Wow. So it was GBP£10k and not the GBP£12.5k I quoted. He’s a fantastic manager and an even better person.
There is a great interview by your pal Vincent Hogan in the Indo a few weeks back with David McGoldrick where he spoke brilliantly about Big Mick. I will dig it out as well
On Thursday night in Glasgow, David McGoldrick passed his first rite of initiation to life within an Irish dressing-room.
He sang.
Daryl Murphy warned him it was coming, so his preparation had been fine-tuned by the time the hush descended. On the team flight to Scotland, he’d familiarized himself with the lyrics to R Kelly’s ‘I Believe I can Fly’.
Voice or no voice, there are certain things the modern footballer must do now and this one is a staple. Presenting yourself before the most pitiless tribunal seen since the Salem witch trials.
It was the calm before what would prove a bruising night for all in the east-end of Glasgow.
“I’d been waiting for it, because I was told the first night I’d have to do it” he says smiling now. "To be fair, it’s common at most clubs. It can be a bit cringing to watch sometimes, but I tell you it’s nerve-wracking when you’re doing it.
“I think it went down quite well though. The boys were clapping and you feel accepted when you do it. I got high fives from Robbie Keane anyway, saying ‘Well done!’.”
Tonight, McGoldrick hopes to ratchet that acceptance to another level.
He makes his international debut at the age of 26, a statistic his Ipswich Town club-mate, Stephen Hunt, recently acknowledged might make some people suspicious. A few years back, Hunt - then at Reading - had an on-pitch confrontation with McGoldrick - then at Southampton - and, out of it, drew his own unflattering conclusions
The Waterford man recently referred to “the gold tooth and air of toughness” of a player who has spent much of his career working the graveyard shift of pressured loan spells at clubs like Notts County, Bournemouth and Port Vale.
Until just over two years ago, McGoldrick’s career stats spoke of a journeyman striker, struggling to find a settled home. But his 2012 switch to Coventry then brought seventeen goals, the second highest tally in League One, English football’s third tier.
That form triggered a move to Ipswich in January of last year, another loan at first, where his form was good enough to prompt last August’s £5 million bid from new Premier League arrivals, Leicester City. Ipswich rejected the offer, pricing McGoldrick at £8 million. Negotiations went no further.
Hunt believes now that Ipswich’s obstinacy was wise.
Recently he wrote in his Sunday Independent column about “a class act” footballer who “doesn’t think as strikers do”, a player - he said - “who can keep possession all day and shoot with either foot”. Tonight, the Dublin public gets to make an assessment for themselves and McGoldrick is determined not to disappoint.
His journey to this moment has been unorthodox and, occasionally, trying. A Nottingham boy, he was adopted as a baby and only discovered the Irish connection (his maternal grandfather was Irish), years later, from a meeting with his birth mother. McGoldrick assumed that his adopted status rendered that connection irrelevant as far as international football was concerned.
[B]But when Mick McCarthy received a call from Gordon Strachan at the end of last season, enquiring about McGoldrick’s nationality, everything suddenly changed.
Yesterday, he reflected "When Mick got that call, I told him that I’d no Scottish roots but that I knew I had some Irish. As soon as I told him that, it seemed to set the ball rolling.
“From the very start, he was pulling me in to his office every so often, asking me for an update. He kept telling me ‘Get it over the line, you’ll love the Irish set-up and it’ll be a great experience for you.’ He’s always talking about how much he loved his time with Ireland and I’ve no doubt the first person I’ll speak to when I get back to the club after this will be Mick, asking how I got on.”[/B]
“I mean I took it as a big compliment that Gordon Strachan was asking about me, but playing for Scotland never entered my head.”
Tracking down the necessary paperwork proved a challenge and McGoldrick is particularly indebted to the work put into that process by FAI employee, Mary O’Brien.
“It’s been very difficult” he says now. "It was going on for a long time. Mary was chasing everything down, all the paperwork I’d been sending over with my family history. Even digging up stuff I didn’t know about. If I was left to do it on my own, I don’t think I’d have been able to get to the bottom of it.
“It was a huge relief when the passport came through because, at different points, I was thinking it wasn’t going to happen.”
He describes as “surreal” the Saturday evening phone-call he then took from Martin O’Neill, confirming his inclusion in the Irish squad for these games against Scotland and the US.
“He makes you feel really welcome” McGoldrick says of the Irish manager. “Me being a Nottingham boy, he was telling me about when he used play with Forest. And I know that he’s been to quite a few of my games. So, for him to bring me here now, must mean he likes me in some shape or form.”
O’Neill, presumably, has been particularly impressed by the venomous combination McGoldrick has been forging at Ipswich with Waterford-man, Murphy, his room-mate this week.
The pair struck for 18 goals in 22 appearances together before McGoldrick was struck down with a partial medial ligament tear in February.
[B]After what felt a small lifetime chasing his tail as a professional, McGoldrick credits Ipswich boss, McCarthy, with transforming his outlook as a professional. In five years on the books of Southampton, he never quite established himself as a regular first-teamer and a 2009 move to Forest served only to shatter his confidence.
“I think, as a forward, the most important thing is playing every week” says McGoldrick. "When I was at Forest, I was playing one game, then missing three. Maybe getting a game away from home, up front on my own. It was hard work. I’m not making excuses.
"Then all the loan moves, you’ve got to get your bearings very quickly. You’re on trial straight away.
"But it feels like the last couple of years is really the start of my career. Confidence is everything for a striker. If you’re not confident, you tend to be just shooting for the sake of it. But with confidence, you’re always looking for the net. You tend to do things more naturally.
"The first minute I walked in at Ipswich, Mick said to me that I would be the main man. For him to say that, I just thought ‘Wow, this guy’s got a lot of faith in me!’ From that moment, I don’t think he’s ever dropped me.
“And I’m as confident now as I’ve ever been.”[/B]
McGoldrick admits that missing out on a move to the Premier League did momentarily unsettle him last August.
“I think the bid went in on the Wednesday before the deadline Monday and it kind of all finished that Sunday” he remembers. "So I knew on deadline day, it wasn’t going to happen. That Monday and Tuesday, if I’m honest, my head still wasn’t around it. I was still a bit upset.
"But on the Wednesday I got back to training, Mick got me in his office and said ‘Look, it’s gone now, you’re going to have to get your head down. It is what it is.’ And I’m the kind of person who can do that. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
“The next game was on the Saturday and I scored. That was important because I wanted to go out there and show it wasn’t playing on my mind.”
“I’ve never played in the Premier League, so it would have been great. But we’re fourth in the Championship with Ipswich at the moment, so who knows?”
That East Anglian dressing-room is populated by a strong Irish contingent now, not just McCarthy, Murphy and Hunt, but Conor Sammon and Jay Tabb too. McGoldrick says, to a man, they had “only good things” to say about his pursuit of an Irish jersey.
Glasgow was a sobering experience last Friday, McGoldrick admitting to feelings of “devastation” after in the Irish dressing-room.
His hopes tonight?
“Martin has told me to just be myself, that I’m here for a reason and not to be intimidated. It means a lot to me, because I’ve been working hard to get it over the line. It’s going to be a real honour.”
Legend:clap:
Ipswich Town boss Mick McCarthy admits he takes great pleasure in beating those that ‘sneer’ at and make ‘derogatory’ comments about his side.
The low-budget Blues – a collection of free transfers, a non-league bargain and academy graduates – are fourth in the Championship table heading into this lunchtime’s televised clash at Charlton (12.15pm).
Just one defeat in 14 has forced the rest of the division to take their promotion credentials very seriously, but that hasn’t stopped opposition managers resorting to sour grapes after running into the Suffolk side.
Watford manager Slavisa Jokanovic referred to Town’s ‘physicality and long balls’ after his side’s 1-0 defeat at Portman Road (despite the home side dominating possession), while Bournemouth boss Eddie Howe bemoaned his team not being awarded a penalty and insisted Ipswich ‘didn’t deserve’ to claim a share of the spoils in a 2-2 draw at Dean Court last weekend.
[B]“It makes it all the more sweeter when we p*** the opposition manger off doesn’t it?” said McCarthy. “There are some of them who think they’re a little bit above us, maybe better footballers who stroke it about a bit more, and it really irks them when the comprehensive lads come and rough a few schoolboys up. They don’t like it do they?
“It just gives me greater satisfaction when we beat them. Even more so when they whinge about it afterwards.”
He continued: “What do they think we’re going to do? Let’s just have a nice pretty game of football and see who wins it? It doesn’t work like that.[/B]
“I think there are a few clubs that look down their nose at us and think they’re better than us. It’s derogatory sometimes the way they react.
“It surprises me. Solid Championship teams are not to be sneered at. Burnley were one of those and they got promoted. They had a couple of top strikers, but, let me tell you, everything behind that was really disciplined and organised.”
We are battering Bolton but just can’t get the go ahead goal. Win and we go top
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.
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.
© Irish Examiner Ltd. All rights reserved
Slab has put us one up at home to Middlesborough:pint:
2-0 now, Jay Tabb with the second on the stroke of half time
We are away to third placed Brentford on St Stpehen’s Day and at home to Derby two games later. Two massive games for us
We really look very solid at the moment especially at home. 4 points from those two and i would be happy. Mick will be expecting 6.
Two wonderfully crafted goals today. We are playing some lovely patient football at the moment
Another one for Slab. 1-0 away to Brentford.
Slab at the double.
Unbelievable scenes.
slab was criminally underused by that arsehole lennon
i actually spent a bit of yesterday stressing about this game:oops:
Slab and big Mick 
1 up at home to Charlton. Tommy Smith with the goal
Cruising to a 2-0 win. Slab with yet another
Ireland’s David McGoldrick smashed in a third in injury time to seal another comfortable win.
yyyeeessssssssssssss