Mick McCarthy looks back with gratitude at memorable days in green

Mick McCarthy is just back through the door of his home in Bromley having dropped his granddaughter to school. The little things, there’s nothing bigger.

The morning rush around the school gates is a free-for-all of cars and bikes and bad parking. It’s an in between place, everybody in a hurry to be somewhere else.

Occasionally, usually out the window of a passing car, McCarthy will have a quip about football tossed in his direction. It’s always good-natured. He has been living around this part of London since he signed for Millwall in 1990. He’s 64 now. And still the Yorkshire accent holds on defiantly within this son of Barnsley.

He has four grandchildren, all living locally. Along with his wife Fiona, they get to watch them grow.

To fix England, Gareth Southgate needs to make bold move and drop Jude Bellingham

---

Georgia shock Portugal and Turkey beat Czech Republic as last 16 is finalised

---

Euro 2024 last 16 draw: England to play Slovakia on Sunday

---

McCarthy’s most recent spell in football was a brief one, managing Blackpool from January until April. The Tangerines. On Sunday, the Dutch tangerine army will descend on Dublin for their first competitive international here since September 2001. The day U2 headlined Slane and Jason McAteer headlined Lansdowne Road. A day of days.

McCarthy was Ireland manager that afternoon when Louis van Gaal’s star-studded Dutch side lost 1-0 to ten-man Ireland.

McCarthy’s Ireland career – both as a player and a manager – had an uncanny habit of often intertwining with the Netherlands. On some of his biggest days in green, they were across the trenches. From Gelsenkirchen in Euro 88 to Palermo in Italia 90, and from Amsterdam in 2000 to Dublin in 2001.

He has a photo at home from the Euro 88 encounter of himself and Marco Van Basten, but it’s not all hugs and pearly whites.

“We fell over contesting a ball and he kind of kicked out and caught me in the face, so I jumped on him. In the photo I have my fingers right in his face,” recalls McCarthy.

Of all the possible images, that’s the one he has framed. Then again, it captures the soul of that Ireland team. Not a single step backwards.

Wim Kieft’s googly of a goal was the difference on the day and the Netherlands, with those magnificent chevron-patterned jerseys, progressed to win the European Championships.

The next time the sides met was also in the final group game of a major tournament, Italia 1990. Both teams entered the game with two points following draws against England and Egypt.

Ruud Gullit put the Dutch ahead early on before Niall Quinn poached an equaliser for Ireland in the 71st minute direct from Packie Bonner’s rocket-propelled clearance. Over in Cagliari, a Mark Wright goal had England 1-0 up. If both scores remained unchanged then England, Ireland and the Netherlands would all qualify to the knockout stages. Shortly after Quinn’s equaliser, a cessation of hostilities was agreed, a Palermo Pact.

“I’d asked what the score was in the England game and heard they were 1-0 up,” says McCarthy. “So, yeah, Ruud Gullit and I did have a discussion. I said to him, ‘We’re going through, you’re going through, we could down tools here for five minutes.’”

Eventually, having tired of watching Ireland leisurely stringing the ball across the back like a pearl on a necklace, French referee Michel Vautrot summoned the two captains.

“He called us in,” says McCarthy. “’Come on you guys, you’ve got to play some football.’ I replied, ‘This is the most football we’ve played in years’.

“It sounds bad now, but at the time there were only a few minutes left, it had been a rip-roaring game until then, tackles flying in, a really strongly contested game.”

One of his early matches as Ireland manager was a 3-1 friendly defeat in Rotterdam, but in September 2000 McCarthy returned to the Netherlands for a huge World Cup qualifier in Amsterdam.

Ireland’s first two fixtures in that qualification campaign were away to the Netherlands and Portugal.

“Those games were pretty much held up as my death knell, Holland away and Portugal away, they were going to see me out the door. The timer had been turned on,” says McCarthy.

“It was all set up for those who wanted to see the back of me. But those results changed everything.”

Ireland led 2-0 in Amsterdam thanks to goals from Robbie Keane and Jason McAteer, but the home side bagged a brace late on to earn a 2-2 draw, while the game in Lisbon finished 1-1.

McCarthy sat down during the week and looked back at the highlights of the Netherlands match.

“We were superb. You’d forget how good some of those players were. We played some great football, that team.”

Ultimately, all roads led to Dublin on September 1st, 2001.

During the build-up, McCarthy got word a Dutch reconnaissance party had already travelled to Korea and Japan to arrange their World Cup logistics.

“We’d heard Holland had already booked their hotels. If you are doing your business properly of course it’s something you’d do, provisionally book hotels. You can’t just wait until you qualify.

“But when you are a coach or a footballer and you hear it, then it’s different, because you use anything you can for motivation, ‘Oh, they’ve booked the fu**king hotels, have they? They’ve no fu**king respect for us.’”

The Dutch arrived in Dublin loaded with stars – Van Bommel, Zenden, Van Nistelrooy, Kluivert, Overmars.

Roy Keane’s early crunching tackle on Overmars has grown in urban legend as Ireland setting the tone, but the Dutch bossed much of the encounter.

“I remember at half-time giving a ‘passionate hearts but calm heads’ speech,” says McCarthy. “‘Lose our heads and we’re not going to get a result.’”

Then just 13 minutes after the restart Gary Kelly was sent off on a second yellow for a rash challenge on Overmars. Just like that, the goalposts moved from base camp to a mountain peak above the clouds.

The Dutch also had a penalty claim waved away after a defensive mix-up between Steve Staunton and Shay Given led to Van Nistelrooy going down.

“Did we get away with it? I’m not sure,” says McCarthy. “I suppose if that game was in Holland then he might have got the penalty, it was one of those.

“But you know what, fu*k ‘em, we’ve had so many decisions go against us over the years, against Belgium in a playoff we got stiffed and then you had Thierry Henry as well.”

The strike which has immortalised McAteer in Irish sporting folklore arrived in the 67th minute; a dinked chip across the box from Steve Finnan, McAteer watches it loop towards him, the ball bounces once, twice, he loads the trigger, click. Goal. Lansdowne Road shakes.

Over on the sideline, physio Mick Byrne leapt towards the arms of McCarthy as if propelled from a trampoline.

“For nanoseconds it was pure ecstasy and joy. The place was bouncing. Then you quickly realised there was a lot of time left, so you needed to get back to work.”

The Dutch emptied the bench – Van Hooijdonk, Hasselbaink and Van Bronckhorst all joined the siege. They finished the game with about 17 strikers, but as the seconds ticked away the engineers of total football were reduced to stripping it all back and going agricultural.

“They started kicking long balls in around our box. I turned around to Taff [Ian Evans], ‘I’ll bloody settle for that’. Because when they tried to play through us they were creating chances, but once they started knocking it in the box we had players who could just head it away all day. The lads were amazing, the resilience they showed.”

About 35 miles away in Slane, thousands of concert-goers were glued to big screens showing the game live. It would prove to be the greatest support act of all time. Later that night, as U2 played New Year’s Day, Bono draped the tricolour over his shoulders, held the microphone close to his lips and told the crowd: ‘Close your eyes and imagine it’s Jason McAteer’.

It was a day that produced several evocative images. One, of McCarthy and Keane shaking hands, didn’t feel all that significant in the moment but eight months later it would be used widely to demonstrate a rift between the pair.

“It looks like we are a mile away from each other in the photo,” says McCarthy. “But after games everybody is different. I have no idea what he thought, no idea.

“I didn’t take any notice of it at all at the time. When you see it with the context after the fallout, it’s a great picture for them to show, isn’t it? They can use that. But the reality is I never gave it a thought. Because that’s who he was, job done, he just walked off the pitch, other players celebrated it differently.”

McCarthy travelled to Korea soon after the win. His flight was with KLM – the Dutch national airline – and went through Amsterdam. At passport control, talk turned to football.

“One of the guys checking my passport started giving me a little bit of grief. Then he asked, ‘But why are you travelling through Holland to get to Korea?’ I said, ‘Because you’re not!’”

McCarthy wouldn’t be one for nostalgia, but he often thinks of Jack.

The last time he saw Charlton was in September 2018 at a 30-year reunion of the Euro 88 crew in the K Club. Charlton, at the time, was suffering from dementia.

“It was wonderful to see him but it was also awful to see him like he was. Jack was such a big, gregarious, powerful bloke,” recalls McCarthy.

The front cover of McCarthy’s book, Captain Fantastic, is a photo of the pair laughing and jostling. Charlton’s arm is wrapped around his captain’s shoulder. The pair had just traded jibes over McCarthy’s keepy-uppy attempts. Shots were fired in both directions, but nobody was wounded.

“Seeing him in the K Club was difficult but I’m glad we had that day because I hadn’t seen him for a while. He was such a big, powerful character, he was a great piss-taker, loved a laugh. That photo, that’s how I like to remember Jack. He was fabulous . . . I loved him dearly.”

Without Charlton, McCarthy doesn’t believe the halcyon days of 1988 and 1990 would have come to pass.

“Not a chance. We had a lot of good footballers and coaches who wanted to play nice football, but we weren’t getting results. Then Jack came in, looked at the international football landscape, and said, ‘No, this is how we are going to play’.

“It’s funny, everybody loved it when we were winning but when it stopped working, they hated it.”

McCarthy still finds it surprising when grown men and women show him old photos of them as kids standing beside him with beaming, giddy, toothless grins.

“It’s incredible how Jack and that team affected so many lives in Ireland during that time, it was amazing. I was lucky to be there and be part of it, we all were. He changed everything.”

As for changes, well McCarthy isn’t finished with football yet.

“I think being a football coach-manager suits me better than being a good grandad,” he laughs.

“If the right opportunity came along then I would get back involved. I’ve never yet got a job I applied for, it’s usually only when it’s a shit-show I get the call!”

For now, there are grandchildren to be collected and odd jobs to be finished. Life goes on, it always does. Storytime doesn’t tend to revolve around grandad’s stout defending in Gelsenkirchen or McAteer’s screamer in Dublin.

“No, the grandkids don’t care about any of it, that’s not important to them,” says McCarthy.

It will be someday.