KEITH Andrews appears to be on the verge of becoming the first permanent Irish Premier League boss since Chris Hughton in 2019.
Speculation has been rife for a fortnight that Brentford will look internally to replace Thomas Frank following his decision to take on the Spurs job.
Andrews has only been at Brentford since July 2024[/caption]
He’s earned acclaim while operating as Brentford’s set-piece coach[/caption]
Though there’s definitely people who are sceptical about his qualities[/caption]
The former Republic of Ireland midfielder only joined the Bees in July 2024.
However, he has done such an outstanding job in his remit as set-piece coach that he is viewed as the leading candidate to replace Frank.
He was widely credited during a bizarre run of games last season when Brentford kept scoring inside the opening 60 seconds of matches thanks to pre-rehearsed moves from kick-off.
Such was the acclaim the 44-year-old received that Jamie Carragher even sang his praises on a Monday Night Football segment – perhaps the biggest Sky Sports spotlight going.
Here, SunSport charts his rise ahead of what looks set to be a momentous appointment from an Irish point of view:
Coaching background:
Upon retiring in 2015, he made his first inroads as a coach with an assistant role at one of his many former clubs MK Dons.
He left that post after the club’s relegation and next cropped up as Stephen Kenny’s right-hand man firstly with the Ireland Under-21s and then the senior team.
Over the course of Kenny’s tenure, other assistants such as Damien Duff, John Eustace and Anthony Barry moved on to pastures new in the case of Eustace and Barry while Duff left following the fall-out from “videogate”.
However, Andrews did stick it out with Kenny until the bitter end when the latter’s contract was allowed to run out in November 2023.
Andrews got back into the game one month later when he secured another backroom role at Sheffield United under then boss Chris Wilder.
He departed in favour of the London Premier League outfit last summer where he has really burnished his reputation.
Bad blood with Roy Keane and Martin O’Neill:
Keane and O’Neill may well revel at the prospect of the shoe being on the other foot for the 2025/26 season.
After all, Andrews was an outspoken critic of theirs towards the end of their time in charge of the Republic of Ireland.
While his criticism was shared by many supporters, it’s apparent both men have held it against Andrews ever since.
In a 2020 interview with the Sunday Independent, Keane labelled his foe one of the biggest “bulls****ers” he’d ever come across in football.
It’s worth noting too that the Cork icon did so completely unprompted amidst what was otherwise a fairly trivial interview about his life beyond football.
O’Neill view
In addition to that, only this week O’Neill spoke gleefully on talkSPORT about the possibility that Andrews may soon be the head man copping the bulk of the flak.
He said: “He has been their set-piece coach. The irony is when I was manager of the Republic of Ireland he was a particularly vitriolic critic of mine at the time.
“He was really dead against me trying to use set-pieces to try to win games.
“The irony is he becomes the set-piece coach. Really I say good luck to him. Brentford have decided, if it is the case, that he should get it.”
“I hope he does get it because then he will realise what management is all about.
“It’s not as easy to be sitting in a pundit’s chair sitting to criticise someone who in all honesty had a much better career than he had.
“He was dealing at the bottom end of it when I was winning the European Cup. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be criticising. Everyone to their own. But it’ll be a different ball game now.”
The 73-year-old did, however, acknowledge that the Dubliner has “done very well” in his current guise which helped Brentford finished 10th in last season’s English top-flight.
He continued: “In terms of some of the decisions he has made, I think he has done very well as the set-piece coach. A lot of credit has gone to him for the fast starts Brentford have made in games.
“He is stepping into an unknown. It’s all very well when you can be the friend of the players.
“You can have the set-pieces, you can be the coach sitting there in the room. It’s a different ball game when you’re making the big decisions.”
