Mick McCarthy can win I’m A Celebrity... unless Cork's Keano turns up that is!
I admired him as a defensive kingpin for Ireland and my club Manchester City back in the 1980s, when an ‘attacking full-back’ was someone who ventured over the halfway line once every blue moon, and when central defenders spent half the match airborne to head away the constant barrage of high balls.
My admiration for Mick went up a notch when he became a manager, and had the near impossible task of following on from the legendary Jack Charlton with the Republic of Ireland. It was a role he carried out with aplomb, and with the kind of win rate that fans would kill their grannies for nowadays.
Whisper it still in certain circles in Cork, but when the Saipan civil war broke out between Mick and his captain Roy Keane before the 2002 World Cup, I took the manager’s side, in these very pages.
While my colleague John McHale insisted that local hero Roy Keane should be accommodated by the manager at all costs, I urged McCarthy to send his captain home for the sake of team harmony... a matter of hours before he did just that (this being the era before the internet was universal, I doubt he took his lead from me... but a fella can dream!).
But here in Cork, most people backed their Mayfield man in the row, and McCarthy became a vilified figure.
I felt he carried himself with dignity in the months and years after Saipan, and his eventual reconciliation with Keane when both were managers showed great maturity by the pair of them.
Despite his Irish roots - McCarthy’s father, Charlie, was from Tallow, a boot of the ball from the Cork border - Mick is a product of his Yorkshire boyhood. He has that northern English county’s gruff, direct manner and doesn’t suffer fools gladly, allied to a parsimonious way with words and a bone-dry sense of humour.
When he once said, “I was feeling as sick as the proverbial donkey”, he was playing up to the stereotype of the not-too-bright footballer, but he knew what he was saying. McCarthy is a shrewd and witty cookie.
Similarly, his comment, ”Anyone who uses the word ‘quintessentially’ in a half-time talk is talking crap” is a measure of his bluntness and dislike of pretentiousness.
McCarthy’s reflections on the pressures of managing Ireland were legendary. He once said; “It wasn’t a monkey on my back, it was Planet of the Apes.” And after one match, he quipped: “You want to try sitting in that dug-out when your backside’s on the bacon slicer!”
However, according to a string of tabloid reports, he is about to put his backside back into the bacon slicer of public life in the coming weeks, as he is reputedly a contestant on the new series of ITV and Virgin Media show I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!
The jungle reality series, hosted by Ant and Dec, and best known for its celebs eating unpleasant foods such as kangaroo testicles, is not my usual cup of tea, but I think I will set that aside this year if McCarthy is among the contestants.
The prospect of this no-nonsense, outspoken man of pensioner age casting a sardonic eye over a string of influencer hunks and bikini-clad C-list celebs, and passing judgment on them and the vagaries of jungle life, is too much to resist. I’d say he will stomach anything thrown at him too.
Surely, in the course of several weeks of constantly filming him, the subject of Saipan will raise its head - and, as ever, all of Ireland will look on in interest to parse McCarthy’s remarks and assess whether an attitude has shifted over time, whether a new morsel of heretofore unknown fact has been spilled.
A decade ago, the Mayfield man admitted: “I’ve had the Celebrity Big Brother offers and the jungle stuff (I’m A Celebrity). I met the jungle people, but I thought, ‘Nah, not for me’,’’ said Keane. “But the more you say no, the more determined they are to get you, so who knows? There’s more to life than football.”
Who knows indeed?! That does sound like Keane was dangling a carrot with a few extra noughts for his fee on the end of it.
I’m A Celebrity... co-host Ant McPartlin, who has relatives in Fermoy, has said: “Roy Keane would be very good. We’ve asked him on a few occasions. And he’s been close, he has been close to saying yes, so come on Roy Keane. Do it for the lads, son!”
Sadly for McCarthy, any chance he has of winning the TV show and being named King of the Jungle would be lost if popular player-turned-pundit Keane joined. The crown will be ‘on his head, son’.
Whatever happens in the jungle, the saga of Saipan, and the story of how the greatest ever Irish footballer and team captain missed out on the World Cup at the prime of his glorious career, will rumble on.
Filming has just finished on that movie starring Hardwicke and Coogan, and it will be released next summer.
Keane was a simmering, trigger-happy perfectionist at the time of the fall-out, and there is no doubt that he and McCarthy rubbed each other up the wrong way, and should share the blame for the incendiary debacle that took place.
The temptation among film producers may be to paint Keane as a wronged victim, and McCarthy as stubborn and out-of-touch. I hope that isn’t the case. Far better that the film allows us to watch the two sides of both characters, warts and all.
It’s been some year for Cork successes on the global stage - from Cillian Murphy’s Oscar, to Bambie Thug at Eurovision, and the Olympic rowing heroes. Perhaps we can end it with a son of Tallow on the Cork border winning I’m A Celebrity... or maybe a man from Mayfield will end up taking the prize!
App?
