The FAI's decision to replace Mick McCarthy with immediate effect has taken some by surprise. While the succession plan with Stephen Kenny was always in place, the moving of the European Championships to the summer of 2021 complicated matters.
Kenny was in line to come in after that tournament, in August of this year. Would that still be the case, or would McCarthy be allowed bring Ireland to the tournament as planned? Many had assumed it would be the latter.
After all, McCarthy had brought us this far in the campaign. A quick look online and you will see that quite a few people think he should have been given the opportunity to finish what he started.
The @FAIreland have done over Mick McCarthy for a second time in his career. They should have found a way to allow him to manage for the playoffs. This crazy succession plan really shows how poor the whole situation was from day one #fai
— James Garvin (@jamespgarvin) April 4, 2020
Very harsh on Mick McCarthy. Would like to have seen him allowed to complete the job he was contracted to do. Great servant as player and manager. Good luck to Stephen Kenny but wrong decision IMHO.
— EastTerracer (@EastTerracer) April 4, 2020
harsh on Mick McCarthy tbh he led us through the qualifying campaign so far so he should have been allowed to finish it at least
— ᴊᴀᴍɪᴇ 🇮🇹🇳🇱 (@tifosileclerc16) April 4, 2020
On the surface, this argument makes sense. McCarthy had guided Ireland up to this point in the campaign, with the team a couple of games away from securing qualification. He had also been planning for months for a game against Slovakia, with a new regime now likely having to start from scratch in that regard.
In this sense, perhaps it would have made sense to stick with him through to the summer of 2021.
However, a quick look beyond the surface of this matter and it quickly becomes apparent that this would have been the wrong decision.
To put it bluntly, the Euro 2020 play-off campaign up to this point will not be looked back upon fondly. It's true that that could have changed had the play-offs gone ahead as planned, but McCarthy did little to make us think that not keeping him in the job would be a mistake.
There was a slight improvement in the football played towards the end of the Martin O'Neill era, but it was still someway short of what most Ireland supporters would expect. The results also left plenty to be desired. Three wins, two against Gibraltar and one against Georgia, is nowhere near good enough. The performance in Tbilisi was a calamity, while we failed to win any of the games in the group against opposition of any sort of quality.
The selection policy was also strange at times. A number of players were allowed to continue in the side despite repeated poor performances, while others were ignored despite playing well for their clubs.
There is no better example than John Egan. The vast majority of onlookers could see that he was a far superior player to Richard Keogh before the campaign even started. Despite this, McCarthy opted to continue with the Derby man, simply because he was the more experienced of the two. When he was brought into the team due to Keogh's injury, it quickly became apparent that he should have been partnering Shane Duffy right from the outset.
In many senses, there are almost no positives to take away from the eight-game campaign. You could perhaps point to the blooding of new faces such as Egan, Enda Stevens, Alan Browne, and Callum Robinson, but they were players who would have been brought in by any manager. As mentioned above, it was only done so with Egan when he was given no other choice.
The logic that McCarthy got us to the play-offs and should be allowed to finish the job also doesn't hold water. Thanks to the Nations League, Ireland had essentially already qualified for the play-offs before the campaign had even begun. We could have lost every game in the group and it wouldn't have affected that.
As Stephen Kenny tore it up with the U21, it became obvious that the succession plan adopted by the FAI had been the wrong way to go about it.
Mick McCarthy was brought in with the sole goal of qualifying for the Euros and that had a major effect on the way he approached the job. He did not attempt to ease in some young players, with every decision taken with a short-term mindset. That is not how a successful international team operates.
If the decision was taken to continue down this road until the summer of 2021, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that it could have had a detrimental long-term effect on the future of the men's senior international team.
The FAI simply couldn't afford to kick the can 12 months down the road when it came to the development of the team. That is especially true when you consider the young talents that are currently coming through. We couldn't waste another year of Troy Parrott, Aaron Connolly, or Jayson Molumby.
Stephen Kenny will approach the job with the right beld of seeking immediate success while also planning for the future, something his predecessor could not do. With the gift of hindsight, it's clear that he should have been in the role from the outset.
We have gained essentially nothing from the last 18 months of McCarthy, time that could have been spent allowing Stephen Kenny to learn on the job.
That is the lasting tragedy of this situation, not that Mick McCarthy wasn't given the opportunity to start what he finished. The fact of the matter is that he never really got started at all.
