A VERY Irish sacking. That's the only way to describe what has happened to Mick McCarthy.

Just a few months after returning as a World Cup hero to a crowd of 100,000+ having taken a tiny country of a few million people to 14th in the FIFA rankings, he's fallen on the Roy Keane sword.

One of the less obvious facts is that he has accepted £40,000 as compensation rather than the £750,000 he was entitled to under his contract.

McCarthy had simply had enough of the sniping and bickering in the background.

The real losers are the Irish FA. If anyone - including Superman - can take them to an even higher level of achievement, then he really is wearing his underpants outside his trousers.

What will happen to team spirit when Roy Keane makes his saintly return to the Irish fold? What about his relationship with people like Matt Holland and Jason McAteer? Why not just give the Old Trafford one the keys to Dublin? Just let him get on with it and dispense with the need to have a manager at all. I think that would be easier all around.

Football falls can be put into two idiot camps, one where the manager is not allowed the freedom to manage and the other where the manager is backed with such blind belief that, by the time something's done, it is too late.

I don't think Terry Venables is bothered which camp he's in at Leeds or, for that matter, how much longer he's around to take flak. He can always go back to the TV sofa until something else 'interesting' comes along.

Crystal Palace, Portsmouth, QPR, Tottenham and counting. Leeds would be another addition to the Venables portfolio.

Some managers' faces fit and they just keep bouncing back because they have carefully-cultivated public personae.

Most good managers are not personalities. Every time a fan complains that his club needs a big name manager, it makes me cringe.

The real managers are people like David Moyes, who has no aspirations of being anything other than a very good manager.

The renaissance at Everton is symbolised by the changing fortunes of an honest footballer like Wales' own Mark Pembridge.

Last year, Everton fans wouldn't even scream abuse at him using his own name. They adopted the moniker 'Pemberton' after a spectacularly bad full-back (John) they had bought some years ago from Sheffield United. Now they're chanting his name and everybody else's as well.

Without buying too much and getting involved in the politics of the club or sucking up to the chairman, Moyes has simply got on with his job on the training ground and won the dressing-room over.

The way he has done it is by proving himself on the training ground and getting the players to buy in to his way of playing. Result? Everton fans now have a real belief that the club is going somewhere with even the possibility of mounting a serious challenge to Liverpool.

Wayne Rooney, phenomenon that he is, is just the icing on the cake.

All good managers need the tools to do the job. Take Mark Hughes. He believed rightly that FIFA rules entitled him to have access to his players the weekend before the match against Azerbaijan.

Now, after much back-tracking, he's found out that rules are there to be bent if the subject nation is tiny and the complainants are big football clubs.

You can bet you bottom dollar that Sven would not be having to alter his hotel bookings if England were complaining to FIFA.

I was going to wish Simon Jones all the best for the Ashes tour but have just heard the terrible news of his cruciate knee injury in the first Test.

I've never really understood why fast bowlers don't just stand at third man and loll the ball in off the boundary like they used to do in the old days. Considering English fast bowlers are an endangered species, perhaps we ought to find a better way of looking after them.

Simon clearly was going for the slide but, for some reason, his knee buckled at the point of execution. It's a freak injury but a real tragedy for Simon and I suspect England's Ashes hopes.

Training has to be stepped up from now on and its been a different regime with Newbridge no longer the base. Enzo can't get used to the fact that we can now make a decent cup of coffee in something resembling a kitchen.

In a way, he's also very chuffed that he also has a bar on the premises as I think he sees himself doing some entertaining there for the Press and TV.

I think the London Press boys will have to be told that they don't need to bring Wellington boots in future and think of excuses to leave straight after the interview.

That's all in the future and at the moment my thoughts are focussed on the hard work ahead.

See you all next week.