Two real football men are Mick and Neil Warnock . Decent skins
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You don’t forget shaking hands with Mick McCarthy. He locks eye contact. He puts the squeeze on. It’s a handshake that says “miner’s son from Barnsley” – which makes perfect sense when the whole idea, after all, is to introduce who you are.
He has always been old-school, Mick. Maybe it has been held against him over the years, but he has never tried to change the way he is. He doesn’t have the patience for cliches and jargon when a bit of straight-talking will do. He likes what he knows. Don’t be trying your luck in his company with any fancy talk of xG. Unless, of course, you are meaning the old Hyundai discontinued after 2005. And don’t expect him to buckle to peer pressure and involve himself in the blah-blah-bleurgh of social media.
Roy Keane, his old bete noire, succumbed recently by setting up an Instagram account. Nobody should expect McCarthy to follow. Not if you remember his response to one press-conference query about whether he could ever be tempted to dabble with Twitter. “Not a chance,” he said. “They should rename it Twatter, and anybody on it should be renamed. Too many tweets make a twat.”
He might have a point.
Maybe football, or life, was simpler when tweeting was something for sparrows, not humans, and trolls existed only in fairy tales. McCarthy is 62 now. He has been in the business for almost half a century and accrued a lot of knowledge in that time judging by his early work at Cardiff City and a renaissance that, at this rate, might even return him to the Premier League next season.
All of which is quite something bearing in mind a lot of Cardiff fans didn’t seem too thrilled when he was parachuted into the job last month. All the usual stuff about the football being dull, McCarthy being a dinosaur and it being another stop on the managerial merry-go-round.
Maybe there are followers of Celtic who also think their club should be more ambitious now McCarthy is being talked about as gettable, potentially, to divert to Scotland and become their new manager next season. But then again, they also seem to have underappreciated McCarthy at Ipswich when he couldn’t take the team up, operating with one of the lower budgets in the Championship, and came under pressure for being mid-table.
When McCarthy left Ipswich late in the 2017-18 season, they were 12th in the Championship and his critics celebrated. Ipswich were relegated just over a year later after finishing bottom of the 24-club division and have remained in League One since. Paul Lambert is now the one getting it in the neck(Ipswich are currently 10th, five points adrift of the play-offs) while McCarthy is showing that maybe he did know what he was doing, after all.
McCarthy has made a very promising start at Cardiff (Photo: Cardiff City FC/Getty Images)
Of his eight games in charge of Cardiff, six have been won and two drawn. Cardiff have climbed into the play-off positions and, approaching the business end of the season, are the Championship’s form side. Not bad for a manager who inherited a team that had lost six successive matches, dropping to 15th in the league, and who was appointed with the job spec to make sure they did not get relegated.
He is not everyone’s cup of tea, of course, and he is probably the first to admit that it is not easy for everyone to embrace a gruff old centre-half with a Yorkshire accent and a nose as crooked as Chesterfield’s spire. More and more, it is a PR-driven industry. And Mick isn’t a guy who cares for public relations. He has always preferred the comforts of a spit-and-sawdust pub to a Michelin-starred restaurant. He, in turn, suffers from an image problem – at least, in the eyes of some. The links to Celtic, I’m reliably informed, have some foundation.
This certainly feels like a reasonable time to show a bit of appreciation now he is approaching membership of what is known in his profession as the 1,000 Club.
McCarthy’s managerial career has taken in 993 games, to be precise. Today, it is Middlesbrough versus Cardiff and McCarthy will be in the opposite dugout to Neil Warnock, one of only three British managers currently in work (the others being Sam Allardyce and Roy Hodgson) who have already passed the 1,000-game mark.
McCarthy was 33 when he started, with a 1-0 win for Millwall over Port Vale on March 21, 1992. He always remembers being introduced to one of his wife’s friends and telling her he was Millwall’s player-manager (“how embarrassing,” came the reply). And, though it hasn’t always worked out exactly as he would have liked, it just needs a look through his CV to realise that the good outweighs the bad. Or to quote the man himself, that there have been only a few occasions when “it’s your backside on the bacon slicer.”
The first time I encountered him was on the Republic of Ireland beat before Keane’s walk-out shortly before the 2002 World Cup. To sum up that madness, India was reportedly on the verge of nuclear war with Pakistan but the Keane-McCarthy story still found its way onto the front page of the Delhi Times. And gradually it became clear that it was a popularity contest McCarthy could never win.
One story that got back to him was of Keane’s sympathisers in the Irish media punching the air when Switzerland scored their goals in the game at Lansdowne Road the following October that sent McCarthy to the guillotine.
There were mutinous chants of “Keano” from the crowd and boos when McCarthy appeared on the touchline. Street traders were selling T-shirts showing Keane and the political leader Michael Collins: “Two Irish heroes – both stabbed in the back.” It was lousy and vindictive considering McCarthy, lest it be forgotten, had taken a Keane-less Ireland to the last 16 of the World Cup that summer, drawing with Germany and eventually going out of the tournament in a penalty shoot-out, having not lost a match, against Spain.
Keane and McCarthy in 2001 (Photo: Lorraine O’Sullivan/INPHO via Getty Images)
Still, though, Ireland took him back for a second spell in 2019. It didn’t work out so well that time but he did win half of his 10 games and, as always, it was a lot more fun dealing with him than with some of the media-trained managers who prefer to see nothing and say even less.
Perhaps you remember the occasion (warning: not for those of a sensitive nature) for Wolverhampton Wanderers, in their 2008-09 Championship promotion season under McCarthy, when he was asked about his centre-half scoring an own goal 61 seconds into a 1-0 loss away to Reading.
“Fucking abysmal, that was what I fucking thought of it. Come on, let’s get to it, I’m trying my best here. What did I make of it? I thought it was the best bit of fucking football I’ve seen in a long time… Do me a favour! It was a crap start to a game. There you have it, can you print all that?
“Fucking rubbish, absolute tosh. Drivel. Shite. Bullshit. That’s what I thought of it. Did that help? I’m quite pleased, apart from the fact that’s given them the poxy result. I’m fucking livid about it – of course I am. So, there you have it.”
Then there was the occasion when his Ipswich side were playing at Leeds and conceded a late penalty.
Journalist: “Mick, some people might say that was two points dropped tonight.”
McCarthy: “Some people can fuck off.”
He was always very quotable. Just don’t be fooled into thinking there isn’t a sharp, inquisitive mind behind the comedic lines, the withering put-downs, the impenetrable stare and the image that seems to have followed him around since the Ireland days that he likes a pint and likes the craic but isn’t one, perhaps, for killer tactical insights.
McCarthy in charge of Wolves in January 2012 (Photo: Ian Walton/Getty Images)
As a player for Ireland, McCarthy never forgot Jack Charlton’s advice about the first secret of management. “Make sure you’re all inside the tent, pissing out,” Charlton told him. “Get rid of any fellow who’s outside the tent, pissing in.”
In other words, you have to build a spirit of togetherness. It is one of McCarthy’s strengths. His players, in the vast majority, tend to like him. It is why he generally — bar his two-month stay at APOEL in Cyprus at the turn of the year — stays longer in jobs (six years with Ireland, five at both Wolves and Ipswich, a month short of four with Millwall, a week shy of three with Sunderland) than is the norm in his industry.
Another tip: don’t use the word “quintessentially” if you are a player making a suggestion to him at half-time. Niall Quinn tried that on one occasion. “Anyone who uses the word ‘quintessentially’ during a half-time talk is talking crap,” came the response.
Richard Sadlier, another former Ireland international, tells a story about the time at the end of his playing career when he arranged to interview McCarthy for the Second Captains podcast. The conversation went well, until Sadlier returned home and realised, to his horror, that the tape had not worked. Apologetically, hugely embarrassed, he asked McCarthy if there was any way they could do it again.
A second interview was arranged. Then Sadlier got home and, absolutely mortified, realised the tape had malfunctioned again. It was McCarthy who insisted he was happy to do the interview a third time if it meant helping out one of his former players.
At Cardiff, they talk about the way McCarthy has transformed the mood at the club and, tactically, how he is far more savvy than many people appreciate. McCarthy decided initially to persevere with the formation favoured by predecessor Neil Harris. He switched to three at the back, with wing-backs, after going 2-0 down in his first match against Barnsley. They clawed it back to a 2-2 draw and have not looked back since.
Nor can the football be described as lumpen. As an old-fashioned centre-half, McCarthy will always want stout defending, but he has also encouraged his more attacking players to be adventurous and creative on the ball. Liverpool loanee Harry Wilson is one, Josh Murphy another. Murphy was on his way out in January after only three league starts up to Christmas before McCarthy came in and stopped him leaving on loan. The winger, restored to Cardiff’s first team, is now being talked about as a £6 million asset.
The question is how far McCarthy’s “stardust and work-rate” methodology can take them. Is promotion realistic? Or is this just a classic honeymoon period for a new manager and a bunch of players raising their performance because they were glad to be rid of the last guy?
All that can really be said for certain is that, in the coming weeks, McCarthy will clock up his 1,000th game as a manager and, for that alone, his career should be judged as a success.
McCarthy has a win percentage of 39.1, which puts him just above Allardyce (39.0), not far behind Warnock (40.2) and slightly further back from Hodgson (44.3). It has been a good innings, as they say back in Yorkshire, and it might even be the case that Cardiff wish they had shown a bit more faith in him.
As it stands, McCarthy has only a short-term contract in place until the end of the season, which indicates his current club were secretly harbouring a few misgivings of their own when they took him on.
That is what can happen when a manager has been around the block a few times.
Yet it might just be that too many people have underestimated the man in question over the years
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And if he’d kept his trap shut, he’d be living free in a space stud farm.
Journalist: “Mick, some people might say that was two points dropped tonight.”
McCarthy: “Some people can fuck off.”
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Richie Sadlier is some gimp.
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Woolie’s sound engineer wouldn’t have made that mistake.
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A draw away at Neil Warnock’s Middleborough today was not the worst result for Big Mick’s Cardiff.
Two titans locking horns
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And the curve starts to turn
What a man
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Get the man back to Abbotstown ASAP
All well and good going undefeated and taking a team being sucked into a relegation battle into the play offs in a matter of weeks but it isn’t worth a fuck to anyone if they aren’t leading the league in pass completion percentage
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There’s idiots out there who prefer to see ‘encouraging signs’ than results.
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Won tonight on 27% possession.
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Ipswich enjoying their ‘Sexy Football’ in League 1
Four goals too. Will be a while before Ireland score than many under Kenny let alone in one game
They won tonight. New manager bounce.
If he he managed to get them under 25% possession they surely would’ve scored 5.
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They had actually won their last two before Lambert got the bums rush
Cardiff are second highest scorers in the division. 6 more than high flying Norwich. If Mick gets them up it will be his greatest achievement
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