Mick McCarthy Is Still Reluctant To Take Risks

Manager Mick McCarthy loves to ruffle a few feathers. Some would argue he has made a career out of it and certainly not giving a damn of what people think of him, is both his strength and his weakness.

I guess he makes owner Marcus Evans happy though because there are few coaches in the game who like the challenge of working on a shoestring and being proud of it but he seems to fit the bill.

In some ways they are a perfect match when it boils down to money matters. Evans hates giving it and McCarthy hates spending it but in the owner’s case, it has not always been this way.

I sometimes wonder whether the reasoning behind McCarthy’s appointment in the first place was because he has a Yorkshire accent?

Certainly any other manager since Evans bought the club, has not have lasted anywhere as near as long and I still feel very sorry for Jim Magilton, who did little wrong, except the takeover took place under his watch and Evans wanted to flex his muscles with a big name!

In stepped Roy Keane and our troubles began almost immediately. The man who said, after he left the job, that he was never much in love with the colour blue, almost single-handedly brought this club to its knees – with a little help from Simon Clegg who was completely out of his depth as the chief executive of Ipswich Town football club.

Paul Jewell was a likable chap who genuinely seemed to love the club but he could not stop the slide, even though Evans was still very generous on the spending front in those days. We may have come perilously close to relegation under Jewell but at least we played some very entertaining football.

I don’t like being so negative about the team that I have supported for fifty years but that is the truth of it. I find that this club is going backwards with every increasing rapidity and although McCarthy’s first two seasons held promise, that seems a very distant memory now.

What happens at the end of this miserable campaign is anybody’s guess but with the backing he has from Marcus, don’t be surprised if it is the same old scenario next season too.

That means a tight spend and the kind of football that the club should PAY YOU to watch most of the time.

Season tickets sales will inevitably fall and as the gate receipts reach an all time low, the club will have to be very inventive with their promotion campaigns.

And if the football and results are as dire as the bulk of this season I have got one for them. Why not charge one pound to get into the ground and one hundred to get out!

Frank Weston – Editor of Vital Ipswich