McCarthy: why the star assets may have to go

Bottom club brace themselves for perils of the drop

Mick McCarthy must have thought it was a home from home. To one side of the new Sunderland manager, as he walked through the reception area at the Stadium of Light on Wednesday morning, was a leaflet inviting visitors to a St Patrick's Day party. To the other side was a display case containing emerald- green international shirts which had been worn by Niall Quinn and Jason McAteer.

Not that all the memories were happy ones as the old manager of Ireland got down to his new job of managing the club stuck at the foot of the Premiership table. It was at the Stadium of Light last May that the row which boiled over in Saipan first started to simmer. Roy Keane was a notable absentee from the Republic side McCarthy sent out that night for World Cup warm-up duty in Quinn's testimonial match. It was the one sour note on an evening when £1 million was raised for charity, and it was not the first time that reality had bitten Mick McCarthy on Wearside.

Back in 1992 he played at the centre of defence in a Millwall team beaten 6-2 by Sunderland at Roker Park. He hung up his boots soon after. He also suffered a 6-0 defeat at Roker as manager of Millwall in 1995. It remains the biggest hiding of his managerial life.

It is only fitting, then, that McCarthy should be under no illusions as he picks up the thread of the club management career he forsook for the international arena two months after the last of those Roker Park roastings. At his formal presentation to the media on Wednesday morning he talked up the challenge of fighting the fight against relegation. "Mathematically it's still possible," McCarthy said. "We might as well set a target." Later, though, away from the glare of the television cameras, he talked with typical candour about the likely prospect of relegation and the financial implications it would have on his job.

"I'd like to talk about the half-full glass," he said. "We are still in the Premiership. But I'm not daft. I'm not coming here with rose-tinted spectacles, thinking, 'Ah, it's going to be all right. We're going to stay up'. We'll do our damnedest to stay up, but if we don't then cuts will have to be made. If the worst should happen, it's not going to be financially viable to keep as many players as we have now."

With Sunderland already £25m in debt, moreover, it would not be financially viable for them to hold on to such saleable playing assets as Kevin Phillips and Thomas Sorensen. "I've been in this position," McCarthy said. "If teams go down, top players very often want to leave anyway, whether it's a financial thing or they just don't want to play in a lower division. And if they have to go, they have to go. I'll just have to get on with it and deal with it the best I can.

"I want to keep my best players, but that's something I can't do anything about. So let me deal with the things I can do something about. If it has to be done, then we'll have to do a bit of wheeling and dealing. If players have to go, I'll get someone else in. It's the way it is in football.

"There is something about that: finding someone who's not a big star and he comes to the club and does brilliantly, or getting someone out of the youth team and he makes an impact. That is an exciting part of the job. I'd imagine having £50m to spend is exciting too, but I've never had it."

McCarthy is unlikely to have it at Sunderland either. He has been hired to perform the job, with his man-management skills, that Howard Wilkinson conspicuously failed to achieve with all of his coaching acumen. He would have started performing it five months ago, but when Bob Murray, the Sunderland chairman, rang Wilkinson for his advice on McCarthy's suitability as Peter Reid's successor he ended up giving the job to the elder South Yorkshireman instead.

As it is, some critics are already asking what McCarthy has ever done as a manager, pointing to the one First Division play-off semi-final appearance he achieved with Millwall and airbrushing the wonders he worked with Ireland, like a Pythonesque revision of Roman history. Indeed, what has the man ever done? Apart from lead a modest national side to the World Cup finals, at the expense of the Dutch. And then inspire them to outplay the Germans. And the Spanish. All the while maximising the potential of a bunch of players blessed with strictly limited ability.

That just happens to be Sunderland's job description. Any man who can make Kevin Kilbane look at home on the international stage is precisely the kind they need to be getting his feet under the managerial table at the Stadium of Light.