Expert Opinion
Why football needs managers like Mick McCarthy
Mick McCarthy will be out of the firing line tonight, when Wolverhampton Wanderers play Norwich City at Molineux. He will derive minimal satisfaction from the knowledge that it’s the turn of Steve Kean and Owen Coyle to endure the indignity of being the man they love to hate.
Mick is a proper football man, you see. He feels the pain of his relegation rivals. He experienced it earlier this season when he heard Wolves fans join in a gleefully malicious chorus of “you’re getting sacked in the morning”.
He turned on his heels, and spat unprintable oaths in the general direction of the main stand at Molineux. He was still raging an hour after the final whistle, when he invited his critics for a full and frank exchange of views in the Wolves car park. Fortunately, no one was sufficiently unhinged to accept. Those gimlet eyes, and the oft-broken nose which lists to starboard, tell you he is not one to be trifled with.
I love him – and that’s not a sycophantic, self-protective sentiment. I’ve always found him a fair man, with a world-weary air that makes him football’s answer to Victor Meldrew. Truly, he does not believe some of the things he has to put up with.
He announced himself, on arrival at Wolves in 2006, with the immortal line: “My initials stand for Mick McCarthy, not Merlin the Magician.” We knew where we stood when he confided: “Anyone who uses the word ‘quintessentially’ in a half-time team talk is talking crap.”
A maverick in an age of manager speak, that strange concoction of clichés, common sense and half-truths, McCarthy educates and entertains. His is the raw humour of the dressing room, a place where cruelty happily co-habits with compassion. He is a perfectly balanced Yorkshireman, with a chip on each shoulder.
Players, with the conspicuous exception of Roy Keane, respond to his honesty, and intensity. He is, by his own admission, halfway through his most difficult task – establishing Wolves as an authentic Premier League team. He will get there in the end.
Football needs people like him. It needs clubs with tradition, like Wolves, to survive and thrive. But, according to Mick: “Opinions are like backsides. We’ve all got them but it is not wise to air them in public.”
I’ll shut up, then.
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