MAKING A POINT
Mackay describes how he proved Scottish football wrong by recovering from a ten-game winless run at Ross County, after an impromptu Ullapool trip helped revive his spirits
DOWNCAST after ten winless games in his new job, exhausted by a transfer window that required a complete team rebuild and stressed after a Covid outbreak that cost Ross County a place in the League Cup, Malky Mackay needed to escape.
Fortunately, the Highlands offers no shortage of road to roam.
One hour and 50 miles later, as he dangled his feet over Ullapool’s harbour wall and gazed out over Loch Broom, he felt the weight lift from his shoulders.
‘I’d just had enough,’ he reflects. ‘It was 6pm that night, I was frazzled and I’d had enough calls.
‘I’d had enough of Roy (MacGregor) asking: “How many more can we get in today?”.
‘I asked the club secretary about the seafood shack in Ullapool.
‘It was a beautiful night, so I jumped in the car and ten minutes outside Dingwall the signal on my phone fell.
‘I drove to Ullapool, parked up, ordered some prawns and scallops and sat with my feet over the harbour wall with my phone off.
‘I watched the world go by for an hour and decompressed. Then I jumped back in the car and went back to the madhouse.’
Next Saturday, Mackay will turn 50 and he’s learning that there really are advantages to not living in a goldfish bowl. Born and raised in Glasgow and a veteran of managerial assignments in the capitals of Wales and England, he has only ever known city life.
Yet, there is something of the Highlands in his blood. Perhaps that’s why he’s connected with MacGregor; club chairman, energy entrepreneur and a standard-bearer for the north of Scotland.
He explains: ‘Roy talks about having a cause. Historically, the Highlanders were put upon, turned down for jobs. Roy was told he would never have a top-notch business if his head office was in Inverness, that he needed to get to the Central Belt.
‘Stubborn Highlander, he decided to prove that wrong.
‘My grandfather was from Harris and my grandmother from Portmahomack. My dad is a Queen’s Park man all his days, but bizarrely enough his middle name is Dingwall!’
Mackay’s status as an outsider also appealed to MacGregor.
When Mackay lost his job as Cardiff manager in controversial circumstances in 2013, MacGregor quietly reached out and offered him a route back into the game.
When he stepped away from his role as the Scottish FA’s performance director in 2020, another pitch was made.
‘Roy called, not long after I was sacked at Cardiff, and said: “Come on up out the way for a wee while and be the manager here”.
‘At the time, I just couldn’t, for family reasons. We had another conversation not long after I left the SFA but, again, it was not the right time.
‘In the summer, he phoned again and we met at his place at Gleneagles — me, Roy and (chief executive) Steven Ferguson.
‘Listening to Roy, I knew this would be a task. All the big clubs are back in the Premiership and we were going to be seen as the minnows. But why not? I have no ego.’
He has, though, required a thick skin to cope with the inevitable fallout from his appointment. Just as there was resistance to his joining the SFA so a section of the County fanbase objected to his arrival on account of the offensive text messages that were leaked around the time of his departure from Cardiff.
Importantly — especially set against other ongoing situations at Raith Rovers and beyond — Mackay owned his mistakes, showed remorse and underwent equality and diversity training, a fact that gained him subsequent career support from the Kick It Out campaign group.
He and MacGregor rode out that initial backlash but it did not help in those early unsettled weeks when he was trying to put a team together and couldn’t buy a win. Now, with his side sitting eight points clear of St Johnstone, they are closer to fourth place than the bottom of the league table.
Mackay can survey it all from a perspective that just wasn’t available that day he high-tailed it to Ullapool.
‘There were lots of things going on at the start,’ he says. ‘There was criticism regarding the 16 players that were leaving. Some were fans’ favourites, some were favourites of themselves.
‘The club also had to deal with (the reaction to) me coming into the club. That’s something I don’t gloss over.
‘Then we got Covid in the building. There were histrionics and we were docked six points in the League Cup, which nobody has suffered since.
‘I lost my first-team coach Stuart Taylor to Hamilton.
‘It was mental because I was trying to build a team before the end of August when the games had already started.
‘We had a hell of a start, playing the top five clubs in the country so we went ten without a win and the whole of Scottish football was looking at me thinking you’re going to last two minutes and they shouldn’t have hired you in the first place.
‘We weren’t playing badly, we just needed to tweak a few things.
‘We now look like a team who can compete against most in the league.’
In Regan Charles-Cook, one of the few players retained last summer, Mackay has the league’s top goalscorer at his disposal.
Yet, the winger is hardly a one-man show. Joseph Hungbo, brought in on loan from Mackay’s former London employers Watford, gives the attack balance.
Hungbo is one of six players borrowed from south of the border — a deliberate strategy that required a hard sell.
‘I sat down with my assistant Don Cowie — who I already knew from Cardiff, Watford and Wigan, and we talked about how we needed a real turnover in the squad. Twenty were out of contract and only four stayed.
‘That was good for the culture of this club. We looked at about 60 different players, mostly from an English base.
‘We put together a welcome pack which details everything from the post office, to schools, to areas to live, coffee shops and restaurants.
‘The standing joke was that the population of Inverness was growing by the week from 50,000 until the point where I was telling players 100,000 lived in Inverness! And that the airport was on the doorstep and flew to Dubai, that Dingwall was two minutes over the bridge from Inverness, when it’s actually 12 miles.
‘But once you get players up here they invariably think it’s fantastic.’
Although he has managed in England’s Premier League, Mackay still remains connected to the roots that saw him turn out part-time for Queen’s Park (where Malky Snr remains a club director) while working for the Bank of Scotland.
His four years at the SFA also broadened his horizons.
‘I know how lucky I am to be in football,’ he says. ‘I really enjoyed the four years I had in governance, I was proud to be the performance director in Scotland.
‘I am fortunate enough to still work for UEFA and FIFA, for whom I am mentoring two technical directors. The Slovenian Technical Director and bizarrely enough the Mongolian technical director. By Zoom!
‘I have also had a few good conversations with the Western Samoan technical director, Jess Ibrom, who is making really good strides.’
As a succession of managers from the cup-winning Jim McIntyre through to the fire-fighting John Hughes will tell you, MacGregor is quite capable of being ruthless.
But having worked under Vincent Tan at Cardiff, Mackay has seen things that pushed the boundaries of boardroom dictatorship. ‘There’s a stability at the club,’ he adds. ‘Roy is a self-made local man. It’s not a foreign billionaire from the other side of the world where you never know what is going to happen, whether the strip is going to change.
‘There is no in-fighting on the board, two or three people tussling for power which I have seen. It is not on the verge of administration, which I was involved in at Watford.
‘The strap line is that Ross County is more than football club, it is an entity for the community.’
Once the season is done, Mackay plans to enjoy a longer road trip. ‘I’m going to get my mates up in the summer and do the North Coast 500 drive,’ he adds.
‘Even Jeremy Clarkson admits it’s the best drive in the world...’
I sat at the harbour wall with prawns and scallops. Then I went back to the madhouse