Former Blues striker Martyn Waghorn has been reflecting on his one-year spell at Town which he says worked perfectly for him after a tough spell in Scotland at Rangers.

Waghorn, now with Derby County, moved to the Blues on a cut-price £250,000 fee from the Glasgow giants in the summer of 2017 and scored 16 times in his only season at Portman Road as Mick McCarthy’s side finished 12th in the Championship.

The former Sunderland man exited the following summer to join the Rams for an initial fee of £5 million after new manager Paul Hurst had taken over at Portman Road.

Waghorn, now 30, says McCarthy was very different to how he’s imagined him before he met him.

“When I got there I got a completely different impression about him,” he said in an interview with the Open Goal podcast (1hr 43mins 57secs).

“I thought he would be this mad man, but what a nice guy. He was very laid-back, very calm, very relaxed and it really surprised me.”

Waghorn says that although he expected McCarthy to be “more intense”, his new boss made his point when he felt he needed to.

“Before I signed I said, ‘Can I have the number nine shirt? I see myself as striker, I want the number nine shirt’.

“He said ‘It’s a big number!’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever, it’s fine, it’s only a number to me’.

“Anyway, the next week we’re doing old-v-young and the old team gets absolutely battered, I’ve missed a couple of chances. This is before I even made my [Championship] debut.

“He pulled me into his office afterwards and said ‘Do you think that’s good enough, your performance out there today?’

“I didn’t really think about it, to be honest, but it was absolutely crap, and he said ‘If you think my number nine is performing like that for me then you’ve got another thing coming’. I thought ‘Oh s–-, I best pull my finger out!’.

“That’s how he was and I never really looked back with my relationship with him. What a top guy he is. I’ve got nothing but praise for him. He’s a really, really good guy.”

Reflecting on Town and making a comparison with Rangers, where he spent two years, he added: “It was complete chalk and cheese. It’s a very family-orientated club, not much stick or abuse. Fans would just turn up, support you and go home.

“It was a complete contrast and probably at the time it was what I needed to get away from the animosity and the drama and everything that comes with playing for Rangers and the times I was going through.

“To go and play for a club [where there was] stability, where the manager’s got a style of play that I kind of fitted into, and a very family-orientated club, it worked perfectly for me and my wife and son went down there and felt settled straight away.

“It worked out and I can’t them highly enough because it kind of got me to move to where I am now.”

Waghorn says the players were as surprised as anyone by McCarthy’s exit after the Barnsley match in April 2018.

“It was bizarre. He was getting a lot of stick in the press and fans were on him or whatever,” he recalled.

“We played at Brentford away and he was meant to come back on the coach and all the fans were waiting for him to have a go at him and give him a bit of a stick but he’s pulled off in this car at on the other side of the stadium.

“And he pulled me in on the Monday and said ‘I think I’m going to leave, I think I’m done, I don’t deserve this, I think it’s unacceptable’.

“The next game, the midweek game where we’re playing [Barnsley] and at the meeting after the game he goes, ‘That’s me lads, I’m done’.

“We’re like ‘What?’ He goes ‘Yeah, that’s my last game, that’s my time done. I’m going next week, I’m done’. And everyone was like ‘That’s the most bizarre resignation or leaving of a club I’ve ever known’.

“But he just wore his heart on his sleeve, he was like, ‘I don’t deserve this, you players don’t deserve this’.

“He respected us enough to say, ’You go out there week-in, week-out in front of fans that are giving me stick and I shouldn’t put that on to you.

“‘If the fans want a change I’ll do that for the fans, I’ll do that for the club and I’ll do that for the owner, but most importantly you as players deserve a bit of respect and a bit of support from the fans and if they aren’t going to give that I’ll leave and hopefully they can push you on because as a group of players you deserve that’.

“A lot of the people in Ipswich I don’t think realised how good he was for the club, he worked on a budget for so long and the players he recruited just because of who he was and the personality he was.

“He brought so many good players to the club that essentially they probably couldn’t have got without him. The grass isn’t always greener, as they say. It’s just gone backwards ever since.”

Waghorn moved to Derby, for whom he has scored 25 times in two seasons, that August but says that wasn’t something he was looking to do until McCarthy’s departure.

“At that point it wasn’t at the forefront of my mind, I’d moved to get settled somewhere again and enjoy my football, but then when the gaffer left, I was like ‘I’ve got an opportunity to leave here and if it comes across then I’ll look into it’,” he said.

“It was one of those times where the manager had left, a lot of players were out of contract at the time so the team was going to change again and I didn’t know how it was going to sit.

“Then obviously we brought in Paul Hurst, who had his own way of playing the game, and he wanted to bring in a lot of players and a lot of players left and it just wasn’t kind of where I saw myself, where [I was] the year before.

“Then obviously Derby and Frank Lampard came in and from when I heard of that interest I was like ‘That’s me done, I’ve got to go, I’m out of here’.”

Reflecting on his short spell at Portman Road, he added: “I’ve got to give my family, myself and the move a bit of credit because it gave me a platform to get to go and play and enjoy playing as a striker, scoring goals and doing what I do.

“It gave me the opportunity to do that, that’s why I thank Mick, the gaffer, for giving me that chance to go and play and do that and I’m where I am now because of that opportunity to go and move and do that.”

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bobble added 04:33 - Jul 30 mick should have been a 2 year save us from the drop manager,,,thats all
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ElephantintheRoom added 09:59 - Jul 30 Slightly one-eyed version of the unpleasant end of the McCarthy era - and the disastrous beginnings of the Hurst era. McCarthy needed managing as much as Hurst did - that's why his arrogant and short-sighted approach took Town to the point of ruin. The lack of any football interest, let alone structure within the offshore ownership has created a vacuum which makes things increasingly worse with each passing year. Now Lambert finds himself in exactly the same boat as MM - an experienced manager coasting in a no-hope, undemanding job faced with an increasingly hostile and ridiculously over-expectant crowd.

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algarvefan added 15:54 - Jul 30 blues1 when McCarthy was offered money to spend in the January transfer window, you assume that there were players to sign and they wanted to come to Town? What he said, he probably said because he couldn't get the right player for the right deal, it happens. On the whole he managed to get good players on loan and signings because of his reputation and experience, he did a fine job for most of the time. To denigrate the man now is unfair, he was OK, the fans turning on him when he had no money to spend was wrong in my opinion. He has my respect, life was not easy at PR during his time, had he come earlier I believe we would have made it back to the Prem.

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rugbytomc added 22:12 - Jul 30 Headline says it all really. It worked out really well for him but not for us. Mick has come out and said plenty since he left. But he hasn't said “when we were top of the league in January 2015 I asked Marcus for money to spend and he said no and so I then made us go on a winless streak for the rest of January and February”. No, he didn't say that. So as much as I hate our clueless owner and even more clueless MDs, I don't think you can pin that period all on him

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Gcon added 11:31 - Jul 31 MM made Marcus Evans looks vaguely acceptable as an owner. Since his departure we have been disastrous, even with Paul Lambert doing all he can to reconnect fans with the club.
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Cheshire_Blue added 09:10 - Aug 3 The facts speak for themselves. McCarthy left and look where we are now.
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