Stephen Kenny says he is ready to prove people wrong once again and fire Ireland to Euro 2024.
The Boys in Green have landed the toughest possible draw when they were dumped in Group B with the Netherlands, France, Greece and Gibraltar.
Kenny is confident that Ireland can breakthrough between the group’s top two seeds.
READ MORE: Stephen Kenny explains why he needs to be in Qatar during the World Cup
He has spent his career proving people wrong - as he pointed out yesterday.
“As a young manager in the League of Ireland, it was always stated to me that you could never win the League of Ireland building and playing from the back,” he said.
“Then when I was managing Irish teams in Europe, it was said you can’t go against the top teams and play out from the back.
“You must sit deep, you must counter-attack, you can’t play superior teams and expect to dominate levels of possession, that’s not realistic. That was the mantra.
“We disproved that very much.
“When I took over this job, it was constantly, ‘It’s not in our DNA to build from the back, to play out, he’s trying to do something that our players aren’t capable of, it’s not our strength playing this way’.
“So that was a consistent mantra.
“But I think already the players have disproved that and they have shown the capacity to play out comfortably from the back and play through midfield.”
As for the prospects of edging ahead of either France or the Netherlands by playing the way Kenny wants, he said: “That’s certainly our ambition.
“We’re building towards the Euros. I think we’re building, in my opinion, a very strong team for the Euros going forward.
“We’ve made some mistakes but you’ve seen it’s a team that’s emerging. We’re improving all the time.
“We’ve the capacity to score goals, we’ve scored six goals in our last two home games.
“I think we’ve been dealt the toughest group we could have got with France, Holland and Greece.
“We’ve got to be resolute. We’ve shown against top nations like Portugal that we can compete. We just need to come out on the right side of those tight games.
“We’ve got to aspire to do that.”
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