Mick McCarthy does not waste much time on sentiment but football’s circularity will not be lost on him when he emerges from the tunnel at Birmingham on Saturday. It was at St Andrew’s, on 3 November 2012, that he took the first small step towards creating a team Ipswich could feel proud of again; now his long goodbye begins there and the overriding sense, beyond the wildly contrasting opinions McCarthy’s reign has prompted, is of relief at the end of a saga that did all parties more harm than good.
As this season progressed and McCarthy moved closer to the end of his contract, which the club confirmed on Thursday would not be extended beyond this campaign, there was tacit acceptance the writing was on the wall. Ipswich began making inquiries about potential successors last autumn, both as standard contingency and in the knowledge their manager’s standing among supporters had nosedived.
It is almost universally held that his first three years in charge, turning a demoralised, League One-bound rabble into promotion contenders and restoring the warmth between club and town, was a feat akin to alchemy; the tail-off since then has been painful and the souring of relations over the past 12 months means he will be remembered with more caveats than many – and certainly McCarthy himself – feel he deserves.
“I guess both of us are happy the decision’s been made, and both of us are a bit disappointed as well that it’s come to this,” McCarthy said of the conversation with Ipswich’s owner, Marcus Evans, that secured his departure. It is impossible to shake the feeling Ipswich and McCarthy met at a Sliding Doors moment.
Had he enjoyed the resources his predecessors, Roy Keane and Paul Jewell, were afforded at a time when a well-spent £10m was a passport out of the Championship he would probably have returned Ipswich to the top flight; instead Evans scaled back the kitty and McCarthy was left to improvise while the division’s wealth mushroomed.
At the root of Ipswich supporters’ complaints about McCarthy, which culminated in an atmosphere at the 3-0 home defeat to Hull City on 13 March that he rightly termed “a disgrace”, was a pragmatic style of football that never quite progressed. Before that match at Birmingham, Ipswich were adrift at the bottom; it was a time to dig in, winning games through hard work and a peerless attitude.
Those methods kept them up, offered a sniff of the playoffs in the 2013-14 season and took them there the following year. Attempts in 2015-16 to become more fluent were scuppered after a 5-1 defeat at Reading, which halted a strong start and appeared to spook McCarthy into reapplying the handbrake. The next 18 months were a slog, the team regressing and the club unable or unwilling to reinvest much of the money – somewhere between £12m‑18m – they received from the sales of Aaron Cresswell, Tyrone Mings and Daryl Murphy.
McCarthy tried again this season to introduce more guile and could feel cursed that injuries to the majority of Ipswich’s creative players checked their stride.
The problem was that, by this time, people were no longer listening. Discord that was first voiced after a 2-0 defeat at Brentford in September 2016 was met curtly – “I wish they would say it to my face on my own because his pint of lager, he’d have been wearing it” – and the environment worsened from there. McCarthy felt he was being denied credit for pushing so hard against the financial tide; in return he shot from the hip with increasing venom and, perhaps sensing his time was up, rose to some considerable bait in a manner that made the fallout irreversible.
It was an utter breakdown in communication and, in his press conference on Thursday, he took aim again at “the numbskulls who’ve been giving me the abuse” who have been “ruining games at Portman Road”. That was fair but the diplomatic conclusion is that it should not reflect badly on anyone that the cycle ends now. The average tenure of a Championship manager is 13 months; McCarthy has lasted five and a half years and that, combined with Ipswich’s 16-year stint in the division, fomented a level of boredom that could perhaps have been taken less personally.
McCarthy, whose standing in the game has not taken a hit, will find employment. Ipswich, several of whose players will consider their futures after Thursday’s news, must rebuild and be aware they stand on a cliff edge. Their next recruit will not be offered the pot of money that eluded McCarthy; they will, though, reap the fruits of an academy that has few equals in the country.
Tony Mowbray, the Blackburn manager and former Ipswich player, is among the names being considered and he is known to find the idea attractive. He would start with bundles of goodwill but the prevailing sadness is that McCarthy, a good man who has done a very good job, leaves with so much having been eroded.
(The Guardian)
