Mick McCarthy might be missing magic but he must make most of talent
As The Who once put it: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
It hasn’t taken long to adjust to Mick McCarthy’s second coming as Ireland manager. He might be older and wiser but, for the journalists who have also been here before, reacquaintance with his characteristic blend of wit, candour and withering blasts of exasperation — all delivered in the unmistakable accent which has launched a thousand imitators — can make it seem like he hasn’t been away at all.
The worry ahead of his one-shot European Championship campaign, however, is that when you look at the player options available to him, it’s as if Martin O’Neill hasn’t gone away either.
Injuries aside, and give or take a James Collins here or a Cyrus Christie there, the bulk of the squad for the opening games against Gibraltar and Georgia is the same as the one which flat-lined in O’Neill’s last year in charge, the final match of his reign — a bleak scoreless draw in Denmark during which the visitors didn’t have a single shot on target — making it four games in succession without an Irish goal and, across the whole of 2018, just the one win in nine.
McCarthy has often been heard to crack that the initials on his tracksuit do not stand for Merlin The Magician. But while it would be unjust to the decent talent within the squad to suggest that a miracle worker is what’s required, it will still be a tribute to all McCarthy’s natural, as opposed to supernatural, managerial abilities if, up against the clock, he can help transform 2018’s serial under-performers into this year’s qualifiers for Euro 2020.
He has to do it too without the silver lining to last year’s cloud. Even when O’Neill was running out of road in Aarhus in November but before the axe actually fell the following day, he might still have been hoping against hope that Declan Rice would come through with some badly needed good news for Irish football.
Sadly, it wasn’t to be, with the seismic tremors from the player’s decision to defect to England still reverberating this week as McCarthy made clear his anger at the insistence by soccer writers that Rice should still be given the Irish Young Player Of The Year Award even after he had switched allegiance.
Since I wasn’t on the panel, I won’t presume to speak for colleagues who were, but I can certainly understand the desire to stick to their original selection which, based entirely on merit, most everyone agrees had been an absolute no-brainer after the year that was. I also accept that, in the light of Rice’s defection, the award looks, as McCarthy put it, embarrassing.
But I’m not so sure it would have been a whole lot less awkward if word had leaked out — as it surely would have — that, behind closed doors, a decision had been made to basically overturn the outcome of a vote which had been made in good faith and for the best of reasons. Apart from being a pretty dubious exercise in pretence, it would also have looked, in my opinion, like a decision motivated almost entirely by spite.
Anyway, what’s done is done although, if Declan Rice fulfils his undoubted potential in a white shirt, there will always be something there to remind us of what might have been, just as sympathy for Jack Grealish’s plight last weekend would have co-existed, for those watching from this side of the water, with a freshly acute sense of disappointment that his sublime talents too are no longer available to the green cause.
When we talk of changing the fortunes of the Irish team, it’s hardly an exaggeration to suggest that if McCarthy was able to call on Rice and Grealish — the former as a defensive midfielder, the latter as a Number 10 — the impact would be transformative.
But, even as I write, I can almost hear McCarthy’s voice in my ear berating gloomy hacks for focusing on the players he hasn’t got rather than the ones he has. And, as suggested earlier, it’s not as if there isn’t quality in the squad, even if nothing like the abundance of it that we’ve been lucky to have at various stages in the past.
Despite Stephen Ward’s retirement and Ciaran Clark’s absence through injury, the manager is still well-served at the back, even to the extent that he faces a selection headache in trying to accommodate two Premier League players, his captain Seamus Coleman and Matt Doherty, in the same side.
In midfield, the loss to injury of goal-scoring Alan Browne is a blow — McCarthy hinted the other day that the Preston player would have been in with a real shout of starting against Gibraltar — but his fellow Corkman Conor Hourihane, performing well for Aston Villa, should get another chance to prove his worth, while a recurring hope will be that McCarthy can get the best out of the likes Jeff Hendrick and Robbie Brady as the campaign unfolds. James McClean and Shane Long are two other stalwarts who, if they deliver consistently, can have big roles to play, though McCarthy’s remarks about Long this week suggested that, understandably enough, he now sees the Southampton man’s value more as a maker than a taker of chances.
Also upfront, we are still waiting to see if Seanie Maguire can come good in a green shirt or if 27-year-old new boy James Collins can make short work of the gap between League Two and international football. And, in one notable departure from the previous regime. McCarthy has wasted no time in restoring David McGoldrick to the fold, a player he clearly believes has a lot more to offer Ireland than he has shown in the past.
The standard criticism all through the last year under Martin O’Neill was that it was the gaffer, not the players, who was mainly at fault. With change in the dugout not mirrored by change in the personnel on the pitch, that’s a consensus which, starting next weekend, is set to be put to the test.
