PLAYING WITH FIRE?

Mick McCarthy is a decent man. He is likeable, too. Indeed, when he was part of the Irish set-up as a player, I'd have confidently described him as warm, intelligent and funny.
He was unfairly vilified at the time as not being up to international standard. Clearly he wasn't quick and he did make a couple of mistakes that left the door open for vital goals to be scored against Ireland. But to focus only on the areas in which he was most vulnerable missed the essence of McCarthy's contribution under Jack Charlton.
Every team needs a number of talkers, organisers and motivators on the pitch, and McCarthy performed all three functions. He wasn't the only one on Jack Charlton's team with these qualities. Packie Bonner, Kevin Moran, Liam Brady, Ray Houghton and Steve Staunton all had the ability to make their presence felt and to help other players through the game. But McCarthy's input in this regard was immense as he bullied, pressurised and organised the players around him to go the extra yard to do their jobs defensively.
I'd have opted for a McGrath-Moran or an O'Leary-Moran pairing at the heart of the Irish defence at the time, and either might well have been the best option open to Jack Charlton. But the more I watch our current team being undone, the less cast-iron my conviction in this regard becomes because the lack of a commanding organisational presence is clearly proving to be such a major handicap.
We desperately need someone - or preferably two or three players - on the park who are capable of calling the shots.
The point of revisiting that old debate is to establish that when Mick McCarthy was appointed as manager of the Republic of Ireland, there was no absence of good will on my part. I wanted him to succeed. I still do. But it is no longer possible to suspend disbelief. The fact is that he has got it wrong repeatedly - and is continuing to do so.
He must learn, in the first place, not to offer up any more hostages to fortune. At the very start of his reign he said that players would have to be playing first-team football to be selected. At the time, this rule-of-thumb became a basis for leaving Paul McGrath out of the reckoning. Which was very convenient, until McCarthy made a nonsense of the policy by successively picking Ian Harte and Mark Kennedy (among others) when they were nowhere near the first team at Leeds United and Liverpool respectively.
In fact, grandiose policy statements of this kind are stupid and unnecessary, and making them would reflect badly on any manager. Players often fall foul of particular club regimes - but that doesn't mean that they're incapable of delivering in an international context. Kevin Moran, for example, was often in and out of the Manchester United first team but he scarcely ever had a bad game for Ireland. How much first-team football was the 38-year-old Roger Milla playing when he came close to winning the World Cup for Cameroon in 1990? First-team park football!
If Roy Keane had a row with Alex Ferguson six games into the new season, and was sidelined for a month at United, would it make any sense to leave our best player out of the Ireland team? Not on your life.
This is obvious stuff. And yet Mick McCarthy is still being quoted to the effect that a player has been left out because he isn't playing regular first team football, despite the fact that it's not a policy he adheres to with any consistency. Robbie Keane, for example, played against Argentina recently, despite the fact that he'd been dropped for the previous three or four weeks from a nondescript Wolves team which plies its trade in the murky environs of the Nationwide League. And thank fuck he didn't!
Anyone who imagines that these inconsistencies don't matter is simply wrong. If a manager behaves illogically or irrationally, it inevitably has a damaging effect on his relationship with the players, and unfortunately Mick McCarthy has repeatedly fallen into the trap.
Out of the blue, for example, he selected Kevin Kilbane to make his debut wide on the left against Iceland in Reykjavik. Having thrown him in at the deep end, apparently on a hunch, he replaced him at half-time. Worse was to follow, however, when he subsequently ignored Kilbane completely, leaving him out of the squad entirely for the next match.
That kind of cavalier treatment of players is grossly unfair. It might have had a devastating effect on the morale of a player of Kevin Kilbane's youth and inexperience. Indeed, it may have had. He'd had a good opening to the season, but after the Ireland debacle his form dipped. This year, reports suggest that he's been back on song, so what does Mick McCarthy do?
Leaving the hugely experienced Denis Irwin on the bench, and playing Ian Harte - a left-sided full-back or wing-back - in the centre of defence, he again threw Kilbane in at the deep end against the might of Argentina, playing him wide on the left.
Kilbane didn't set the world on fire. Nor, in fairness, could you reasonably attribute the Irish team's first-half capitulation in any way to anything he did (or didn't) do. And yet, unbelievably, for the second time, McCarthy withdrew him after just 45 minutes.
This kind of treatment of players, as if they're yo-yos, up one minute and down the next, has been a feature of McCarthy's selections. Alan Maybury, for example came into the panel for the game against the Czech Republic and played. He did reasonably well - and yet he was dumped for the Argentina game.
Similarly when Stephen Geoghegan of Shelbourne was called up to complete the squad for the match against Macedonia, we were assured that he was there strictly on merit - and yet he was gone for the next game, never to reappear, bypassed by players who were almost certainly available when he had been preferred.
There is neither rhyme nor reason to this approach - and everyone involved in the Irish camp must recognise it. What it communicates is a feeling that the manager is grasping at straws; there's an element of desperation involved that could only undermine the confidence of whichever eleven players are selected to represent their country.
This problem of squad selection and team selection is the most deeply worrying aspect of Mick McCarthy's performance to date. If he consistently put the best players available to him onto the pitch and we lost matches it would be one thing. But the game against Argentina crystallised the realisation that, in schoolboy terms, he has his "pets", who he will play against all football logic - the decision to stick Ian Harte in at centre-back being the obvious case in point. It also confirmed a tendency to follow the most transparent whims - Kevin Kilbane being the beneficiary, and ultimately the victim, in this last instance.
In Denis Irwin, Mick McCarthy has the best and most consistent full-back in the Premiership, and a player with experience at the highest level in Europe at his disposal - and yet he left him on the bench.
Similarly, anyone who has seen Phil Babb in action recently would have confirmed his return to form. He's a natural centre-back in a 4-4-2 formation, is quick, strong in the air and - increasingly - fierce in the tackle. If he is suspect at all it's in his reading of the game but Ian Harte is a novice by comparison. To omit Babb for Harte - playing out of position - was simply crazy.
Football is an unforgiving business; you could justifiably blame Harte for Gabriel Batistuta's goal. But the truth is that he shouldn't have been put in the position of having to try to cope with one of the most lethal strikers in international football. The real blame lies with the man who cast him in that unenviable role.
Hopefully Mick McCarthy will have learned from the Argentinian experience. Irwin and Babb were introduced at half-time and the Irish were far stronger in the second half.
After the game, he commented that he was happy to be proved wrong, adding that they had both played better than ever before for him. It was a curious emphasis. Denis Irwin is an established and experienced international who has done exceptionally well for Manchester United against the best in Europe this year, including the finest that Juventus could throw at him - and yet Mick McCarthy was unhappy about how he had performed for Ireland. Did it never occur to Mick that the problem may have related to what was going on around Irwin? Or that the problem may actually be with the systems and tactics dictated by the manager?
Ireland under Jack Charlton patented the pressing game. It's now become a feature of the tactics employed by the best club - and international - sides in the world. And yet under Mick McCarthy, Ireland seem to have forgotten how to do it. Thus, while there was a refreshing zest and a willingness to run at the opposition on display even in the first half against Argentina, we lacked any sense of urgency about closing the opposition down and in particular about getting men behind the ball.
Runners were being let go as if they were someone else's responsibility. Midfielders were coasting back when they should have been sprinting. And there was a general air of complacency about our defending. We were lucky the Argentinians hadn't bagged at least four before the break.
This is the sort of thing that a manager has to sort out before the team goes onto the pitch. You cannot afford to be lackadaisical in international football and it's up to the manager to ensure that the players aren't.
In many ways Mick McCarthy is lucky. The cliché when he took over the management of the Irish team was that we don't - or didn't - have the players anymore. It was a line that conveniently forgot that some of Jack Charlton's most impressive successes were achieved with players in the side who were widely considered not to be up to international standard.
Neither Chris Hughton nor Tony Galvin, for example, could command a place regularly with Spurs for a lengthy spell during which they served Ireland well. Chris Morris was hugely fallible - and at times seemed as if he couldn't cross a ball accurately to save his life. McCarthy himself was "too slow". And so on.
The fact is that a well organised side with good team spirit can do well at international level. A very well organised side with good team spirit can make a real impact, as Northern Ireland showed in Spain in 1982, and as they may well do again under Lawrie McMenemy.
Organisation and spirit are paramount. But the fact is that there is now a greater number of Irish players functioning successfully in and around the (much-improved) Premiership than ever before.
Especially with the likes of Lee Carsley (a very good footballer), Mark Kinsella (ditto), Damien Duff, Robbie Keane, Stephen McPhail and Alan Maybury coming through, we have the players. What they need is to be part of a set-up where there is real focus - where the manager knows what he's doing, and where they collectively know that they - along with the rest of the Irish squad -will be dealt with consistently, and honestly, by him.
They need enough experienced players around them to bring them through. And that means the manager always putting the best 11 players at his disposal onto the park.
It also means being both organised and fired up with self-belief and passion. In the game against Argentina, Robbie Keane was hugely impressive as a footballer - subtle, inventive, fast, and far stronger than his 17 years would suggest.
But going beyond that, he was also impressively passionate. He was hungry. He wanted to make an impact. He wanted to win, and so he played like a demon. Mick McCarthy might ponder the fact that Keane stood out from the rest of the team precisely because of this - and do something about it.
Or if he can't, then he'd be better to throw in the towel now. n