Mick McCarthy insists authority not undermined by one-shot deal

Critics of the plan for Stephen Kenny to take over the Ireland job in 2020 are already damning Mick McCarthy as an interim manager, a caretaker gaffer, and - because the players have learned his time of departure at his time of his arrival - a leader who has had his authority undermined before a ball has even been kicked.

McCarthy hears out the rap sheet without any change in expression, then offers a short but firm response.

How will Mick McCarthy feel if he does well and then he has to stand aside for Stephen Kenny in 2020? @corktod asked the question. Mick may head for China..... #rtesoccer pic.twitter.com/5tz4rzxPIX

— RTÉ Soccer (@RTEsoccer) November 25, 2018

“Not for the European Championships, which I’m in charge of,” he says. “Anybody wants to say, ‘Well, he won’t be here in 2020 when we’re off to Qatar, so we’ll chill, we’ll not bother’ - how many games are they going to play? I don’t think it undermines my authority one bit.”

That Mick McCarthy has agreed to the novel terms and conditions of his second spell as Ireland manager is, he readily admits, a sign that he is not just older but also wiser than he was when he first took over the reins in 1996.

“Absolutely. If you’d said this to me at 36 I’d have thought…well, you know what I’d have thought,” he told a group of print journalists, some of whom he knows of long-standing, after completing his official unveiling at the Aviva Stadium yesterday. “But look, I want to do the job for the next two years and I have absolutely no problem with the arrangement.”

McCarthy says that the finite nature of the offer was made crystal clear to him when he met with FAI CEO John Delaney and High Performance Director Ruud Dokter in England on Friday. “That was put to me straight away so I knew that from the off,” he confirms.

But he doesn’t mind admitting that he had initially come to the table assuming that any deal on offer would be along more traditional lines.

“I thought I might get two terms,” he says. ”Who doesn’t want two terms? But the reality is that I think that international managers should be given one term.

“Perhaps they should be given the chance to take it into the next term, if they do well. But I knew that wasn’t the case so I accepted it and was fine with it.”

He also reveals that his previous experience as Ireland manager – and how his time in charge might have ended differently in 2002 - loomed large in his consideration of the new deal.

“I’ve seen it before, I should have resigned after the World Cup,” he admits.

“I’d had a good World Cup and I’d had five years and I should have gone and got a job elsewhere. I think whether you’ve done, good, bad or indifferent, you might as well shift yourself. But I didn’t, and it went on too long and we lose two games and suddenly I’m walking for a different reason.

“No, I’m happy with this arrangement and relationship. If I do well and we qualify, there’ll be something else for me down the line.“If we do badly and don’t qualify, you guys wouldn’t want me, nobody would. So it’s not such a bad thing. And good luck to Stephen. I looked at his list of achievements – pretty damn good. And I think it would be great for Irish football if he could take over a team that’s doing well and progressing.”

McCarthy dismisses the suggestion that having his successor waiting in the wings only serves to intensify the pressure on the top man from the off.

“No, because I know I’m going. If we lose the first two games, let me tell you, they’re not going to remove me and put Stephen in. Because he’s unlikely to qualify and he’ll be tarnished with that brush. He wouldn’t want to take it. They might blame me for the first two defeats but if we don’t qualify it’s Stephen Kenny that’s got the job. So I don’t see it as added pressure at all. I said already: you get 11 months as a Championship manager. That’s pretty much the average tenure. I’m getting two years.”

He also maintains that once he got his head around the concept, he wasn’t tempted to respond with a take or leave it gambit of his own.

“Not really because they might have told me to leave it, and I wanted the job,” he says with a smile. “They could have said, ‘see you’ and they’ll get somebody else. They might have gone and given it to Stephen. And I wanted it. Honestly, it’s a real honour, privilege and pleasure to be getting it back. Yes, I had all those questions: ‘Well, what happens if I do well, if we qualify?’ And I squared the circle in my own head. I’ll get another job elsewhere, I’ll go and do something else, and let Stephen come in and do it. I hope I’m leaving him with a good team.”

But he makes no bones about the fact that he regards his main goal as delivering qualification to Euro 2020. The man who led Ireland to a World Cup narrowly missed out doing likewise in the European Championships. “94 minutes and Macedonia and all that,” he grimaces. “I’d like to go to a Euros.”

Just don’t make the mistake of taking that to mean he thinks he has ‘unfinished business’ here..

“Can I clear something up about this? It’s the biggest load of pony I’ve ever heard. I haven’t got unfinished business – I did my business here. I did it for five years and, however anybody thinks about it, I did it reasonably well. And I didn’t leave because we had a bad team or created a bad team or we had bad results. I’d a bad start to the next qualifiers – we lost two games. So it’s new business.”

New business about to be done by someone who scoffs at the perception that, in football terms, he’s an old fogey.

“Far from it. I haven’t lost any of my drive or my ambition to be a success and to have good teams and play good football. It’s a bit of a misconception, a bit like (Neil) Warnock, he’s got tagged with that. Now he’s ten years older than me, he’s 70. He’s still in the Premier League and fighting tooth and nail. If anybody has seen me at the sideline over the last five years, nobody is thinking I’ve packed it in and want to put my slippers on.”

In fact, he reckons that the passing of the years has only been to his benefit, both as a man and a manager.

“I’ve accepted the fact that I’m going to take a job just for two years. I’ve a bit more perspective on life. I’ve three grandkids – that’s helped. I’ve had three jobs since I’ve left. All the experience that I’ve got and all the decisions that I’ve made, everything that has gone on in my career on and off the pitch that I’ve had to deal with, it all helps. I’m certainly a bit more thoughtful, a bit calmer.”

A pause. A smile.

“But you can judge that in March. You might disagree with me.”

After leaving Ipswich last season, how long was it before he began missing the training pitch?

“When I jet-washed the jet washer,” he says, to laughter. “Once I jet washed it and it was clean and I put it away, I knew it was time to go back to work. I’ve had other offers in this time. I wasn’t waiting for this at all. I’ve said it all along that (I would be ready) when the right job came up, whatever the right job was. This did come up and I think it is the right job for me.”

And so, one more time with feeling, he is asked: how will he really feel about having to walk away if his Irish team have done well at the Euro 2020 finals?

“It will be tough, won’t it,” he reflects. “But that will be a luxury problem if I have that problem in 2020.”