Time for McCarthy to open up to media

LockerRoom/Tom HumphriesLast Sunday at Moscow Airport we suffered a couple of those illustrative little tableaux which cruelly show the dysfunctional relationship between the people who run Irish soccer and the people who pay money to enjoy Irish soccer.

The national team had been spectacularly shredded the previous night and in the aftermath there had been a chaotic press conference which manager Mick McCarthy had, understandably perhaps, walked out of. So, at Moscow Airport with a couple of hours to kill before boarding time, the media sought comment from the Irish manager. The message came back that McCarthy wouldn't be holding a press conference until an hour after we arrived in Dublin.

As a piece of media management this was spiteful and petty. Many of the press contingent were headed straight to Croke Park to work the All-Ireland hurling final between Kilkenny and Clare. Many others had flight connections to England. Representations were made. It was agreed an interview would be done at Moscow Airport.

McCarthy made his way into a small side room and for several minutes emphasised the pluses which could be pulled from the wreckage of the previous night. Gary Doherty and Clinton Morrison both scoring. Our ability to keep on fighting despite a deficit, etc, etc. Finally he was asked about Roy Keane. Simple question. Obvious question. Glaringly obvious. One presumed McCarthy would have had a pat answer prepared. Out of my hands, etc. Regrets, etc. Instead he said a few snide words and walked out. One felt like running after him and asking if he was really surprised to have been asked the question but he's big enough and ugly enough by now to figure these things out himself.

Brendan Menton, FAI general secretary, came into the same room a few minutes later. Another decent man, Menton was explaining the FAI's response to several incidents involving Irish fans which had taken place during the weekend. Towards the end of the press conference Menton was asked two questions about Roy Keane. Before he began each one there was an attempt made by one of the FAI's media consultants to end the the press conference. Menton just wanted to say it was a football matter and not an administrative matter but there was a little frisson of panic each time the dreaded "Roy" name was mentioned.

On the face of it this may seem merely like troubled relations between football people and the media. It's not. It has to do with fans and the relationship of Irish football with the public who support and tolerate it. It may come as a surprise but most of the time, almost all of the time in fact, asking questions is just a job for the media. There's no personal agenda. There's no high-fiving afterwards. There's no collusion beforehand. People just ask the questions they think the audience out there wants to hear asked. The media don't think they're anything special. They don't expect to be treated like pesky vermin either.

There is no doubt Roy Keane's future relationship with the Irish team is chief among the concerns of the Irish football public right now. This fuss, it's not a media creation. It's a Mick and Roy creation.

No doubt, either, that after the most humiliating defeat in years that the questions about Mick and Roy needed asking.

It is almost four months since Saipan. The Irish manager has yet to address the issue in any sort of expansive or detailed way. After Saipan the Irish media, who are, like it or not, the chief conduit to the Irish fans, respected McCarthy's request that he not be asked to speak about the matter because he had a World Cup to prepare for. They were rewarded by Mick McCarthy spilling his side exclusively to an English Sunday newspaper.

Since then, with the time and space, to reflect Mick McCarthy's tune hasn't changed much. If you want to know what the manager of the national team has to say about the greatest controversy to have hit the Irish game in living memory, if you want to hear his side of it, you have to buy his book.

This is unacceptable. There is an embrace of accountability which comes with managing a national team. You aren't accountable to wretched media toads like me. You are accountable to the people beyond. It's easy to walk out onto a pitch and raise hands above head and applaud the travelling support. It's easy to appear in an English newspaper and uniformly brand the Irish media as "liars". It's easy to storm out of press conferences.

But being honest and freely accountable to fans is part of the management job. Dealing with the media of the country whose team you manage is part of that job. Press conferences are part of the job.

Remembering that the team isn't yours but the nation's is part of the job.

You don't hold back so you can sell more copies of a book. You either speak about something or you don't. You don't release your observations on a pay-per-view basis.

It's different for players. They don't assume the same responsibilities or take on the same burdens. This column is associated, for instance, with a forthcoming book by Niall Quinn. Quinn will make some money but the deal was done long before the World Cup and remains unchanged. It should be remembered, too, that if Quinn was the only person grown up enough to try to bring some settlement to the World Cup debacle he was also the only person in Japan to give full and frank explanations to the media of everything which involved him. Nothing was held back. Everything that the public had a right to know from him was explained, with a separate press conference for Sunday newspapers.

Mick McCarthy is a good man and this column has supported him through hard times when he was derided and abused for successive failures in qualifying campaigns. He has made a mistake on this whole issue though.

His reasoning on the entire Roy Keane business may be sound. His version of the story may be definitive and exculpatory and compelling. It may even be written in breathtaking, soaring prose which will bring tears to the eye. Still, we had a right to hear the bones of it from his mouth, though, and not be asked to fork out cash for it. It's not about the book. It's about the long silence which has preceded it.

This childish mendacity towards the media has been a regrettable feature of McCarthy's entire tenure as Irish manager. Alone of international managers at the World Cup he refused to do separate press conferences for Sunday newspapers or feature writers or foreign media.

So he ended up doing his daily stint at noon for the almost exclusive benefit of the wire services and the Evening Herald. It was a pleasant way of treating media organisations who had shelled more than ten grand a time to cover the Irish team.It has been the same since his first game in charge when he insisted on showering and changing before speaking a few words to a media contingent already tight up against deadlines. It has stayed the same right up to our first night in Moscow when he strolled past us all in the lobby of the Grand Marriot in Moscow and got into the lift to go to the fifth floor where it had been decreed a press conference would be held. We waited herd-like for the lift to come back down. When we reached the fifth floor, no Mick McCarthy. He'd stuck his head into the press conference room, saw none of the people whom he had just passed in the lobby and gone to his room in a huff.

Finally the press conference started 50 minutes late but for the local Russian media that was a disaster deadline-wise. McCarthy had made enemies of the locals. A couple of nights later he would wonder why the Russian media wouldn't play ball at his chaotic post match press conference.

So it will continue. It's wrong to judge a manager on the way he handles the media and most of us have tried not to. If goodwill is at an end, however, McCarthy can hardly be surprised. He never approached his relations with the media with anything but condescension and derision.

If his book is received with anything less than rapture Mick McCarthy will be uncomprehending and bitter about it. He'll say that he expected nothing else. If our result against Switzerland is imperfect McCarthy will feign not to see any connection with the Roy Keane issue.

It's an odd Achilles heel for a man to have. Generally he is personable, humorous and warm and with a little savvy he could have made the Irish media his greatest and most useful weapon. Now, ironically after his greatest achievement, he is in the middle of his greatest travail.

One suspects that for McCarthy, it will end bitterly. Needlessly so.