The ages of Irish football can be summed up in a phrase. “Put ‘em under pressure.” “Stick it up your bollocks.” “I’m the gaffer.” “They have no the tribune.”
There's no doubt what will go down as the slogan of Mick McCarthy's second stint as Ireland manager: "If you'd offered me [X] at [Y moment in the past], I'd have bitten your hand off."
The phrase became increasingly familiar as it was rolled out to justify the series of disappointments and frustrations that characterised the latter period of McCarthy Two. Through autumn and early winter, Ireland faced Switzerland, then Georgia, then Switzerland, then Denmark – each time failing to win, yet clinging on to a chance of making it thanks to the forgiving structure of the qualification process for a 24-team Euros. As Ireland's position deteriorated with each setback, McCarthy kept insisting he'd gladly have settled for this situation at the start of the group.
In the end, of course, McCarthy didn't actually fail to qualify for the Euros – he just ran out of time. In a farewell video to the Ireland fans posted by the FAI, the former manager seemed in good spirits as he joked about requesting a couple of tickets from the FAI to watch the team at next year's finals. It's been a rewarding 18 months for McCarthy, with a salary of €1.2 million-a-year topped up with a €1.13 million golden handcuffs bonus for seeing out his contract. If Stephen Kenny does end up leading the team to Euro 2021, McCarthy will be in line for a qualification bonus as well. The situation was "bittersweet", he said, but it was hard to detect much bitterness.
Good enough
Future historians of Irish football may struggle to understand why McCarthy was ever appointed on that short-term contract. If Stephen Kenny was good enough to become the Ireland manager in the summer of 2020, then why didn't John Delaney just give him the job in November 2018?
The reason is that Delaney never really believed in Kenny, and only arranged for him to succeed McCarthy because he knew it would be a popular move with the Irish football public. For Delaney there was only one thing that mattered, and that was qualifying for Euro 2020. If Ireland made it to the finals there would be, at a minimum, €10 million extra in prize money to prop up the financial house of cards he had built at the FAI. If Ireland didn’t make it the game would be up long before the summer of 2020, so what happened after that point didn’t really matter to Delaney. Kenny could be lined up as a sop to public opinion, but Delaney’s personal opinion was that McCarthy was more likely to lead Ireland to the finals.
On what did he base this view? The former CEO's thinking seemed broadly in line with that of former Ireland player Kevin Kilbane, who told Off The Ball in November 2018 that "if you're looking for an immediate response to a manager when he walks into the dressing room, Mick McCarthy would grab you more than Stephen Kenny. I am telling you right now that would be the case . . . Callum O'Dowda and Harry Arter and lads that have grown up in England will not know who Stephen Kenny is."
Thankfully, with the Delaney era consigned to the scrapheap of history, we now seem to have an FAI that no longer gauges the quality of a manager based on how many times he has appeared on Goals on Sunday.
The sense at the end of the second McCarthy era is that it was, above all, a waste of time. What did Irish supporters want after Martin O’Neill? More than anything, we wanted change – something different, the sense of new possibilities. Ireland had the oldest squad at Euro 2016 and the team had continued to age over the next couple of years, with O’Neill dourly convinced there were no young players good enough to refresh it.
McCarthy's appointment was sold as a bridge to the future, but if anything his short-term contract ended up entrenching an even more conservative, short-termist outlook than O'Neill's. Any sense of optimism that things might be different under McCarthy evaporated when it became apparent that his chief innovation would be to recall the 35-year-old Glenn Whelan, who had been ushered into international retirement by O'Neill.
Abandoned the effort
When exciting new options did present themselves, McCarthy seemed reluctant to use them. Matt Doherty had been Ireland's best performer in the Premier League, but McCarthy abandoned the effort to integrate him after 56 out-of-position minutes in Gibraltar, and the Wolves man only got into the team towards the end of the campaign when Séamus Coleman was suspended. Against Georgia, McCarthy started with the Luton workhorse James Collins up front, leaving the in-form Aaron Connolly on the bench until the last few minutes.
In a press briefing in Elverys on Henry Street in mid-February, McCarthy insisted that he was not about to change the team for the playoffs against Slovakia, and argued that Whelan, who had just joined Fleetwood Town after being released by Hearts, remained a better option in midfield than the likes of Jayson Molumby. "It's not a game for debutants," he said. It was plain that his plan was to stick with the same formula that had failed in the previous four matches.
McCarthy leaves the Ireland team in much the same state as he found them, an old and jaded team in search of a new direction. Kenny’s work with the under-21s looks like being far more significant for the future of Irish football than anything McCarthy accomplished in the same time with the seniors. Maybe that Slovakia playoff, if it ever happens, will turn out to be a game for debutants after all.
