This is an interview of two parts.
The first, a relaxed hour and a bit over Zoom on Monday morning from the office of his South London home, takes in everything from Declan Rice’s England declaration to Marcelo Bielsa’s sacking and ends with Mick McCarthy saying he hasn’t retired from football but “football might have retired me”.
Three days later and we pick it up again. McCarthy is on speakerphone this time, his voice battling with the sat nav directions as he drives up the M40 to start a new job at Blackpool, the eighth managerial posting of his 32-year career.
“This came totally out the blue, I had no clue at all on Monday, no idea,” he says. “It’s unbelievable how quickly things change in football, absolutely ridiculous the nature of it all.”
McCarthy first heard from Blackpool on Wednesday. He’d said on Monday he was enjoying the time off, had spent a year with his four beloved grandkids and wasn’t “desperate” to take a job unless it was the right one. Applications for jobs at Wigan, Rotherham and Sunderland hadn’t gone anywhere. The phone hadn’t rung for a while.
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“I’m really excited about it. It’s great to be back in the game and great that someone thinks you can do a job,” he says. A raft of speaking engagements and a trip to Florida have been cancelled.
On Monday we’d spoken at length about that weird twilight zone of spending over 12 months out of management, the strange emotions of a Saturday afternoon without a game to manage and how he’d spotted that “familiar blankness” on the face of Frank Lampard and one or two others under pressure the previous week.
“Journalists get that bit braver when you’re losing games, you know,” he’d said of that “awful feeling” of being unable to reverse a losing run.
Now he is opening the door to that world again, the stress, the tension, the late nights, early starts, the surreal life of the long distance manager. He can’t wait.
“It’s the same every time you get a new job, that buzz. I’ve loved spending time with my family but you miss being around it and Blackpool is a great club. Besides, on Sunday I jet washed my drive and I think it was a case of jet washing the jet wash.
“That probably told me it was time to get back in.”
McCarthy told friends on Thursday that Blackpool is either his “swansong” or – if it goes as he hopes – might just end up being the start of another managerial journey.
You suspect McCarthy will relish the fact that his managerial career is not ending with the run of eight defeats which brought the curtain down on his time at Cardiff in 2021.
Mick McCarthy’s managerial career
- Millwall (1992-96)
- Republic of Ireland (1996-2002)
- Sunderland (2003-06)
- Wolves (2006-12)
- Ipswich Town (2012-18)
- Republic of Ireland (2018-20)
- APOEL (2020-21)
- Cardiff City (2021)
- Blackpool (2023-present)
“I’m still surprised and shocked by that, it’s not normal,” he said. “I made a few mistakes in that run. I think I went a bit too negative but there were mitigating circumstances. I’d have sacked myself after eight games without a win.”
McCarthy returns to a game that has, he admits, changed immeasurably in the last four or five years.
“Everyone has two centre halves in the 18 yard box getting the ball, everyone seems to play the same way and the best teams do it really well and will win more games because they keep the ball. It’s not a bad thing as teams are playing some great football but sometimes I’m watching it and thinking ‘Someone please put a cross in!’ As a centre forward you’d be doing your head in,” he says.
“I think there’s more than one way to skin a cat. There has to be.”
He also chuckles at the changing terminology of the game. “I was watching my nephew play the other week and spotted a goalkeeper who used to play for me,” he recalls.
“I went over to chat to him and there’s a kid with a bag so I said to him ‘Are you the physio?’ He said ‘No, I’m the head of health, medical, physiology and something else and something else and well-being’. I said to him ‘How wide is your f___ing office door? You’ll never get that title on there!’
“When he went away the goalkeeper said to me: ‘Yeah, he’s the physio’ but they just can’t call him that anymore.”
Blackpool are getting a good manager, a proud member of the 1,000 game club, and an even better man. He’s as fired up as he was as a 33 year old at Millwall all those years ago, determined to justify the faith of Blackpool’s board and supporters rather than proving perceived doubters wrong.
On Monday, we spoke at length about his reputation and he settled on the following sentence: “I do what I can to win a football match but I don’t always do it to please everybody.” That is exactly what his new club need.
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