Mick McCarthy says he’ll be keeping faith with keeper Dean Gerken at Yeovil tonight, despite the 28-year-old’s error for Middlesbrough’s first goal on Saturday. The Blues boss believes it’s important that players shouldn’t constantly be in fear of losing their places and that Gerken wasn’t the only player to blame for Danny Graham’s opening goal at the Riverside.
The former Colchester United and Bristol City man has been McCarthy’s number one since August and he confirmed that he will keep his place for Town’s first ever game at Huish Park: "I have [nailed my colours to the mast] and will be doing so again tomorrow, he will be playing.
"I think he deserves it. If you start looking at a game like Saturday's, the easy thing is to go ‘I’ll change that, I’ll change that and I’ll change that’. But actually, that’s not the right thing to do.
"You’ve known me 16 months and you’ll have seen that I’m a loyal person and a consistent person who doesn’t chop and change on one bad performance.
"That’s something I learnt from my managers myself. One in particularly stuck with me when I had a bad spell. I came out of it and I was fine.
"I had a bad spell having had a fantastic spell prior to that. I played out of my skin and then I had a bad spell and he would have been justified in going, ‘Out the door’ but he didn’t because he knew I was a good player and I would come back and play well.”
He says it doesn’t help players if they feel they’re always one error away from being dropped: "It creates fear if you think that if you make one mistake today you might not play again on Saturday. Wow!
"There’s all these things going on — you have to play anyway and perform, you’re playing in front of fans, some are giving you adulation, some are giving you whatever else it might be and the ones who are giving you adulation can turn into the abusive ones very quickly.
"If they’ve got that in the back of their minds, ‘If I have a bad game today the gaffer’s going to drop me’, they’ve got no chance.”
Regarding Saturday’s goal, he says Gerken failing to hold on to Mustapha Carayol’s shot was one of a number of errors: "I don’t think we can [entirely blame] the goalkeeper.
"[Carayol] shouldn’t have got out, he shouldn’t have got inside, he shouldn’t have hit the shot and Tommy and everybody else who was there perhaps could have done better with the rebound but it didn’t happen. I’m not going to leave them all out, all the ones who were involved in it.”
McCarthy says he and assistant Terry Connor review all Town’s matches: "We do analyse the games from start to finish, from the end of the game to start of the next one. We’ve put Saturday’s to bed now.
"People play badly, people don’t play as well as they can. They don’t do it every week, we have 46 games and you’ve got to be at it every single week.
"Our lads are at it every week, in terms of the physical side, but they were better than us on Saturday. There’s got to be a bit of that sometimes, holding your hand up and saying ‘We were beaten by a better side’.
"I thought they pressed us and closed us down and stopped us playing and they did to us what we do to other teams mainly. And then they’ve got some players with really good ability.
"I don’t like losing but I’m the ultimate realist and pragmatist and sometimes you do get beaten by a better side. If they’re playing well with those players playing well, they’re a good side.”
He points out that there haven’t been too many days like that since he came to the club: "That’s why I don’t do paralysis by analysis, I accept that some days we will not play well.
"On Saturday I was asked why we didn’t play well and the answer always sounds like excuses.
"I mentioned travel, we’ve got to travel again, so if we don’t play well at Yeovil, is it because we’ve travelled for five hours on the bus? I thought they deserved it, they played well.
"And when we beat teams like that I know our opposition are asked why it happened and we’re saying it was because we were too good for them, we were all over the top of them, we played well, we passed it well, we made good crosses, we had good chances.
"And they’re going ‘And why was that?’. Were they this or were they that. Sometimes you just get done by a better team and I thought on Saturday that that was the case.”