The future can wait, we owe Mick McCarthy another spin
We’re not getting Jurgen Sanchez Peppo. There is to be no up-and-coming ‘holistic’ European gaffer with a big idea.
No mysterious philosopher who split the footballing atom one day in his bath, discovering how to play the low block and the high press at the same time by using his keeper as both advanced libero and false six.
There wasn’t time to find a Jurgen Sanchez Peppo. Since a man is urgently needed to watch on while balls are pulled from glass bowls in Dublin next week.
So it will be Mick.
And maybe it should be Mick.
We owe Mick.
After all, we once cast him as relic of a failed Ireland — an outside toilet, two-channel charlatan piggybacking on the rage of the only man in the country who demanded more. All because Mick mislaid isotonic drinks and miscounted Spaniards.
Eventually, we found out that demanding more all the time would bring its own problems and we relaxed a bit again. Though it was too late for Mick, who might now be clocking up 22 years of modest growth and soft landings, if we hadn’t opted for boom and bust and joy and recrimination.
Yeah, we owe Mick another spin on the merry-go-round. If one warring party in the nation’s bitterest conflict got to entertain us in press conferences for five years, it’s only fair the other gets to arch those eyebrows and roll out again his old grumpy bastard routine.
Unfortunately for Mick, he will come back to a place that has changed once more. He will come back to Rugby Country.
A place convinced that anyone can win a World Cup by learning off a few set plays, reciting some jargon about the process, and building an unlimited army of world-class players in school gyms for a few grand a term.
This high-achieving environment could be an unforgiving one for a man once accused of failing to prepare and preparing to fail.
On the brighter side, he comes back to a place beguiled by the most rudimentary acts of elbow grease.
A place where heroes are deified for falling on a loose ball or rooting and clawing at a prone Kiwi until the ref blows for an offence nobody understands. A place where kids no longer dream of top-corner volleys or bicycle kicks, rather of rummaging around in a ruck until somebody gets ‘pinged’.
So it shouldn’t be all that hard to put something together that entertains us.
Mick is the obvious choice, the convenient option, though it may not be quite as obvious if you were to lay the CVs of every football manager in the world side by side.
His calling card over the past dozen years has been modest results with limited resources, with poor players. That makes him the perfect candidate, in many eyes.
Though having been reminded constantly by their previous two managers just how poor they are, do our players really need to know we are now recruiting specifically to cater for their poverty?
But Mick is a realist and a pragmatist and will be given every opportunity to be realistic and pragmatic.
He’ll be good-humoured and decent, won’t constantly put his medals on the table, and won’t needlessly fall out with players, except maybe his best player.
He won’t carry the burden of philosophy. “My philosophy is winning more games than you lose,” he once said, when pressed on his footballing beliefs.
We have seen Ireland play bad football under Mick McCarthy and we have seen them play good football. Perhaps recent years have shown us the man in the middle of the field demanding more was given too much credit for engineering the good times.
This won’t be some grand experiment.
“We are not going to be the next Barcelona,” Mick assured Ipswich fans on day one in that job. We, too, can take that as read.
And maybe that’s for the best. Perhaps our struggling players have enough on their plates without setting off on an existential voyage to identify The Ireland Way.
Mick will just get on with it. Perhaps the best he can do is carry with him those fine words of wisdom from our greatest footballing sage, Gilesy, and take each game on its merits. Play when we can play and shut up shop when playing is out of the question.
The prevailing climate should be mild enough. Tony O’Donoghue will relish a friendly face. Dunphy is gone off the telly. And we owe Mick. It will take a lot to get the bacon slicer whirring.
It’s sounding a lot like the right call.
The nagging doubt is the sheer life-affirming joy among Ipswich fans when they finally unseated him.
In the London Times, Mark Souster spoke for his people:
“What they and I would welcome is someone to come in who is young and ambitious, understands that philosophy (The Ipswich Way), realises the potential in the squad, and has the ability to play attractive football, is tactically adroit and clear of thought.
“In short, someone to bring back the excitement and joy of following Ipswich Town. To make us care again. Surely that is not too much to ask.”
He might have been speaking for us all. But then look at The Ipswich Way now — the way down.
Perhaps we can hold off on The Ireland Way. We’re already hanging on for Michael Obafemi and Troy Parrott and Lee O’Connor and Adam Idah and Caoimhín Kelleher. Why not lumber these kids with that voyage of discovery too, on top of everything else?
The future can wait. The past is owed another shot.
Strong wind of change
Musical chairs at the top of Irish football may have distracted us for a couple of days, but it is impossible to escape the seismic events of last week, or to ignore the whiff of change that swept through the highest levels of the sporting world.
In the end, analysis of darts ‘fartgate’ proved inconclusive. We don’t know for sure if this was a case of ‘dealt it, smelt it’, with Wesley Harms in the dock, or ‘denied it, supplied it’, with Gary Anderson the guilty party.
A security guard working front of stage at the Grand Slam of Darts has since become the third man accused of kicking up the stink.
Whoever it was, for his pursuit of the truth in the post-match interviews, Arjan van der Giessen has set new standards for investigative sports broadcasting.
And in his invitation to “put your finger up my arse, there’ll be no smell there,” former world champion Gary Anderson has shown sportsmen the world over how to swiftly put an end to a line of inquiry.
