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“We got to the play-offs at Ipswich – that is a club I should have left earlier. They got bored with me, but me being belligerent I wasn’t going to walk, certainly Marcus Evans, the owner, wasn’t going to sack me because I was keeping them up – we finished 12th the last season that I was there. But it did turn sour, which is such a shame because I had a great rapport with the fans when I first went there. We didn’t spend any money and we had really good results. And the rapport that I had with them from the start, I wasn’t doing anything different when I left. But I think they got a bit bored with pragmatic me.”
Ipswich were relegated the following season and are now 10th in League One, seven points off the play-offs and drifting. While it is too simplistic to throw the “be careful what you wish for” line at Ipswich supporters, the reality is that McCarthy leaving has achieved nothing.
That it not to say that he should have stayed. By the end, his position became untenable. When Ipswich lost 1-0 at Brentford in April 2018, a policewoman came to see McCarthy after the game and asked him to leave Griffin Park via a back entrance to avoid an incident out the front, where she said “there are people waiting to throw bottles at you and pour beer on you”.
Listening to McCarthy tell that story – and he does it matter-of-factly and without any sense of drama – it makes you wonder whether management is worth all the hassle that comes with it
.....
Picking up players for next to nothing, developing them, and seeing them go onto bigger things, is something else that McCarthy finds gratifying about management. Tyrone Mings is the obvious starting point for that discussion, bearing in mind the England international was working as a mortgage adviser when Ipswich paid Chippenham Town £10,000 for him in 2013. McCarthy can still picture himself and Russell Osman, the Ipswich great, walking over to the pitch where a trial game had just kicked off. Osman had recommended Mings to McCarthy after a tip-off from his son, Toby, one of Mings’ team-mates.
“Ty won a header, he dropped a ball down the side – he was really involved in the first five minutes while Russell and I were still chatting. I said, ‘I’ll sign him on what I’ve seen now,” McCarthy recalls. “He was 6ft 4in, he was built like an Adonis, he was an unbelievable specimen of a man… well, of a kid, as he was then (19 years old). He was chirping on the pitch, telling people what to do. He was everything I’d have wanted in a player. He could play, he was quick. There was no downside at all.
“I remember he was getting stuck in, then he went to kick a ball and somebody left a foot in, an older player, and he kicked right through it. I said: ‘Somebody’s going to do him.’ He was limping a bit. I said, ‘Take him off.’ And of course he was having a row with me then, saying, ‘I don’t want to come off.’ I said, ‘I’m taking you off because I want to sign you. Shut the f**k up and just sit down will you, and put some ice on your shin.’ He changed his tune then. He probably thought I was taking him off because I thought he was rubbish. It was completely the opposite.”
Mick McCarthy interview in The Athletic today... on 08:41 - Apr 20 by ITFC_Forever
Saw that last night.... the first bit you've copied says it all - he knew it was time to go long before he did, as did we.
Yes, it was over. But still think he was paying far too much of the price for 17 years of relative failure and boredom in the Championship.
No criticism of Blue Action because they've been doing an excellent job but I remember reading that they had been trying to get organised for a year or so before starting up. So it was a shame that they got going the summer Mick left when it *could* have helped bring the fans, players and manager back together more. It certainly might have avoided the poison of the games in the second half of 2017-2018 and meant both parties separated with more dignity.
And, as much as people said Mick needed to go, he's been the only manager out of six under Evans who's been anywhere near playing to par with the money they had available. Given the justified criticism of Evans, it's increasingly apparent just how much him and Terry were keeping the club together, which I'm sure added to McCarthy's annoyance with the OTT criticism he was getting towards the end.
[Post edited 20 Apr 2020 9:38]
Pronouns: He/Him
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Mick McCarthy interview in The Athletic today... on 09:09 - Apr 20 with 1148 views
Read that over my cuppa this morning, very good read
Any idea if Dan B in the comments is a TWTD poster? Disliked his football style so much he felt the urge to comment on it twice, I could think of a few posters on here that still can’t let it go that much!
Highlighting crass stupidity since sometime around 2010
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