Ken Jones: McCarthy brings logical end to self-defeating Irish sniping

I suppose that Tuesday 5 November, 2002 will go into books about the history of Irish sport. It was the day when Mick McCarthy resigned rather than dispute the charge that he was no longer up to the task of managing the Republic's football team. McCarthy, you may have noticed, made a dignified exit. By action alone, he told the officials whose support he had lost, the players who had stopped playing and the writers who were after him, to shove it.

By way of thoughtful reacting, I have to say that the end of McCarthy's reign was held predictable here long before a bitter confrontation caused him to expel Roy Keane from last summer's World Cup finals. And not for obvious reasons either.

Let's go back to when the Barnsley-born McCarthy stood at the centre of the Republic's defence in tussles that got them through to the European Championship in 1988, their first appearance in a major tournament, and the World Cup finals two years afterwards.

While happily embracing other recruits of tenuous affiliation, allegedly enlightened critics soon regarded McCarthy's robust Englishness as a symbol of Jack Charlton's refusal to accommodate romantic purpose. This did not immediately occur to them, but as time went on it became more and more evident that they were using McCarthy to get at the manager. This was particularly true of the ace polemicist Eamon Dunphy, who went on to write Roy Keane's book.

Based on his vast playing experience, Charlton's fundamental theory about defensive play was that centre-halfs who took risks close to their own goal were of no use to anybody, certainly not to a team short of defining talent. "Mick does a terrific job for us," I remember Charlton saying. "The criticism he gets is disgraceful. Completely out of order."

It was possible to find in the response to McCarthy's subsequent appointment as manager an echo of that period when the manner of the Republic's great progress was not to everyone's satisfaction. "Of course, it's great for the game here," an old player said, "but you have to understand that while people enjoy the victories, appearing in these championships, they'd like to see more class."

In the shape of such notables as Johnny Giles, Liam Brady, Charlie Hurley and Billy Whelan, class did not bring the Republic much to shout about. Success was in moral victories, bad luck stories told in bars. Prior to Charlton's contentious appointment the Republic were not even a nearly team.

That McCarthy took the Republic forward technically, adding to the refinements Charlton eventually accommodated, qualifying for the World Cup mattered little when things began to go wrong. "Now we can start afresh," an Irish supporter said on television earlier this week as though a curse had been lifted to make way for pure Irish blood.

I sense something peculiarly Celtic in all this. When Graham Henry was brought in from New Zealand to coach the Welsh rugby union team doubts were extinguished by a series of highly encouraging victories. The Great Reedemer had arrived. In the fullness of time, however, the doubts returned. Too clever by half, complicates the game, confuses the players. More damagingly, in some people's eyes he was a foreigner. "Not one of us, doesn't understand our culture," I heard an old player say.

If that criticism could not be fairly directed at McCarthy, the vision Irish football has of its present self could be as self-defeating as the view that Welsh rugby can emerge from a wasteland of self-interest.

To compensate for the awkward truth of largely modest talent, many in the Republic turned on McCarthy much as many in Wales turned on Henry. I don't know what the moral to draw from all this is. Sooner or later, we may hope, mediocrity will dawn as a revealing truth.

McCarthy has not left the Republic with a great team. His achievement, in common with Charlton's, was to make better teams nervous. In spite of all the crisp editorialising, it seems to me that in the long run McCarthy may come out of all this better than it seemed he would. Not as a manager, not as a wronged man, but someone with the tenacity to stand up for himself.