The vague outline of a future here and, finally, confirmation that the wait for a goal would not have to constitute a five-year plan.
rue, Alan Browne’s 18th-minute header wasn’t enough on the night, but it did end the sense of parody at least, of a team in need of miners’ lamps and maps.
So the thunder of early Irish defiance rebounding off the stadium curves fell away on a long, educational night in Belgrade.
Serbia won because they were better, the elegant Dusan Vlahovic equalising approaching half-time and Aleksandar Mitrovic – eyes gleaming with mischief – then putting Ireland to the sword.
Ireland did not have that assassin’s quality in the final third but, then again, this wasn’t the Irish team as such.
It was a patchwork of aspirants in midfield especially who, had they won, it would have been illogical, broadly unexplainable.
This has been a rotten first year for Kenny, a year at the end of which the grass was threatening to grow over his best intentions.
You can only wonder what crimes he committed in a previous life.
Between injuries and the pandemic, plans for a new dawn have been denied even the most basic flow of oxygen. So he’s been compelled to sell difference at a time all hope of structure and control unravelled before his eyes. In such circumstances, an over-stretched team trying to out-pass technically better opposition can begin to feel like a manager’s conceit.
Why not settle for pragmatism, we ask? For the conformity of two defensive blocks pulled deep and kicking long into the channels?
But that’s just never been Kenny’s way and, on many levels, his resistance to it has felt admirable. The manager’s view is that playing that way, we might as well just adopt the lotus position and let the better team own the ball.
But do you wisely apply tactical calculus to a bullfight? Especially when the hard-boiled truth seems to be that your players aren’t good enough to do that?
On this evidence, maybe it’s not quite as cut and dried as we portray it. Because both before and after Browne’s goal, Kenny’s players looked composed with the ball and managed an impressive collective press when without it. It was modern football, intelligent, connected and – seemingly – unafraid.
The manager has made his name as someone with a taste for almost granular levels of detail. And international football, of course, doesn’t allow time for that. It demands swift, constant adjustment and, routinely, compromise.
Honourable intention becomes an abstract thing when your team have gone 678 minutes without a goal and your strikers keep running down cul-de-sacs.
In football, goals must be the substance of any creative philosophy. Which, of course, had become Kenny’s biggest problem.
In their absence, he might as well have been selling snake oil.
Last night’s worry was always that this game might quickly just spin out of control, that a callow team would find themselves swamped. Serbia currently rank 30th in the FIFA rankings, 12 places above Ireland. But the teams pitching up in Red Star’s stadium last night were, being honest, almost galaxies apart.
So we went there hoping essentially for someone to unlock a secret door.
Which is pretty much what Callum Robinson did with those quicksilver feet, delivering the cross that found a soaring Browne at the far post.
Kenny had picked Robinson and Aaron Connolly as an all-Premier League front two; mobility in abundance between them, but neither player exactly prolific in front of goal.
It was a team with pace and a hint of the unknown about it though; Kenny’s stamp on it undeniably. A team with, as the manager himself put it before kick-off, “attacking intent”.
And for all the depletion of resources, seven of his starters are Premier League employees.
Not that much of this registered with Dragan Stojkovic who seemed, if anything, to be resting some of his players for the weekend joust with Portugal in mind. Hand on heart, could we really blame him, given the last goal scored by Ireland all but had the status of a Pathe News curiosity?
But in the minutes before Vlahovic’s equaliser, Stojkovic looked like he’d just swallowed a wasp.
So the whimsy in Kenny’s head began to find group expression here and, even in defeat, seemed to signpost a road to somewhere better.
Those two Mitrovic goals inside seven second-half minutes set them a mountain to climb, but when James Collins bundled a second Irish goal home with four minutes of normal time remaining, the night was a storm of panicked Serbian voices.
It didn’t lead to escape in the end, but at least we weren’t left just chronicling more shortcomings here.
Anointed before they started, they’d ended the night piling forward against palpably spooked opponents. It wasn’t enough to kick-start any World Cup fairy tale, but you could see in Stojkovic’s emotional embrace with his backroom staff at the final whistle that they’d been stretched.
No release of pressure for Kenny. But the glimmer of a future.
No points gained for brave defeats, of course, but some degree of honour retained. Bad habits form and settle for teams trapped in losing runs, but this felt better. Seven games without a goal, Ireland managed two on the night.
