THE MICK OF TIME
McCarthy’s return has everyone smiling but, despite the positivity, doubt lingers over the planned transfer of power in 2020
ON THE first day of the rest of their lives, everyone played their roles perfectly.
The Irish soccer drama twisted and flipped like a floundering fish on Saturday evening.
But yesterday afternoon at Lansdowne Road, the principals in this endless opera behaved exactly as one would expect.
Mick McCarthy was positive, towering and gruff in that goodnatured and practiced way.
John Delaney was unflaggingly positive, insisting there was a plan and that McCarthy and Stephen Kenny and Ruud Dokter and the FAI board were all in tune with it.
Robbie Keane was alert and grinning, and Terry Connor was the underwhelming assistant even in a press conference room four months before the first match under the new regime is played.
Connor and Keane slipped in unnoticed by the flashing, clambering, barking group of photographers that surrounded McCarthy when Irish soccer’s new future walked in the door.
The assistants sat in the front row while McCarthy beamed for the clacking cameras and Delaney and Dokter, the latter the FAI’s high performance director, took seats at the top table.
Just before the leading dramatis personae arrived, through a door on the other side of the room entered the FAI board. In they shuffled and took up the front row, beaming all round them as a sport that has known quite a few new dawns greeted another one.
One photographer groused about the make-up of the pitch and how it would affect their traditional unveiling photo.
On Saturday evening, the Irish rugby team had completed their series of November Test matches here and the ground was still slathered in the branding of the team sponsor, a big telecommunications company.
A rival telecommunications company sponsors the FAI, so the ruffled photographer said they wouldn’t be able to take the snaps they wanted.
It was a rare grumble on a day when official optimism abounded.
McCarthy was the Mick of the popular imagination, the proud pragmatist who wouldn’t ignore his country’s call.
‘We’ll see, won’t we?’ he shot back when asked if it’s a good idea to go back.
And he shrugged that the arrangement under which he will leave the post at the end of Ireland’s interest in Euro 2020, no matter how well they do were they to qualify for the tournament, worked for him.
It is a remarkable set-up, with Kenny guaranteed the biggest job in Irish soccer no matter what happens and McCarthy leaving irrespective of results.
Delaney would later explain this was the brainchild of him, the board and Dokter, and it was based on an impulse that inspired them to ‘take Irish football to the next level’.
That is not the level next to the one they currently slumber in, one presumes.
Because for all of the determination to make this a future-focused celebration, some old spectres lingered.
McCarthy was asked about Saipan. ‘Why? What happened there?’ he joshed, before delivering an unmistakable message from beneath the laughs.
‘If people want to talk about it, good luck, but I won’t be answering any more questions about it.’
Keane has just been sundered from the national team for the second time.
This departure did not come with the belching sulphur of the 2002 one.
Instead, he went as part of the end of the Martin O’Neill age, one that was also a time of pragmatism until the results turned bad.
Delaney mentioned a trip to London with Michael Cody, the FAI honorary secretary, for a meeting with O’Neill last week.
‘He understood,’ said Delaney, mentioning the soccer that had become ‘a bit poor’, ‘drifting attendances’, and the need for a ‘new energy’.
McCarthy brings that, but no matter how good he is, he will supply little more than a shortterm lift.
Delaney and Dokter talked about the new circumstances in wholly enthusiastic terms, of course, with Dokter declaring that ‘the future is bright’.
He sees the installation of McCarthy and the positioning of Kenny as his successor in terms of connecting the various teams from underage level to the senior side.
That makes sense, but it is the speed with which this new approach was shaped that has taken so many aback.
The most obvious implication is for McCarthy, of course. He could be Ireland’s most successful manager between now and July 2020, and that will be him done.
He was asked about the possibility of not wanting to relinquish his job. ‘I probably won’t but I’ll have no option,’ he barked back.
Keane was not on speaking duties but McCarthy spoke about him, revealing that it was Keane who contacted him about becoming involved, and then announcing that he should be part of the succession in two years’ time.
It was an afternoon that swung between yesterday and tomorrow, from Delaney’s determination to imagine a bright future, to the fact that one of McCarthy’s most compelling attributes is the man he once was, as both a player and a manager.
Whether he can recapture the successes he enjoyed managing Ireland between 1996 and 2002 will matter in the strict sense of Ireland getting to Euro 2020.
But it won’t determine his future: that has already been decided.
So has Kenny’s, and that is what made the day seem so odd.
It is good planning to have systems in place that are not entirely contingent on results, but Ireland now appear to have a strategy in place in which, for the next 18 months, results are irrelevant.
This could turn out to be judicious business, but nobody can have a clue about that.
Kenny could be taking over a demoralised side worn down by their own inadequacies, or he could be succeeding a manager the public don’t want to go.
As of yesterday, however, everyone was smiling. Both of the deals have been done and Captain Fantastic is back.
‘You always get it on a bit of a low,’ he said of replacing another manager in a job.
Stephen Kenny mightn’t. He gets it, no matter what.
That fact overwhelms everything, even the positivity being pumped through Lansdowne Road.