Mick McCarthy working wonders with cut price Tractor Boys

Even now in this country that he used to captain and manage with such pride, we still don’t or can’t give Mick McCarthy due credit.

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.