Prague spring's gentle revolution

PRAGUE. Spring. Tuesday morning. Mick McCarthy gets on with another day in the life. Footballs whizzing all around him like cartoon bullets, every shout needing an exclamation mark. "Go! Give! Go!"

Barnsley boomer. The voice echoes around the old training ground here on the hill above the old city.

"Pass and go, Sparky! Spin away from it! Faster and faster all the time! Hey Babbsy! Babbsy! Five press ups. Count him through them lads!"

The sports centre has the used up feel of an old regime. Dirty windows set in blank concrete. Dark eternal corridors covered in old orange linoleum. A thousand unmarked doors. Outside, though, the sun is shining and this football pitch is just like any other.

Lots of laughter and lots of variety and a cluster of 16 green training tops with Mick McCarthy in their midst. No sea of curious punters, no green and white army. Just the exciting thrill of transition that marks the low key birth of a new regime.

The players are enjoying themselves, but their manager is loving it all the more. The man who once boasted that his record for juggling was 67 - with a centre forward that is - plays himself right into the heart of these exercises.

"Twenty one years," he says afterwards, "I've been training every day. Now it's stopped. It's good to get out there and have a bit of crack with the lads once again."

When the first session of the day has wound down and the players are wandering loose limbed and aimless about the hotel, McCarthy sits down on the edge of an armchair with a bottle of mineral water swinging from his hand and talks with the media. The tone is easy and friendly, but McCarthy watches every move with a centre half's wariness. He talks later on about that morning chat with the hacks.

"Well, I'm saying that this World Cup group we are in, maybe it looks easy, but it isn't. There's some tough games. Six years ago it might have been easy. Then somebody says, kind of smart like, `Why? Because you were playing?', and there's this silence. And I said: "Fucking right. Nobody else will say it, so I'll say it. Because I was playing and Kevin Moran was 30 and Paul McGrath was younger and Andy Townsend and Ray Houghton were 26 or 27. If we had that team is would be easy. We were all fresh and all bright. Every thing was bright and fresh. Four four two. Put them under pressure. It was all new'. That's all I meant."

Prague. Spring. Tuesday night.

Still extracting what he can from the remains of the day. His team have trained again in the hours before dusk, McCarthy immersing himself in a five a side game with his players. Then breaking for some tea. Then a video of the Russian game. Then some talking. Then down here to the lobby for more media work.

The number of journalists gathered here is a residual of the good times. Legions travelling from Ireland and England to examine the transition era. New Jack City? Goodbye Good Times?

Generally, he has had an easy and frank relationship with the scribblers. He worries little about the possibility that their judgements might define his relationship with the public.

He offers up a flow of good information, but pollutes his comments with nothing which will incriminate or deflate his players. If he detects foul play he commits himself to the tackle. He has already had a run in on the phone with one journalist who criticised him for taking a shower before speaking to the media after the Russian game.

If I think something is unfair I'll say it to your face. Then gel on with it. If it keeps on being unfair, personal stuff like. that's fine, but don't ring me up and expect me to tittle tattle."

He is settled in now, talking about the media and how, for better or worse the will stalk him through the coming years.

People send him things, bits and pieces from the newspapers, especially the abusive stuff. He seldom reads any of it anymore, but occasionally the odd paragraph will catch his eye and take his breath away and he will find himself sucked in, reading something from beginning to end. Then he balls it and renews his vow never to read what's written.

"The personal abuse stuff has gone on for a long time. I don't like it, but I'll leave it be. If people want to criticise the team I pick, that's fine. Nobody else has to put a team out on the pitch. That's what I'm judged on. If people say we haven't got such a good manager any more and we haven't got such good players, let them. Maybe people will be surprised."

The more he talks, here in Prague, about, his job and the business of being constantly judged, the more isolated he seems.

It's not just that his Sancho Panza, Ian Evans, is away in Skopje watching Macedonia play Liechtenstein, or that the clamour of the greatest fans in the world has subsided a bit, or even that Mick McCarthy and his system have yet to wholly sell themselves to a spoiled public and some doubtful pundits, or that he needs to put some distance between himself and his players.

Rather it is the isolation of the footballer. The business of being judged as an individual in the hurly burly of a team game. He has known that feeling of having no place to hide since he was 16 years old.

"It's a hard, cruel business sometimes is football," he says later on, sitting back and sipping a beer and making a face that suggests that he can't tell an outsider the half of it.

"When I was 15, maybe 16, I went from Barnsley down to Sheffield United for a week's trial. Sheffield was 11 miles away, but born and bred in Barnsley I thought it was a million miles. So I go down and I'm sat there, getting changed and this first year pro starts up on me. `Hey, look at him lads. Did ya ever see feet as big as that?'"

"And I mean he was right. I took 9 1/2 size, when I was 15. But I didn't need him telling the world, but he keeps going. Hey. Where'd they come from, Hull? D'ya get them fucking launched in Hull? Hey lads look at his feet'. So I stood up and said to him, I said `If you've got a problem with me or a problem with my feet, then we'll go outside and we'll sort it now. C'mon then'."

"And he backed off. He was two years older than me and he couldn't risk getting tarred by a 15 year old. But I left two days later and I went back to Barnsley. I hated that thing in Sheffield. I could have just laughed and it would have got worse and worse and worse. I didn't like it and I was scared. I fronted it, though. Said I'd fight him. Just fronted it out to get the respect. You have to do that sometimes.

Yes, you have to do that sometimes. Mick McCarthy looks balefully at the opening five fixtures handed to him for his tenure. Russia. Czech Republic. Portugal. Croatia. Holland. He can please the crowd or he can front it out for what he believes in. Never any question of him reaching for the placebo of easy applause.

So here in Prague, as Tuesday night gives way to Wednesday morning, he alks about his system and his conviction in it.

"Maybe I'll end up losing five out of five. That will be my record perhaps. It's not bloody minded. It's what I believe. The players all want to win. I want to win. We are all agreed that this is the best way."

He could take the musty precepts of the old era and crap for a couple of goalless draws or the odd win. But he won't. There is a way to progress with this team and what he has available and he believes he knows, it. Paul McGrath's legs must be preserved. Ditto Andy Townsend. The lack of a quick and prolific goalscorer raised the need for a little more variety, in approach.

Maybe in the end we will, change it a little bit. If the way we are playing indicates to me that the system isn't the best we could use, maybe we will look at a sort of 4-3-3, with two wingers pushed up and playing just slightly wide in front of the midfield. But for now I believe in what we are doing. If I change, it won't be because any of you lot think I should."

A couple of times as he speaks he is interrupted by diffident Czechs who want him to sign old pictures of himself. Yellowing portraits of Big Mick in Celtic gear, or Big Mick in long defunct Irish kits are offered to him. He takes it all graciously with a smile and a wink. He points.

"I loved that old all green kit there. Good times and bad times. You can't let other people change you."

Here, in the big time, you can easily go under. Mick McCarthy, whose job it is to surf the diminishing wave of Irish football hysteria, could easily hit a reef of disillusioned hangers on.

He has been in contact recently with Graham Taylor, now manager at Watford, concerning goalscoring prospect David Connolly. Taylor has been kind and courteous and faultlessly helpful, returning every call, acceding to every request. McCarthy can scarcely reconcile the man he knows to the demonised and traduced fool of tabloid mythology.

Say what you like about his football. Nobody, nobody deserves what he went through. His children his family having, to read that stuff. That won't happen to me.

On the day he had to call a press conference, to explain what had happened to his FA Cup Final tickets from last he realised at last what a big deal his new job was. Some, people were keen to drag him under even before he fell.

The FA had contacted him already about the business of his tickets. He had contacted the friend he had given them, too, accepted his denial and both men had written back. More. McCarthy had traced the four tickets beside his own and the bearers remembered McCarthy's friend, another man and their two sons as having sat beside them at the cup final.

"There was nothing more I could do. I realised then that they had quite a pound of flesh in the Irish manager and they weren't going to let go. Some of the papers quoted me as saying that I gave me tickets to a friend, he said he went to the game and I believed him. I said believe. B-e-l-i-e-v-e. That letter D made a big difference. I do believe him. I still believe him. There's nothing more I can do about it, though. That sort of thing is what this job means.

Not to put too fine a point on it, he suggests that anything you can think of to say about his team he has spent thinking of already in the past few turbulent months. As the FAI fell ("The alternative vote of confidence," he calls it), as the FA swooped. McCarthy's head has been swimming with permutations.

He has travelled the length and breadth of Britain already watching players. He has written to every club in England and Scotland inquiring about players that might be qualified to play for Ireland. He notes with a smile that Rangers were among the first to send him back a reply.

There is more. McCarthy and Ian Evans have been trailing around to reserve games, building a file of younger players. He remembers telling Maurice Setters about David Connolly two years ago after he played for Watford youths against Millwall, remembers telling Setters to get Connolly nailed down straight away. He shrugs his shoulders, allowing the bare fact that he is still on Connolly's trail to finish the entire story.

He talks about bedding down his new ideas in the heads of his players and, hopefully, in the heart of the public. He is fine company, a man free from self doubt in the matter of his craft.

There is about him the sense of a man simultaneously hoping to alter the course of a river and push back the progress of time. Something heroic. You sense that soon he will have gripped the public imagination. Big Mick and his system.

"People want us to win," he says "They send me faxes all the time. Have you seen this guy, that guy. I get offered copies of the Rothman's with all the Irish sounding names highlighted in green. The goodwill is still there. I believe we will do it.

Others, too. His son Michael loves Celtic and Liverpool and Millwall and Steve McManaman, but most of all he says to Mick, he loves Ireland.

"I'd like him to be a footballer for his sake. Not mine. Like this team. It would be nice for me, but I'd like the lads to win for their own sake. I've had the good times. It would be great for them.

Prague. Spring. Wednesday afternoon.

His boys have lost again. Mick McCarthy talks the talk with the TV folk. Stands on the touchline in his number 17 Irish jersey.

He has a stubborn competitive streak that despises defeat. He is used to measuring success in points gained and failure in goals lost. He can tell you that he kept 34 clean sheets in 57 internationals he played for Ireland. He can tell you that Millwall were top of division one last November and early December, that in 14 games towards the uncertain end they won only twice, and that since then they have taken 11 points from 14 games.

He is used to those yardsticks, but now he must measure progress in different terms. Six of his team have 14 caps between them. Babies. They have a new system, a new manager, a couple of ageing heroes and no goalscorer. They have done what he has asked. He will brook no criticism of them. His faith is stirred, not shaken.

He wanders in through the tunnel and is lead through a tiny kitchen under the main stand into a little vestibule. , He stands for a moment as the Czech official fumble with the lock to the doorway behind the stage area of the press room.

Through the wooden door beside him he can hear the babble, of a hundred or more journalists, behind him a few thousand fans are wandering, home quietly, in front of him is an empty pitch. He stands with his hands on his hips and stares at the ceiling for five maybe 10 seconds.

"Mr McCarthy. Ready?"

The door is opened and he walks into the dressingroom ready to sell his team and his system once, again. Not a thought of compromise in his head.