The lot of the manager can be a rather thankless one – when you win and things go well, it’s down to the players but when there are a few bad results, eyes tend to be cast towards you as the primary cause.

And, to be fair, there are few if any managers who go into a role under any other kind of illusion. They know that, along with death and taxes, the third certainty in life is that football managers get the sack.

It’s something Stephen Kenny has experienced first-hand, at Bohemians, Dunfermline Athletic and Shamrock Rovers, but he is living proof of the maxim that the most important thing is not how many times you fall, but how many you get back up again.

After things failed to work out for him at Rovers, he took what was unquestionably at the time a downward step, joining Dundalk, who had just won a play-off to remain in the League of Ireland Premier Division.

A year later, the Lilywhites were runners-up to St Patrick’s Athletic; a year later again they were double winners. Three more league titles and two FAI Cup wins followed, as well as impressive performances in European competition under Kenny’s guidance.

It was an unprecedented haul, meaning that, after the departure of Martin O’Neill as manager of the Republic of Ireland, for the first time in a generation there was non-fanciful talk that the next national boss could be someone from the domestic game. With the FAI torn between Kenny and Mick McCarthy, the compromise reached was that former boss McCarthy would take over for two years, with Kenny taking charge of the U21 team during that time and then taking over after the 2020 European Championships.

Postponement

Of course, in the best tradition of worrying about hypotheticals, there were a few columns worrying about the possibility of McCarthy guiding Ireland to Euro 2020 and us doing really well in the tournament only for him to be replaced, potentially halting all of the momentum.

Understandably, there were no opinion pieces as to what might materialise in the event of the western world grinding to a halt for a four-month period due to a pandemic, with the European Championships postponed by a full 12 months. Rightly or wrongly, the FAI decided to stick with McCarthy’s original departure date of the summer of 2020 rather than having him stay on until the Euros.

It meant Kenny got the top job, but in strange and bizarre circumstances. The semi-final of the play-offs for a place in the European Championships, away to Slovakia in Bratislava on October 8, loomed on the horizon but time and space to prepare for it were not in plentiful supply.

Warm-ups

In that regard, Kenny’s first two games in charge, away to Bulgaria and at home to Finland in the Nations League last week, had to be treated as little more than training sessions, a chance for the new boss to get to know his squad and communicate how he wanted the team to play.

The Nations League is a bit like its GAA half-namesake – if you go well, there isn’t much attention paid as it’s not the real thing, but if you do badly, then it’s taken as a sign of serious crisis. One prime example was in 2014, when Kerry lost their opening three Division 1 games to Dublin, Derry and Mayo and there were calls, from people who should have known better, for Eamonn Fitzmaurice to consider his position. Come September, those same people were praising him to high heaven as he guided the Kingdom to win the All-Ireland.

Obviously, we’d all have loved if Ireland had won in Sofia and in the Aviva Stadium on Sunday evening, though that would have counted for little if defeat was experienced in Bratislava.

None of the three managers who have taken Ireland to major finals – Jack Charlton, Mick McCarthy (first time around) and Giovanni Trapattoni – began their tenures with victories, so hopefully it’s a good omen for Kenny.

Of course, the poor results were grist to the mill of those who had decided Kenny was a failure before he’d ever started, such as Jason McAteer, who said that the Ireland players didn’t respect Brian Kerr as he hadn’t managed in England and he felt that it would be the same with Kenny.

Such prejudices will exist and their holders will be only too keen to jump on any opportunity to express them. It’s no help to Kenny or the team, of course, but all they can do is answer them with results. Beginning with Bratislava, hopefully.

Where next for Munster?

Another head coach under some pressure is Johann van Graan, whose Munster side only managed three points against Leinster in last Friday night’s Guinness Pro14 semi-final.

If you were of a perennially optimistic Munster bent, you could say that Munster only allowed 13 points compared to 27 in their clash two weeks previously, but against that is the fact that they had scored 25 on that occasion.

We are often told that teams learn more from defeats than victories, but clearly Leinster applied the lessons of the earlier outing to better effect. In a way, that’s hardly surprising as they are clearly a better side than Munster right now and have the capability to beat anyone in Europe.

On the other hand, van Graan is now in the Munster job nearly three years and, at best, they are in stasis, with no real sign of an evolution or a development to suggest that they can return to the elite level of continental rugby in the immediate future.

Obviously, it would unfair to make rash judgements based on the interrupted 2019-20 season, but Munster will be aware that the upcoming 2020-21 campaign is one where a clear step up must be made.

Improvisation of the week probably won’t become a regular award in these pages, but the inaugural title goes to Tipperary camogie star Cáit Devane.

She played a key role as Clonoulty-Rossmore knocked Burgess-Duharra out of the county championship semi-final, and one cameo from that showed her irrepressibility. Having won a ruck with a broken hurley, she was able to catch a fresh stick thrown by her brother John, who was on the sideline, and take a shot with it, all in the one movement.

The shot didn’t go over the bar, but thankfully for Clonoulty-Rossmore, they came out on the right side of the result.