Kenny acknowledges mistakes but won't stray from plan

When Armenian goalkeeper David Yurchenko picked the ball up just after the 70th minute at the Aviva Stadium on Tuesday night, the main focus for most Republic of Ireland fans was probably on the number of goals the home team might clock up.

A 2-0 home win against the world's 92nd-ranked team to finish off an up-and-down UEFA Nations League campaign would have been fine. Three-nil, 4-0, 5-0... that would send the masses out of Lansdowne Road with a spring in their step.

Flash-forward about 105 seconds, and the entire stadium - save for a little pocket of Armenian fans - was numb. Two goals in less than two minutes drew the visitors level and turbo-charged a grimly familiar debate: Kenny in, or Kenny out?

Robbie Brady's injury-time winner softened the backlash a little - make no mistake, things could have been a lot worse - but question marks around the manager's approach, substitutions and general game management persist.

There's been an unfortunate pattern of surrendering leads in the Kenny era: Serbia away, Portugal away, Ukraine away, Scotland away, Qatar in Debrecen.

But Kenny remains confident his team will iron out their issues in next year's Euros qualifiers.

"I think we just shot ourselves in the foot for a few minutes and we have to make sure that doesn't happen again," he reflected, amid a national post mortem into that baffling collapse.

"Certainly, everything is in context. We will play better teams than Armenia in our quest to qualify for the European Championships. We will play teams of equal standard and some of less probably as well. It's all relative.

"It was a good performance from a technical point of view and we dominated. There is room for improvement in some of our attacking play and we were uber aggressive