Rochdale linchpin is relieved coach saved him for Wembley tie
Jimmy Mcnulty feared being banned from ‘highlight’ of the club’s season, he tells Jim White
If you wanted a hint about the current priorities at Rochdale AFC, it came in the 41st minute of their game with Wigan on Saturday. With the club in desperate need of points to stem relegation from League One, the manager Keith Hill substituted his defensive linchpin Jimmy Mcnulty. From the stands it seemed a puzzling decision, not least because, to that point, Mcnulty had looked the team’s most accomplished player. But the reason was personal.
“I took him off because he’d just got a yellow card and if he’d got another booking he’d have missed Wembley,” Hill said. “And the lad deserves to be there.”
Thus it is that Mcnulty is free to play in tonight’s FA Cup fifthround replay against Tottenham in the national stadium. And the player himself was full of gratitude for Hill’s decision to withdraw him.
“The manager really protected me,” Mcnulty said, as he stood outside the dressing room at the DW Stadium after the game. “I’m not going to lie, as soon as I got booked, I went up to the ref and pleaded with him: ‘Please I just want to take my daughters to Wembley on Wednesday’.
“He said: ‘I’ll look after you as long as you look after me’. One second later there was a heart-inmouth moment when there was a 50-50, one of them when on another day I’d be thinking: ‘Right, I’ll go all in here. And I looked very close to picking up a second yellow.”
By his own admission a lowerleague journeyman after being released by Everton, Mcnulty played at 10 clubs before arriving at Rochdale in 2015. There is no public pretence that the replay against Tottenham is “just another game”. A player who, after he ruptured a kidney in a horrible collision while playing for Brighton in 2009 was told that he would never play again, recognises that chances like this are far from ordinary.
“Arguably, playing Wigan is more important to our season,” he said. “But try telling the players that Wednesday isn’t a bigger occasion. If we are to go down, Wembley may well be the highlight of this season. Even though we’re deep in the mire, since we drew with them, it has been very difficult not to have such an occasion in mind.”
And he believed the fact that his team are playing at Wembley in a run-of-the-mill FA Cup replay does not diminish its meaning. He said: “I think I’m the only one in the team who has played there before. I played in a League Two play-off final for Stockport against Rochdale. We know we’re just the away team in a replay that happens to be taking place at the national stadium. But in our heads, all of us have made it into our cup final.”
Besides, Mcnulty insisted, Rochdale’s performance in the home tie was notable to merit another chance to shine on live television. If nothing else, they deserved their moment in the limelight for the way in which Steve Davies’s equaliser had the nation leaping from its sofa.
“I tell you what, when that went in I’d have jumped off the sofa,” he said. “We excited a lot of people. We delivered, we stepped up on the day. We can play that kind of football. Some days we get it horribly wrong – that’s why we’re at the bottom of the table.”
Mcnulty who, in his spare time, is undertaking a journalism and media degree at Staffordshire University, did admit there may have been another reason Rochdale survived to replay at Wembley: fortune.
“There were moments in the first game – like Son [Heung-min]’s touches in and around the box – that had they gone different we could have been on the end of a devastatingly heavy defeat. I’m just hoping we get the luck in those key moments on Wednesday.”
He added there was one other thing he hoped for from tonight: that the nine friends and family he is taking down for the game see him spend a bit more time marking Harry Kane.
“I only had 10 minutes against Harry and instantly you knew his movement was unlike anything you’d played against before. Very elusive, despite the fact he’s a big boy.” Kane was, he said, a very different problem to the one presented by Fernando Llorente.
“I’m not saying he stands still,” he said. “But he’s very much more a platform than a mobile type of centre-forward, more like the kind of forwards I’m used to playing against. Mind, I best not say too much about him. I could be up against him again at Wembley and he could embarrass me.”