Former Ireland manager Eoin Hand thinks Stephen Kenny might be better suited to managing a new Irish youth academy rather than the senior team.
Kenny is winless in ten matches in charge of the Boys in Green, with a 1-0 home defeat to Luxembourg on Saturday severely denting any hopes of qualifying for the 2022 World Cup.
And, in the view of former Ireland boss Hand, Kenny has wrongly tried to teach old dogs new tricks since taking over the national job from Mick McCarthy.
"I think that he started in the wrong way, as far as I'm concerned," Hand told RTÉ's Claire Byrne Show. "This whole thing about coming in and talking about an 'evolutionary style of football’.
"It’s a very basic concept really – you don’t build anything from the top down, you start at the bottom and it’s a much bigger picture.
"Making it simplistic would be asking do you have a system to suit the players or players to suit the system? Well Stephen’s opening gambit and his whole way of thinking was that the players must suit the system.
"That is nigh impossible for international footballers who are playing a certain way with their clubs in England all their lives and then you’ve got them for maybe three days before you play a vital game and you ask them to play a totally different way.
"I think that he made that mistake at the start of it all, before this series of matches. But the one that must learn from all this is Stephen Kenny himself, you cannot do this, you must get players who are accustomed to doing what they’re doing every training day and every week with their clubs.
"Stephen is in there to get results, that’s it, that’s the bottom line. Results are the big thing, to get results and to qualify, that’s gone now.
"We’re lucky that there were no crowds during that game on Saturday because there would have been remonstrations afterwards it was that poor."
Hand believes that a real change in Ireland's football philosophy will take a long time to achieve, and he believes Kenny might be better suited to heading up a new national academy.
"I think that Stephen’s attributes are very, very strong but I think that they could be used in a much better way.
"Really I think this is a story about an academy, a national academy that should have happened way back in 2005. It was on the cards but it never happened, that’s another story.
"Stephen could be in charge of all the aspects of the way you want to be teaching and educating our players, to ally our natural strengths with more technical skill. That’s the big picture.
"It could be a way to move aside without losing that much face. Because Stephen looks very uncomfortable with his interviews and that, and the national job is a huge, huge job and a huge step for him.
"I think Stephen’s assets would be employed much better in that direction."
