Republic of Ireland coach Stephen Kenny has waded into the debate about Michael Obafemi’s omission from first team football after his failed prospective move to Burnley.<\/p>\n
Obafemi has been out of the squad – yet sat amongst the substitutes on the bench against Sheffield United – since the draw at Stoke City with Russell Martin clearly stating that it would be up to the player to fight his way back in.<\/p>\n
But it’s left fans bemused as to whether the player is on strike, whether Obafemi has argued with the manager or if there is a deeper problem with the striker himself.<\/p>\n
Kenny has selected the former Southampton man for his Irish squad to take on Scotland and Armenia later this month and says that whilst the situation isn’t ideal, it isn’t as clear cut as perhaps suggested so far.<\/p>\n
He told the Irish Examiner: “There\u2019s three sides to every story.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not ideal, we want our player playing coming in and in form.<\/p>\n
\u201cI saw him against Blackpool when he ran 60 yards and unselfishly laid the ball off for a teammate to score.\u201d<\/p>\n
Will Obafemi be in the squad Saturday?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Republic of Ireland coach Stephen Kenny has waded into the debate about Michael Obafemi’s omission from first team football after his failed prospective move to Burnley. Obafemi has been out of the squad – yet sat amongst the substitutes on the bench against Sheffield United – since the draw at Stoke City with Russell Martin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":459,"featured_media":67516,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[293,49,203],"tags":[657,819,1448,665],"class_list":["post-69311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-first-team","category-news","category-opinion","tag-michael-obafemi","tag-republic-of-ireland","tag-stephen-kenny","tag-the-2022-23-season"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/459"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69311\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}