Still battling with the critics

Half a decade of Mick McCarthy and, conveniently, football offers us a natural pause for stocktaking and appraisal. It's five years since the erstwhile Captain Fantastic baptised the new era and brought the national team away to a friendly game in Prague, five years and time to throw an eye over the country ahead and the country behind. A chance to measure what has been gained and what has been cast away.

McCarthy's team, and at last it is truly his and not Jack Charlton's, journeys to the front again this week with half a job done and it seems the potential within itself to finish the task. In a group containing two of the best sides in Europe, Ireland are in a position where they need no luck and no favours to take a top two place. Time to assess the harvest.

Well, so you'd think, but Mick McCarthy is the product of no media training courses and, if five years at the coal face haven't dented his Barnsley decency, they have certainly diminished his trust in people.

By now, of course, he was supposed to be history, the wisdom conventional and otherwise having decreed that his team would travel to Amsterdam and Lisbon and receive two sturdy thumpings, thus allowing the search to begin for a successor.

Well, he's still alive and breathing on this spring morning, but his face is seldom unclouded and, if you have a tape recorder on the table and a press card in your pocket every question is an inquisition.

Five years, Mick. First of all, how has it changed you?

"Have I changed? You tell me."

Thirty seconds gone. One-nil down.

Well do you feel that you're different as a person? As a manager?

"I dunno. As a manager? Ask the lads?"

Two minutes in. Two-nil down. Struggling.

Well do you think you approach people differently?

"Look," he sighs. "I couldn't tell you. I'm not into self-analysis. I don't think that's been a problem for me."

The last punter is still coming through the turnstile. Three-nil down. Lucky to be nil. Limping badly. Morale all gone. Wish we could kick off again.

But interviews don't work like that. Words have to fill the silences and, though he still examines every syllable before it's granted an exit from his head, Mick McCarthy begins to talk.

And yes he has changed since the Prague spring. More than the football, that's what's interesting about him. He's a big decent, tough guy, but, the more times he tells you that the criticism and abuse hasn't bothered him, the more you can see the hurt.

Between things he doesn't want to go back over and his general reluctance to talk about individual players, there aren't many things left to speak about except how five years on the job has changed him.

"I'm not a different man," he says defiantly. "I react differently to things and do things a little differently, but I'm not into self-analysis. I still have the same friends, I see the same people. In the way I see the job and see people involved I've maybe changed. I'm better at it, just like anyone who has experience for five years.

"That's the main thing. I think I've gained experience, like in any job, that's valuable. Anything which helps you to see the reason people are doing things is helpful. I try to do the job without worrying about what people think.

"People tend to put these last three results up and say they prove something, but we missed the Euro Championships by 12 seconds last time out."

The setbacks, of course, have had a starkly dramatic quality about them which make them better conversation points than a mere run of unimpressive results would. Mostly too the setbacks have occurred in Macedonia. You take him back to the first visit there.

At the time of the first Macedonian disaster, there was a feeling that the team was in transition and it lacked leaders. A few years on how has that changed?

"First Macedonian disaster? That's an interesting way of putting it. Was anyone killed?"

No. But you didn't look too chipper about it.

"You'll remember I got up the next morning suited and booted and put my best face on. I wasn't feeling too chipper though."

But the team and that criticism that was made?

"I don't think I made it, but that game was a watershed in lots of ways. It was a bad game to lose and we played badly, but we had two jammy penalties given against us and lots went wrong. That was a watershed for me. We'd done alright playing 3-5-2 until then, but we went 4-4-2 for the next game in Romania and the team changed again with more young players.

"Since then, the team has changed, younger players have changed, they've had more experience. We've grown as a team but we've stuck with our pattern and formation. We went back to a flat back four and we've played that way ever since. We might go 4-3-3 or 4-5-1 or straightforward 4-4-2 but we've basically stuck to that and the young fellas have become good players in the meantime."

The teams complexion has changed irradicably with only Roy Keane and Niall Quinn now surviving from McCarthy's playing days. He has given debuts to almost all the current squad, nurtured them through the difficult first 15 to 20 games at this level and secured their loyalty under the galvanising rat-a-tat-tat of machine-gun fire from the media.

Somehow, out of the rather arid landscape which Jack Charlton left behind, a team has emerged. In the sink or swim world of pro football, sufficient players have survived to keep Ireland viable. The bonuses have been big. Steve Carr and Ian Harte emerging as fine full backs.

Robbie Keane arriving as a fully grown star. Damien Duff's vast potential still unfolding majestically. Stephen McPhail's development coming along somewhat more haltingly. Even Gary Doherty's sudden leap from bit player to matinee star at White Hart Lane takes the flashing light feel of the crisis at centre half.

"They were always going to be good players. It has been a matter of getting used to playing at the level. When you look back and talk about leadership three or four years ago that's one of the things you have to think about.

"I remember as a player myself coming into international football and you wonder will you survive at this level, will you be able to step up the extra five or 10 per cent. It takes a while before you realise, `hey I'm doing this, I'm surviving', that's when you start expecting things of yourself and the team.

"And this team has got to that stage, they expect things of themselves as a team, not just to survive as individuals. Their results were never bad and recently they've been very good."

Since last autumn and the three very good results he speaks of, particularly the unlikely draws in Holland and Portugal, his confederation of critics has dwindled and the more rabid surviving portion of them have been driven to a dementia which makes them look marginal and cartoonish.

There was some ludicrous foaming at the mouth even after the 3-0 friendly win over Finland before Christmas which would be unforgiveable if it weren't matched by a daft moment when McCarthy fuelled the animosity by beginning his final post-match press conference of the year by expressing thanks that he wouldn't have to be putting up with the sort of BS he had been putting up with.

Generally, though, things have improved and the credit denied him rather unfairly during a determined but traumatic team-building process is finally coming his way.

"That pleases me, that the players and myself have turned it around, have made people think a bit."

They have turned it around too late perhaps. The country will exult if he succeeds and the people will tell Mick McCarthy that they never doubted him, but relations with his critics will never be normal. He's not going to be a gracious victor, no loveable scarecrow, no press conference sweetie pie.

"I won't do that. I'm not going to put on an act when I go into press conferences. That's not me. Things have got better with the media, but there are still one or two I have a problem with. Some of the criticism has nothing to do with football. At the start of this campaign they were queuing up for me and I'm not going to be all sweetness and light after that.

Jack Charlton's relations with the media were no better, but Charlton never cared really. With Mick McCarthy, the wounds cut deep.

After that extraordinary night in Amsterdam when we shared four goals with the Dutch, much mischief was made about the supposedly different reactions of the Irish captain and the Irish manager (Keane pensive, McCarthy mindlessly celebrating). It was exaggerated and trivial to begin with.

"Some of the stuff that went on at that time was disgraceful. That was the stuff I've read for years in England. Just disgraceful. And absolute lies as well. Total fabrication, It doesn't surprise me though and it doesn't hurt anymore.

"I'm not paranoid about it though. I see the press lads and have a beer or coffee and play golf with some of them, but that's the way it was. When they start gathering in the pack and hunting for one person I don't appreciate that and I see it now with Bernard O'Byrne.

"There are still a few who go beyond what happens on a football field. I still have a couple of axes to grind, but, unless these people come and they speak to me personally and get to know me, well that won't change."

Five years on. Any regrets? Does he ever watch a video of the second Macedonian disaster for instance?

"Well it's strange. I have no regrets. I don't sit around and rue what's gone. I learn what I can and move on, but one thing that always flashes back is the goal in Macedonia. I don't think I could have done anything other than what I did to win that game. I can see it going in.

"It was one of those things. The guy could play for a 100 years and never get the ball put on his forehead like that again. But do I ever watch it? Do I hell? Do I stick needles in my eyes? Do I put hot coals under me finger nails?"

This week he gets back to what he loves best. Taking a team on the road, away from the distractions of Dublin, eight or nine days of training and bonding and moulding. Games away with Cyprus and Andorra which should yield six points.

And if it all goes pear-shaped?

"I separate it better now. I had one time at Millwall, a bad patch, when I started taking it home and it affected us at home. No more. Results help you to handle it and help you leave it at the door. I'm not relaxed about winning, and defeat still hurts. I hate it, but I don't take it as personally.

"When we got a couple of results before Christmas the mood changed towards me. I knew it would happen. I came back and tried not to read the newspaper, but I'm on the plane with the lads and there's papers all around and I'm catching the headlines.

"Wonderful says one. Crap it says in the next. In between it says in the next. So I let them get on with that and I'll get on with this."