I’M LIKE A PRAYING MANTIS WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO GET THE SACK!
MICK McCARTHY EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
I marched up the tunnel with Baresi’s shirt in my hand, sat in the dressing room and wept I’ll walk in, eight players will be on their phones and I’ll say: ‘Any chance of a chat?’ — I know I’m talking to myself
SO here is a story that fits what we think we know about Mick McCarthy. ‘I listen to football radio phoneins and let me tell you why,’ said McCarthy, sitting up in his chair.
‘It’s when I’m driving home from games at night. It’s because it annoys the hell out of me and it keeps me awake at the wheel.
‘I start off feeling calm and then suddenly I am, “Are you for bloody real? Do me a favour!” And then I am wide awake again.’
Now here is a story that doesn’t quite fit the caricature.
Four-and-a-half years after their famous clash at the 2002 World Cup, McCarthy and his former Republic of Ireland captain Roy Keane were about to meet as managers. Keane’s Sunderland were due at McCarthy’s Wolves in the Championship for the first meeting since Keane was infamously sent home from Saipan.
‘I thought it was gonna be a circus,’ McCarthy told Sportsmail. ‘So I decided to blow everybody out of the water. I rang him up and said, “Listen, we can either be part of the circus or we can get together and have a chat and shake hands privately. We will p*** on everybody’s chips”. So I drove to meet him in Cheshire and I’m glad I did. Half an hour and a cup of tea. We had a chat and it was done.
‘Despite what people may think about me, I am a mediator. I like to make things right. I don’t want anger and grudges and bitterness. On the pitch I will scrap to get what I want for me and my team. But in life I want to be right with people and I want people to be right with me.’ MICK McCARTHY is out of work and doesn’t like it. He has been 26 years a manager and never been without a job for more than nine months at a time.
He left his last club, Ipswich, on April 10 so currently it’s five-and-ahalf weeks and counting. He would like to stress that, at 59, he is unemployed but definitely not retired.
‘I want to work in the Championship or the Premier League,’ he said. ‘If I could get a Championship job with a chance of getting in the Premier League, that would be great. What gives me inspiration is Roy Hodgson going in at Palace, Warny (Neil Warnock) at Cardiff. Get them organised, hard to beat, know what they are doing. Play good football. Win. I put myself in that bracket.’
McCarthy arrives for our meeting in London smiling and as lean as he was as a player. His departure from Ipswich after five-and-a-half years was strange and came four games earlier than planned. Tired of persistent criticism from supporters, he walked out immediately after a win over Barnsley.
YouTube is not short of McCarthy soundbites. In front of the cameras, he is by turn funny, belligerent and abrasive. But the truth of his leaving is more prosaic. By the end, McCarthy actually just felt a bit sad. ‘It was the right thing but it would have been nice to leave without that atmosphere because I loved the place,’ he said.
‘I thought with eight games left they may just have left me alone and got behind the team but it didn’t happen.
The relationship with a minority was tenuous but I loved the bones of the people at the club.’
Earlier this season McCarthy gave an interview to the Telegraph in which he was asked whether he would ever use Twitter.
‘I would either end up with 70billion followers or in prison,’ he replied. It was typical McCarthy shtick. Blunt, funny, strong.
But the McCarthy who sits at the offices of the New Era Agency who represent him is not like that. He is rational, considered and at times almost gentle. I wonder out loud if his rather more gruff public persona has its roots in self-protection.
‘There is an element of that,’ he nodded. ‘I used to see this with Kenny Dalglish. Kenny is one of the most charming, funny, mischievous, warm, chatty people you could meet. Seriously, a lovely man. Gordon Strachan is the same. But when I see their interviews on TV it just isn’t them and I guess that is their protection. Now I can’t do what they do and just say nowt. So I guess I do what I do. Yes, you do have to protect yourself.’
McCarthy loves footballers. He loves their company and the challenges they present. He was a good one himself, for Barnsley, Manchester City, Celtic and Millwall.
‘The perception is they don’t give a stuff but that’s wrong,’ he said. ‘Some don’t like football but I haven’t had many like that. They do care.’
He watched the harmony Jack Charlton brought to the Irish squad as manager in the 1980s and 1990s and hasn’t forgotten it. He bases his own management on sound coaching, leadership of individuals and the creation of an environment that suits modern players.
We talk about mobile phones and to my surprise he says he allows them in the dressing room.
‘They have all had them in their hands since they were 10 years old,’ he explained. ‘ There is no point taking their toys off them.
‘I read Carlo Ancelotti’s book and thought it was brilliant. Quiet
Leadership. He said it was not his job to motivate players, just to make sure he didn’t demotivate them. Absolutely.
‘I have no caps, no headphones walking into the ground, shake hands every day. I will walk into a dressing room and eight of them will be on their phones. I will say, “Any chance of a chat?”
‘I am talking to myself and I know it. I will answer my own question and think, “Boring buggers” but maybe the joke is on me. That’s the culture and it won’t change so I adjust and change over time.
‘Me and Warnock at Barnsley didn’t have phones. We sat and talked and played cards.’
McCarthy met Warnock, a senior pro, when he was a teenager at Oakwell. ‘He was entrepreneurial, always doing something,’ he smiled. ‘He had a fruit or veg shop or something but he could play. I remember spanking a ball to him on a diagonal in one reserve game and he said, “That’s brilliant”.
‘I have never forgotten how it felt to hear that from an older player. I have had my tussles, wanting to throttle him on the touchline. But I admire him. He is a pal. The Premier League is lucky to have him back.’ McCARTHY’S first decision in management was to drop his best mate.
Having a drink with John Colquhoun, now a respected agent, on a Sunday night in March 1992, the two Millwall team-mates were picking hypothetical teams for their next game. The previous day they had lost 6-1.
‘John said he wouldn’t pick himself because he had a back niggle,’ McCarthy recalled. ‘On the Tuesday I got the bloody job as caretaker and suddenly I did have to pick the bloody team! So I left John out. How could I pick him when he said he wouldn’t have picked himself?
‘It was awkward as we used to travel in together. So straight away I had put my marker down...’
McCarthy has had a progressive career as a manager. Despite the Keane affair, he took the Republic of Ireland to the last 16 of the 2002 World Cup and then led Sunderland and Wolves from the Championship to the Premier
I drove to meet Roy. Half an hour and a cup of tea, and it was done. And yes, he apologised
League. His enterprising, attractive Wolves team were frontrunners who went up with 90 points in 2009.
What he has never had the opportunity to do is manage with money. His record signing over two-and-ahalf decades was £6.5million for Kevin Doyle at Wolves.
In all his time at Ipswich, he is reputed to have made a single million- pound signing, Welsh midfielder Emyr Hughes.
‘ He cost £ 250,000,’ snorted McCarthy.
We wonder what might have happened had promotions with two big clubs been followed by money to invest. What we know is that gravity eventually took its effect.
‘I don’t know why I haven’t been given one of those jobs with cash to burn,’ he said.
‘I think I have an image in the game. I am seen as a straight talker. Does everybody like that? Maybe not. People like it until you do it at their club. Then they don’t. But I have been really lucky. I don’t see myself as being downtrodden.
‘I get a job and I do that job to the best of my ability. That’s always been me and always will be me.’
McCarthy has suffered at times as a player and as a manager. Failure to take the Republic to the finals of Euro 2000 thanks to a lastminute goal in a play-off against Macedonia hit hard, as did defeat as a player against Italy in the quarter-finals of the 1990 World Cup in Rome.
‘I was broken-hearted after that,’ he said.
‘I marched up the tunnel barechested with Franco Baresi’s shirt in my hand and I sat in the dressing room and sobbed.
‘I wish to this day I could have gone on the pitch and accepted the applause from the fans with all the other players but that’s me, isn’t it? I wasn’t going to change. I wanted to be out of sight. Me, the physio and the kitman.’
McCarthy learned about fickleness during his years with Ireland. At first he wasn’t welcomed by supporters. ‘I was a lad from Barnsley with a thick Yorkshire accent,’ he said. Then, over time, his stock rose as that of others fell.
‘I roomed with Frank Stapleton and he was the star,’ he revealed. ‘I would answer the phone and it was always for him. I was like his secretary.
‘Then, years later on a plane, people asked for my autograph. They didn’t ask for Frank, who was across the aisle.
‘I thought, “Wow”. It wasn’t right. But I knew if it could happen to an Irish hero like Frank then it could happen to me.’
McCarthy had no idea what lay in store. He has never spoken in detail about what happened in Japan with Keane and steadfastly refuses to do so.
‘It was crazy when it happened,’ he said quietly. There was an election on back home but there were 16 pages of me and Roy before you got to any of that.
‘I have heard some of the stuff people who were there have said and written and some bits I am not sure about.
‘Sixteen years on, can we all really remember? I think some people have added bits to make it sound better.
‘But at the time it was just dreadful. It was appalling. I did the right thing and I would do it again now. I stand by b it.
‘But it was a tough time for me, really tough, and it had a profound effect on me.
‘What should have been b the best moment in my life and career... well,w let’s just say it w wasn’t.’
And about that meeting in with Keane at the M Marriott Hotel in Hale. D Did Keane apologise?
‘Yes he did,’ McCarthy sa said after a pause. ‘Yes, he apologised. ‘That was accepted an and I have been cool ev ever since.’ BABACK at the start — rigright back at Millwall — McMcCarthy said that his life would forever depend on whether a football wenwent into a net or not. To himhim, that would always be the very essence of mamanagement. Nothing muchmuc has changed. ‘I was watching Arsenal and Atletico Madrid and went ballistic at the TV when Arsenal conceded that late goal at home,’ he laughed. ‘My wife Fiona just said, “Why are
you so upset?”. It was because it was bonkers and I was livid and so felt sorry for Arsene Wenger. It was wrong and shouldn’t happen. Don’t let them score! Complete lack of discipline.
‘As a manager you remember those moments longer than winning stuff and being at World Cups. Those bad moments haunt you.
‘I usually fall asleep at night but wake up thinking about it. I could be up at 4am walking the tiles or out on my bike at 6am.
‘As soon as I am awake that is it. No chance.’
Mick and Fiona met at primary school in Yorkshire and she has always been there.
When he played briefly for Lyon in 1989, they moved to France with three young children.
Two years ago in an excellent interview with the Irish Independent, McCarthy told a great story about Fiona firing an early shot across his bows.
‘We were leaving church in the car,’ he recalled. ‘I was managing Millwall and had probably lost the day before. Kids were playing up in the back, kicking the car seats. I snarled at them and she was on me.
‘She said, “It’s not them, you are the problem”. She really put the manners on me and she was right. I tried to learn from that but bloomin’ heck, this job isn’t easy.
‘And yeah, as I said at the start, my whole poxy career — my whole bloody wonderful career, everything I love and enjoy most — is defined by the ball going in or out of that net.’
McCarthy has been linked with a return to Barnsley and indeed Sunderland but he doesn’t want to work in League One. He is aiming higher and that is right.
He has been on the golf course but his nine handicap flatters him.
‘You think you can just pick the clubs up after nine months and play,’ he said. ‘But you can’t. I have been hopeless.’
And what about management? Can you pick that up again right away?
‘I have never been out of it long enough to really know,’ he smiled.
‘But it’s a strange profession. It’s not like Tesco or Esso, you can’t send your c.v. off can you?
‘You are like a praying mantis waiting for someone else to get the sack or leave. Divorced, beheaded, died.
‘Then you have a chance. You do know in this profession that something will come up. Whether you get the job or not is another matter entirely.’