So many reasons to be cheerful, Mark McGhee

Published on Saturday 15 December 2007 18:55

In an exclusive interview, the Motherwell manager tells TOM ENGLISH about his successes and regrets in a career which has put him in the frame for the Scotland job

Friday lunchtime, Fir Park

A PHONE is ringing in Mark McGhee's office. McGhee looks at me, I look at McGhee. Rrring-rrring. Rrring-rrring. "Is that yours or mine?" he asks, politely. "I think it's yours, Mark," I reply. "Yeah, I thought so." He looks over to the side and sees the phone in question. He's confused. "What's that ringing for? That's never rung before. I've been here months and it's never rung." He stares at it suspiciously, this incredible thing called a phone that rings.

"Hello?" he goes. "Oh aye. Yeah. Okay. That'll be fine. No problem." Gordon Smith on the line perhaps? No, nobody like that. Just routine business. A bit of stuff to sort. And then there's a pause and a look across and a scratch of the head. "How's that phone ringing all of a sudden?"

This was the start of a seriously good hour in the company of the Motherwell manager, who is a short-priced favourite to succeed Alex McLeish as Scotland coach. If you have a view of him as a dour sort, then abandon your preconceptions. He's not as he seems.

"You know," he says, "it was while I was Millwall manager that I began to form the impression that people didn't really understand me. The fans there made a presentation to me once. It was a little enamel badge with my face in the middle of it and around my face are the words, 'Cheer Up Mark McGhee'. They thought I was a miserable bastard."

He laughs at the memory. He laughs quite a lot, in fact. "Cheer Up Mark McGhee! Brilliant. I still have it in the house."

People say McGhee has changed, and he has, but not in the way they think. The feeling is that he is less intense now but that's not really the case. He's as intense about his football as ever he was – "look, I still want to manage Man Utd, I still want to manage Real Madrid, I'm up for it, don't worry about that" – but he has chosen to show his other side more often, the engaging side, the fun. He's on television and has a newspaper column. He's out there in a way he never was before. People are impressed with the quality of his team and the intelligence of his analysis.

He's glad of this but, you sense, a little bemused by it. He's had folk come up to him and congratulate him on the job he's doing at Fir Park and he's felt like saying 'well, I did it at Reading and Wolves and Millwall and Brighton as well, you know." He feels sometimes as if the good stuff from his previous life in England has been forgotten.

"I felt a bit like a stranger in my own land coming back," he says. "The media work I do, it's all deliberate because I felt I was a bit of a mystery to people up here and that they didn't really know me. I felt I had to protect myself so that people wouldn't draw their own conclusions about me. So I decided I was going to get out there and be seen.

"I know I've given the wrong impression sometimes. I know that and I want to change it. The whole thing about me being a mercenary, the way I left clubs. I had a reputation for being ruthless. At Leicester, yes. I was embarrassed at the way I behaved there. But that was it. One moment in 16 years in management that I regret. I've apologised for that but I don't apologise for anything else. I'm not one for bumming my load but...."

Welcome to Elm Park

"Fergie said 'what about the Reading job?' I said, 'yep, whatever'."

It was 1991 and McGhee was a Newcastle man coming to the end of his playing days. On the table was an offer from Hearts for one last hurrah in his homeland. He was considering it when the phone rang one day. Alex Ferguson was on the line.

"What's happening?" asked Fergie.

"Well, boss, there's this thing from Hearts."

"Oh aye? And you think you should still be playing at your age, do you?"

"Er, well..."

Ferguson advised him to stay in England and to get into management. He scouted around awhile to no avail. Then Fergie got in touch once again. "What about the Reading job?" "Yep, whatever. It's as good as any."

McGhee joined when Reading were in the middle of the Second Division, playing in front of crowds of 3,500 at the glorified ploughing field that was Elm Park. "It was a dump and I'm not exaggerating. It was probably the worst ground in England." As a nursery, though, it could hardly have been better.

McGhee got them promoted and got the fans coming in the gate. Attendances rose to 12,000. He departed in December of 1994 with the club in second place and pushing hard for the Premiership. And yet, when his time at Reading is remembered, it is because he broke his contract to join Leicester, not because he made something of a team that was going nowhere.

"John Madjeski gave me permission to speak to Leicester so I went to Filbert Street and I got excited by what was then a Premiership club. I came back and said I wanted to leave Reading. For the next two days John was on at me to stay. We sat up until two o'clock in the morning and it was like, 'come on, Mark, stay, just stay will you?' Eventually he broke me. 'All right, John, I'll stay. Now can I go to my bed?'

"I woke up the next morning and said, 'hang on, I'm not staying, there's no way I can stay'. But John had been on the radio at 6am saying that everything had been sorted. I've no problem with the way I left. I felt I was entitled to leave after giving them three and a half years."

The way it was reported, McGhee abandoned Reading.

The Premiership – a life's dream?

"I was embarrassed at what I did. It was just wrong."

There were influential people in his life who told McGhee not to go near the Leicester job, Ferguson being one of them. "He told me 'there's no way on this planet you can keep this team up, no matter how clever you think you are'. But I took it anyway."

He stayed 11 months and then walked out for the Wolves job. To say he regrets his actions is putting it mildly. He feels guilt about it even now.

"I'd be driving down the M1 and at Junction 21 there's a sign pointing to Leicester. After I left them I couldn't look at that sign out of pure embarrassment. The thing was, I was really uncomfortable doing the deal in the first place. It never, ever felt right. I still did it, though."

Martin George was the chairman back then and he was a good guy. McGhee has apologised to him many times but the regret didn't begin and end there. He had signed players at Leicester and then deserted them. He had also taken his family with him, uprooted his two boys from school and before the carpets had been laid in their new house, he was moving them on again.

"They're perfectly balanced, my two boys. But still it was hard on them. I brought my own staff with me to Leicester and that meant that people who were there already had to be moved on. These people had families and mortgages. As a rule now, I don't bring staff with me. That's one of the things I learned about my Leicester experience. I was blind to all of that back then."

Martin O'Neill took over from McGhee and initially there was a frosty relationship between the two. Three weeks after the Scot left Filbert Street he played in the Midlands Sports Writers golf day, McGhee partnered by Jonathan Hayward, his new chairman at Wolves and O'Neill in a team with George, his new boss at Leicester. A black comedy moment was not far away.

At one point McGhee hit his tee-shot close to an adjoining fairway. He set off in pursuit of his ball and in the opposite direction he spotted O'Neill and George. Two golf balls lay like peas in a pod on the ground. O'Neill quickened his step and played on. McGhee got to the scene after him and realised that O'Neill had hit the wrong ball. He said nothing.

Later, the president of the society asked him how he'd enjoyed his day. "Fabulous," said McGhee. "We had a great laugh about O'Neill hitting my ball." The president disappeared into the clubhouse and made an announcement. Martin O'Neill, the winner of the Midlands Sports Writers Cup, has been disqualified. "He'd gone home by then but apparently he wasn't happy about it. He must have thought I mentioned it deliberately but it wasn't like that. That kind of fuelled the tension between us for a while."

Sheep in Wolves clothing

"Sir Jack sacked his son and should have sacked me too."

In his early days at Wolves in 1995, Jonathan Hayward, the chairman and son of Sir Jack, the owner, asked McGhee what kind of player would he like to sign for the club. McGhee asked how much money was available. Hayward had already gone on record saying the budget represented "not a bottomless pit but a bloody big hole".

Paul Ince was mooted. He was still in Italy and would cost 7m. The feeling was that 7m was within their means. In fact, it was far out of reach. When he departed in November 1998, McGhee's total spend on new players was in the region of 8m and he brought in 7.2m in transfer fees. He also cut the wage bill by 2.8m. If you argue that he didn't get success at Wolves, then you'd better be loaded with evidence because McGhee is proud of what he did there, especially in the circumstances.

In his first half-season he managed to keep them up, a feat in itself given that they were hopeless at the time. The following season they finished third and got beaten in the play-offs by Crystal Palace. To Sir Jack, this constituted abject failure. The morning after the play-offs he went on radio with his famous statement about his son's stewardship. "I'm no longer going to be golden tit," he declared, before sacking Jonathan as chairman.

"From the moment the final whistle blew in the play-offs I was on borrowed time. Sir Jack saw me as Jonathan's man. He pulled the plug on the money right away. What he should have said was 'my son has gone as chairman and you're gone as manager', but he didn't want to pay me off, so he waited for the contract to wind down a bit. The next season we got to the semi-final of the FA Cup and lost 1-0 to Arsenal. The season after, I was sacked."

It hurt him enormously. He felt a great injustice had been done. It was around this time that his relationship with Ferguson nose-dived, partly because Ferguson's son, Darren, was on the books at Wolves and McGhee didn't play him that often. Tough times, then.

"I remember, not long after I got the sack at Wolves, I was driving down the dual-carriageway that goes up behind the stadium. There was a game on and through a gap in the stands I could see all the fans and I could hear the noise and, honestly, it was like an out-of-body experience. I felt I should still have been on the touchline. That was a huge blow. I don't mind admitting it kept me indoors for a while."

Badlands

"It was more than a riot, it was anarchy."

McGhee was unemployed for a year after Wolves. It was a chastening time, his first sustained period out of work. It ended with an offer to join Millwall, whose chairman at the time wasn't as well known then as he is now. Through his appearances on Dragons' Den, Theo Paphitis is now something of a celebrity.

Millwall won promotion to the Championship and everything looked rosy. Richard Sadlier, the big Irish centre-forward, was the star player. He scored 17 goals before Christmas and had McGhee thinking of the Premiership again. Sadlier, he says, was as good a player as he's managed. Then Sadlier got injured and was never seen again. Millwall made the play-offs instead of securing outright promotion. They would play Birmingham.

Millwall lost in the last minute of the second leg at The Den. Then the mayhem started. "It was more than a spontaneous riot, it was anarchy," he said of the Millwall fans' attacks on the police in the streets around The Den. "What they'd done was park up trucks round about the stadium before kick-off. They had loads of bricks in the back and they covered them up with tarpaulin. Ten minutes before the end, the hooligans left the ground and all the covers came off. Hundreds were injured; fans, police and horses. The club was nearly shut down. They brought in identity cards and the normal punters weren't having them. Our crowds came down from 17,000 to 7,000."

Things soon became unworkable with Paphitis. There was no fall-out per se, just a slow drift apart. Paphitis was all hubris and had notions about team selection, McGhee had a strong will. Players were sold and manager and chairman split. McGhee went to Brighton, where again he took them forward before stalling and getting the sack.

Friday, Fir Park, part II

A man in demand

It's funny, football. After 16 years in England, after championships and promotions and flirtations with Cup finals, McGhee's stock has risen to a new high in his homeland on the back of a few months at Motherwell. He is now 6-4 favourite to succeed McLeish. Nobody's been on the phone (yet) but Gordon Smith is bound to get in touch. He's the clear frontrunner. He looks bemused at all of this. He's heard of big bets being waged on him getting the job but he has nothing to say.

"What can I tell you? Nothing's happening. I'm the manager of Motherwell and I'm happy to be here. We've some great boys and a growing confidence. I'm happy."

Maybe Smith will ask the question eventually. Either way, McGhee is in good form. He's content. The miserable bastard of Millwall smiles broadly. "Cheer Up Mark McGhee," he says. "I love it."