Former Town boss Mick McCarthy has revealed that fans waiting to throw bottles at him led to police advice to leave Griffin Park via a back exit following the Blues’ 1-0 defeat to Brentford in April.
McCarthy, who had already announced he would move on at the end of last season, decided then that the home match against Barnsley on the following Tuesday would be the final game of his five and a half years in charge at Portman Road.
"I got asked to leave via the back door at Brentford because there were people with bottles and beer waiting to throw them at me,” he told the Irish Daily Mail.
"Of course me being me, I said to the police, ‘F*** em, I’m going out the front door’. They said, ‘Well, if you do we might get covered in beer; we might get hit with bottles’.
"I don’t know if there was one person or 20 people or 100. But I had to go out the back door.
"I spoke to [Town owner] Marcus Evans then. Barnsley was always going to be my last game.
"But it would have been nice to go out and say, ‘Thanks for everything, it’s been great’, rather than, ‘Well, what do you think about being booed?’. So I said, 'Thankfully I won’t have to listen to it again', and I did one.’
Asked whether he received hate mail at Town he says his personal assistant dealt with his post and shredded anything abusive.
"Why on earth would I read it?” added McCarthy, who starts a new role working as a pundit for Virgin Media Sport.
Despite the manner in which his time at Town ended, the 59-year-old still wants to go back into management.
"Because we love it,” he said. "I want to do it again. I have no desire to rest on my laurels. That’s what I enjoy doing.
"I have to say I enjoy the combative nature of it. I enjoy the managing of players and solving problems, both on the pitch and off the pitch, dealing with all the things that come with it, and sometimes the s*** and sometimes the glamour of it. I’ve had more of the glamour than the s***, I have to be honest.”