robinson have made a difference because we put together some nice moves and there was clearly a plan to hurt them.

Ref was a joke. He had a narrative in mind and clearly wanted to be there for Ronaldo's big day.

Our back 5 is something to build on though. Some of the blocks and clearances were heroic as was the general application. Thought Omobamidele looked good when he came on. If you lose to a couple of Ronaldo headers you aren't alone in world football. A shame we didn't have better to spring from the bench but that's where we are.

Agree with most if not all of this. Just a couple of general observations - hard not to blame our defenders for allowing Ronaldo a free header at goal not once, but twice. He never should have been allowed the freedom to net the winner. And one more thing - is there anyone on here who still believes Jeff Hendrick is worth a place in the Irish squad, let alone the starting eleven (my guess is there's not many, if any at all - which in itself is an indictment on SK's team selection). Anyways, it was a far far better performance from the lads than we all expected. Will mean nothing however if we don't build on it.

[da bishop]

There is no point people coming on here having a pop at certain players for not stopping that cross or the manager for subs/timing etc ,ALL of those players gave it everything they had for their country and their manager,the performance deserved at least a point ,a performance given by few decent elder pro,s and a crop of inexperienced promising youngsters.Thers only one set of performers togged out tonight to have a pop at and thats the officials ,ALL of them ,disgracefull.

[passinginterest]

Maybe it's just the usual match day optimism, but I expect us to keep it tight and make it very awkward for Portugal. I don't think we'll concede more than 2 and if we nick one at the other end there's a chance we get away with a draw. Obvious concern is in midfield, really only Cullen playing regularly so far this season and whoever is selected will need to put in a massive shift. Hopefully if there's evidence that lads have run themselves into the ground after 55 minutes there's no hesitation in brining in fresh legs early. With three games in seven days, he's probably going to have to use all the midfielders in the squad at some stage anyway. Expecting some variation of 3-5-2 or more realistically it'll be closer to a 5-4-1 or 5-3-1-1. Wouldn't mind seeing Long given the job of leading the line from the start for his experience with Parrot dropping into the deeper role and helping the midfield.

This turned out to be close enough to what happened. Just a shame we conceded the two so late. I think the fresh legs were a bit too late and probably the wrong ones, McClean getting sold the dummy for the first goal was very poor.

We looked more threatening than I think anyone expected, but yet again rarely looked like actually finishing the half chances. I do think the ref was harsh on Connolly a few times, he doesn’t help by looking for things so much, but there was a decent argument to be made for both penalty shouts he was involved in, it’s just unfortunate his finishing and final decision making wasn’t quite good enough.

I’ve said a few times I think Idah is the real deal and he really showed it at times. Only shame was he was out wide a bit too much rather than attacking things in the box.

Doherty seems to perform better for us on the left, I think it makes him concentrate a bit more and be a little more conservative and it actually suits him. It’s a shame the two goals were headers so the otherwise brilliant defenders have to take some flack, I think Coleman needs to do more for the second one and it looked like Duffy lost him for the first one. Ronaldo might not have his pace anymore but he’s still an incredible header of the ball.

A draw would have bought Kenny some much needed time. Despite the mostly good performance I’m sure the pressure has mounted further now and if there’s not a win and a draw in the next two games he might well be out the door. I think that would be a shame, because despite all the challenges he’s had I genuinely believe there’s progress being made and it’s worth sticking with.

[tommy_c12000]

Promising performance, sickening result in the end. More positives than negatives. Best performance from a Kenny side yet. Bazunu will learn from his error, did well aside from that. Coleman like a fine wine with a very good performance. Central defence was excellent, devastated for Dara hopefully it’s not too serious, wonderful to see Omobamidele getting valuable experience. Doherty was very good for the first 60 minutes, but was woeful in the final 30 - tired badly showing his lack of true match fitness. We badly need a couple of youngsters to take our midfield by the scruff of its neck. Hendrick was not good. Cullen was solid and should continue to start. McGrath has only proven himself at St Mirren, and needs to do more than that to convince me of a starting berth, he was not great today and was out of his depth. Connolly was woeful, even though his runs and energy were excellent. He has lost out on the traditional professional development years at a lower division senior team and left his ego get the better of him. He badly needs consistent game time anywhere, may not get it at Brighton. However, they are so light up front even Moran and Ferguson have a chance of breaking in sooner than expected over the coming months. Idah was simply immense. He has really come on leaps and bounds. He should hopefully start seeing more game time soon, especially with Pukki’s poor form. Farke’s persistence with one man up front is costing Idah dearly.

I wouldn’t have made the subs Kenny did, and he continues to show some level of incompetence. But he’s improving the whole time and we are actually playing some football. We now just need a few more youngsters to come through to strengthen the midfield and for Parrott to blossom, and we will be well set for 2024 qualification

[RiffRaff]

Lucky Ronaldo scored in the 6th of the 5 additional minutes otherwise the ref would still be playing injury time now