Givens takes the safer route

Irish caretaker will be happy to return to youth job

The number of international managers who become the equivalent of a one-cap wonder is small, but Don Givens will happily join the list after taking charge of the Republic of Ireland for the first time in Wednesday's friendly away to Greece. Even the Football Association of Ireland, so thoroughly excoriated in last week's independent report on the World Cup campaign, surely cannot fail to have put a permanent successor to Mick McCarthy in place before the next match, against Scotland in February.

Givens, 53, and domiciled in Warwickshire, is adamant that it will not be him. Softly spoken and undemonstrative, he is happy to continue with the role he has held for almost three years as coach to the Under-21 side, insisting: "I feel I'm better suited to developing players and that's where I see myself for the future."

It is also the level at which he began as a coach, some 16 years ago, in the beautiful surroundings of Neuchâtel, taking over the Swiss club's youth team after an unexpectedly long extension to a playing career that began as one of the hopefuls who cross the Irish Sea to Old Trafford. Unfortunately, a slip of a kid called George Best had beaten him to it by a couple of years, and competition for places in Manchester United's attack was daunting.

Givens was eventually offered an opportunity when Wilf McGuinness, struggling to make his mark as manager, took the sensational step of dropping Bobby Charlton and Denis Law; the forward line for the next game read Willie Morgan, Brian Kidd, Givens, Best, John Aston. Not too much tackling back in midfield there – Everton, the champions-elect, were 3-0 up by half-time and with Law and Charlton soon recalled, there were few more chances for the young Irishman.

He moved on to Luton Town, making bullets for Malcolm Macdonald, then Queen's Park Rangers in Dave Sexton's sublime team that almost won the 1976 championship, Birmingham, Bourne-mouth and Sheffield United, before a career move that was comparatively unusual in those days: "I was 32 and just decided I fancied playing abroad for a couple of years before I finished. In the end it was between Holland and Switz-erland and I ended up having six years at Neuchâtel, the last four of them as sweeper. It was very enjoyable, we had four years out of the six in Europe, and won the championship in the last season. I worked with the younger teams, then the manager, Uli Stielike, went and I took over the first team for a while before coming back to Arsenal to work with the Under-19s."

Givens' international career had begun early, even before he made United's first team, and his tally of 19 goals from 56 games, including two hat-tricks in European Championship qualifiers, has been exceeded only by Niall Quinn (21) and Frank Stapleton (20). He took over the Under-21 side when Ian Evans was promoted to become McCarthy's full-time assistant, and has therefore worked with a good number of the current seniors.

Ireland, he believes, are still producing promising young players, though there comes a critical point in their development once they have joined the bigger British clubs: "The problem sometimes is they're at big clubs and stuck in the reserves and they need to be pushed to go out on loan somewhere and come back. If they don't do that, they stand still. That's worked well for players like Colin Healy at Celtic and Graham Barrett at Arsenal."

McCarthy, had he weathered the criticism after losing the opening two matches of Euro 2004 against Russia and Switzerland, intended to name several younger players for the Greece game. Givens, indicating that he will be his own man, has named the strongest available squad. "It would have been slightly different for Mick, wanting to experiment, but I feel that after the last two results we need to put the thing back on the rails a little bit. So I've picked what I consider to be the best lads available to do that."

Having met McCarthy at West Bromwich Albion's game against Manchester City two days before the resignation, he knew the way the wind was blowing and was able to offer commiserations without deflecting Europe's longest-serving international coach from his chosen path. "I've spoken to Mick a couple of times since, and I feel very sorry and disappointed for it to end that way. He deserved a lot better than that. The job he's done for us has been unbelievable." It is understandable that Givens should feel no great desire to be the man who tries to better it.