The twists and turns that put McKay’s career in reverse
Barrie craves the platform to bounce back from ‘craziness’
ASWIVEL of Barrie of lighting up a day watching Rangers clamber back to the top flight.
Unfortunately, rapid switches of direction also became a method of bamboozling behaviour adopted in boardrooms wherever McKay has been.McKay’s hips and the jinking run through a defence or killer assist that followed were moments always capable As a result, it was the fleet-footed winger who was left on his backside more often than he cared for.
It turns out that bringing Pedro Caixinha in to replace Mark Warburton, the English coach who reintroduced McKay to the Ibrox first-team scene to devastating effect in 2015, was only the start.
Similar hiring and firing episodes have played out at Nottingham Forest and Swansea.
Thank goodness, believe it or not, for former Rangers team-mate Joey Barton bringing some assurance to proceedings.
And, for now, purpose and the type of platform McKay craves.
‘The craziness of football’, as McKay describes his latest departure from first-team regular to outcast at Swansea, has led the 25-year-old to relaunch his career on loan at Fleetwood Town.
On Friday, the League One play-offs commence with a home leg against Wycombe.
Wembley is the target, the wide open expanses of which — in tandem with Barton’s trust in his
loan signing — are likely to offer McKay the freedom to influence and impress.
McKay was doing just that in January 2017 — and ‘on top of the world, enjoying football’ — when a performance in a friendly in Germany triggered £6million interest from RB Leipzig.
He had rounded off the previous campaign with a stunning goal at Hampden that helped Championship winners Rangers knock Celtic out of the Scottish Cup.
Then came a Scotland cap against Euro 2016 hosts France, Gordon Strachan intrigued to establish that McKay was more than a Warburton wonder.
But confidence in Warburton among the Ibrox hierarchy was waning around the time of the Leipzig tale and, within a matter of weeks, an unknown Portuguese from the Qatar league was his replacement.
An alarming depreciation of an asset was allowed to play out, one of the many curious and ruinous outcomes of the folly to appoint Caixinha.
McKay, with a year left on his deal and contract talks ongoing, went from a £6m saleable talent to a £500,000 exile in the space of four months.
‘With Caixinha, I just think he didn’t like me,’ explains McKay. ‘He stopped playing me and pulled me to the side to ask why I hadn’t signed a new contract.
‘I said: “Well, you’re not playing me. So how can I commit to that?” I could commit long-term — then I don’t play.
‘He said to me: “Well, if you don’t sign, then you will never play for me”.
‘You can’t really believe all that they say and when results weren’t great, he was back to me before the end of the season telling me he needed me.
‘That was fine. It’s not as if I was going to throw in the towel. He’s the manager and picks the team. I played the last four games and scored a couple of goals.
‘So I never really thought about leaving. Then, on holiday in Tenerife, my agent rang to say: “You’ll never guess, Rangers are trying to sell you”.
‘I said: “What do you mean? They were offering me a new contract a few months ago!” But they’d got another agent going about clubs to try and get me out.
‘I was gobsmacked. All of a sudden I’m thinking: “Who’s going to take me?” I couldn’t believe
I was having to get my head around the idea I’d need to leave
Rangers.
‘When I went back for pre-season, there were no reasons given. It was names up on a board — me and Michael O’Halloran training on our own, away from the squad.
‘Whatever fee they were trying to sell me for, as soon as they start doing that, they’re not going to get anywhere near that price.
‘You’re down to a case of clubs saying: “You don’t want him? We’ll take him off your hands”.
‘I’ve heard Rangers fans say that I chased the money and all that sort of stuff but people didn’t know what went on and that I was forced out.’
McKay never played again for Caixinha and the day after a disastrous 2-0 defeat to Progres Niederkorn, a team two places below Prestatyn Town in UEFA’s rankings, he was sold to Nottingham
Forest.
He left behind a dysfunctional regime run by a manager whose reign has wreaked incalculable damage to the quest to stop Celtic’s title rampage.
‘He used call me Robbie in training,’ recalls McKay. ‘I’d have to say: “Look, my name is not Robbie”. ‘I genuinely think he used to do it just to wind me up. But I don’t know why a manager would do that.
‘He did it at Kilmarnock about five weeks into the job. You’re telling me he can’t know my name by then? ‘I wouldn’t say many people got along with him. But it doesn’t matter how the manager is with you. If you’re playing for Rangers, you put in your performance.
‘And, if I played, I gave my all. The hardest thing for many of the boys, though, was that you’d come in on Monday and he’d already named the team for the weekend.
‘We’d only just played Sunday! So it wasn’t a case of if you weren’t in the team, you’re thinking: “I’ll have a good week’s training and get myself back in”.’
Back under the Warburton wing, McKay made a flying start at Forest but the mid-season dip which resulted in a Hogmanay sacking effectively ended the young Scot’s time on the Trent.
For the sudden philosophy switch to an ultra-defensive mind in Aitor Karanka meant there was no scope for McKay to weave his spells.
When the results weren’t great, he was back telling me I was needed
After only four starts in five months for the new coach, Forest chief Evangelos Marinakis attempted to persuade McKay to join the other club in his ownership portfolio — Olympiakos.
‘They flew myself, my agent and girlfriend Megan over to Greece and we had a look about the place,’ he revealed. ‘But I just wanted to stay in England. The one thing I never want to be known as in England is a failure.
‘If you come down and go back home or away early, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done down here, I still think it’s classed by people as failure.
‘Because I said no, Forest were trying to make it difficult for me to go anywhere else. Greece was convenient to the owners. They were wanting me to go on loan for six months.
‘But I got a great feeling about Swansea because I could tell Graham Potter believed in me. I just wanted to go and play for him.’
Forest pocketed a £1m profit on McKay, who was released at the Liberty Stadium to revel in the attractive style deployed by Potter.
Unfortunately for McKay after 31 appearances, two goals and seven assists, Potter’s work caught the eye of Brighton.
Former England Under-17s coach Steve Cooper replaced Potter and, despite playing most of pre-season, McKay was ditched ‘at the flick of a switch’ when the competitive action began this season.
McKay explains: ‘Graham Potter was brilliant for me and the fact they paid £1.5m meant: “We believe in you, we’re giving you a platform to just go and play”.
‘The way that he and Warburton play just suits me to a tee. And it suits the teams they build.
‘For six months at Forest, I was loving it. The next six wasn’t enjoyable. Same with Swansea — loving it the first year, a great place to live, hoping this was my home for longer than the contract.
‘Then out the picture under a new manager. I got back in the team for about a month in December and contributed well from the bench.
‘But then we lost to (Warburton’s) QPR 5-1 in the FA Cup and I was told I could go on loan.
‘All that happened after the change of manager, a change of opinions. It’s the crazy thing about football that your job relies on the opinion of one man.’
Not taking these knocks personally has been straightforward for McKay. In fact, his coping mechanism is a fail-safe constructed at the very outset of his professional career.
He said: ‘I’ve been through worse. I went down to Kilmarnock as a 16-year-old boy with my parents thinking I was going to sign my first contract.
‘They said that I failed my medical, the deal was off the table and I was released.
‘You start thinking: “What am I going to do now? Am I going to go to college? Am I going to get a job?” Fortunately I got a call from Rangers and signed a few days later. They did an even more thorough medical and I passed.
‘I said to myself: “No matter what happens to me in football, I will always remember that moment at Kilmarnock. Nothing will make me feel as low as that”.
‘And I can also use it as motivation to say I’ve actually come really far and look at how many games I’ve played since that day.
‘There’s not really a lot who can say they’ve played over 100 times for Rangers. And I am 100 per cent a better player now in England. I’m more mature, I know a lot more of the importance of the gym, the diet, everything.
‘When I was still at Rangers, I was a skinny small guy. I bulked up a little bit, as you need to do, because they are all athletes. I’ve picked up a lot of different things over the years and I want to get back to playing at as high a level as I possibly can.’
‘With Caixinha, I just think he didn’t like me. He called me Robbie in training and I genuinely think he would do it to wind me up. I’ve heard Rangers fans say that I chased the money and that sort of stuff but people didn’t know what went on and that I was forced out