Stephen Kenny has eyes on 'big away victory' in Athens

Almost exactly a year on from a sluggish, passive UEFA Nations League defeat to Armenia, Stephen Kenny is targeting "a big away victory" to ignite the Republic of Ireland's Euros qualification campaign.

In June 2022, Ireland slipped to a bad defeat in Yerevan with several players in the halfway house between the end of the club season and the start of pre-season.

They looked off the pace that evening, losing at home to Ukraine four days later before responding with a comprehensive 3-0 victory over Scotland and then drawing with the Ukrainians in the Polish city of Lodz.

This time around Kenny is confident his squad will be in better shape for the crunch clash against Gus Poyet's Greece in Athens, where temperatures could hover around the 30-degree Celsius mark.

He held a training camp in Bristol last week for the players operating outside of the Premier League, which only wrapped up last wekend, and on Monday he'll take his full 25-man squad to Turkey for some warm-weather acclimitisation.

Juggling a panel of footballers who fall into a few different categories [free agents, those getting minimal playing time at their clubs, others only just returning from injury] is tricky, but Kenny believes he can strike the right balance.

"This is a conventional camp of two games in a nine-day window," he said.

"We needed to have that camp in Bristol because... we need football sessions, we need to train with the team.

"It was to get people focused. It wasn't just running sessions; they were all footballl sessions.

"Some of the players who got promoted with their teams - Sheffield United and Burnley - the teams were in the city, the tour bus, all the celebrations, and then they bring them to Vegas for five days. That's what they do when they