Mick McCarthy working wonders with cut price Tractor Boys
Almost midway through another football season and we’ve been far more preoccupied with Roy Keane’s coming and goings as an assistant manager with an English football club, or a book in which he recounts managing Sunderland and Ipswich Town, and speculating about whether he’ll ever get a head coaching job with Championship teams such as them again, when all along his old acquaintance/nemesis/boss/teammate is once more quietly but surely excelling in such a job, helping clean up some of the mess Roy left and/or inherited at Portman Road.
In case you haven’t noticed, Ipswich are just a point off the top two spots in the Championship. They’ve lost only one of their last 17 games. In a league and a time in which former title-winning giants like Nottingham Forest, Blackburn Rovers and Leeds United have splashed out so much cash they’ve been charged with violating financial fair play laws, Ipswich and McCarthy have been outperforming them all.
The scale of that achievement is probably exemplified by the fact that while Forest could — or at least did — fork out £5.5 million on a striker called Britt Assombalonga, the side McCarthy put out on the pitch against Neil Lennon’s Bolton last Saturday cost just £10,000.
That outlay was for full-back Tyrone Mings, a former Southampton trainee he bought from non-league Chippenham two years ago within a month of taking over a job that had proved to be too much for Paul Jewell as well as Keane. Last September Crystal Palace tried to sign Mings. Now Arsenal reportedly have him in their sights. Yet Mings’ development is only one measure of McCarthy’s capacity to recruit and coach.
The rest of his side are all Bosmans or loanees, or in the case of Kiwi-born Tommy Smith and 18-year-old Teddy Bishop, products of the club’s academy.
Jay Tabb, a 30-year-old journeyman that played 10 times for the Ireland U21s, was picked up upon being released by Reading, while the Hunt brothers have also had playing spells with that club. Other members of the biggest Irish contingent outside of Everton that McCarthy has signed up either on loan or on a free include Sean St Leger, Paul Green and Conor Sammon while perhaps the outstanding example of McCarthy’s capacity to revive and improve a player’s game and career is Daryl Murphy.
The Waterford man is 31 now and almost a decade in the British game upon being first brought over by McCarthy to Sunderland. Already he’s on 13 goals for this season, as much as he has ever scored in a campaign, and he attributes a good deal of that to his manager.
“Mick’s man-management skills are the best I have ever worked with,” Murphy said recently. “You could be doing well but might make a few mistakes in games and he will call you in to tell you how you could be doing better. That is definitely his best skill. He gets the best out of players.”
Isn’t that probably the biggest aspect and challenge of managing and coaching? And it’s something McCarthy has been doing for years. For sure his first qualifying campaign with Ireland involved possibly too much learning in the job (years later he’d reflect and admit that he was far too young and raw to succeed Jack Charlton). But in that time he blooded a wave of young players.
,Hhe was exceptional at managing other pros, especially your solid, even journeyman pro. It’s a skill and a task that Keane himself has had extreme difficulty with but that McCarthy has continued to excel at, be at Sunderland, Wolves and now Ipswich.
Through it all he has maintained a dignity and stoicism that wasn’t always apparent in, but undoubtedly informed by, his time with Ireland. And it hasn’t been lost on his peers.
“He’s cut from granite,” Stuart Pearce would remark before Ipswich visited Nottingham Forest recently. “I like the fact he’s so even-handed. I always put the local station on as I leave town just to listen to his interviews so I could have a chuckle down the M5!
“Anyone who has stayed in this game for the length of time he has, you have to admire. We are a wonderful nation for writing people off but I think you do that at your peril.”
Britain is not alone. Some of Ireland’s best writers have written McCarthy off; it particularly grated with this observer how an updated and inferior version of I, Keano depicted McCarthy as some pathetic, crucified reject. Certainly the chairman of a Premiership football club could do worse than follow Pearce’s advice and sit and wait for a proven manager like a McCarthy rather than a volatile gamble like a certain Corkman. He’s learned from his mistakes, something you hope that some day we’ll be able to say for sure about Roy, and made the most of the second-chances and experience he’s gained.
McCarthy has been the victim of some shoddy revisionism in Irish football. He was a genuinely a fantastic captain, someone whose capacity to communicate with and lead a defensive line and team was seriously underestimated by some who disparaged that Captain Fantastic reputation. Now he’s entitled to some complementary revisionism. Even Eamon Dunphy would now accept that of all Ireland’s managers over the last 30 years, McCarthy had the national team playing the most attractive brand of football.
No one is more aware how fickle the Championship and indeed football is than McCarthy; he’s recently remarked that a few losses here and there and you could be dealing with relegation instead of promotion. But he also has enough self-awareness to also observe, “I’ve either been in the top five or six of the Championship or the bottom six of the Premier League in the past five or six years. If that’s my bag, being one of the top 25 managers in England, it’s not bad.”
Now that even Roy would accept that, it’s time we all here acknowledged it too.
