Andrews: It’s a cop-out to say new manager won’t have the players

Backing McCarthy for a second term in charge, the presenter and analyst says: “Mick would be the right choice but it’s important he gets the right people around him.

"I’m presuming he would bring (his ex-Wolves and Ipswich assistant) Terry Connor in.

"But we need to build a bridge between the U21s and the senior team and someone like Lee Carsley or Stephen Reid would be ideal in that role.

“And with his experience, enthusiasm and personality, Shay Given as a goalkeeping coach — which he could combine with his work at Derby County — would be a no-brainer for me.

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“But Robbie’s role shouldn’t be along the lines of Roy, where you’re front and centre doing press conferences.

"It should be part of his development in his ambition to be a coach/manager and I think it would be good to facilitate that. But the likes of Lee Carsley and Steve are much further down the line in their development as coaches.”

While an admirer of Stephen Kenny, Andrews thinks this is not the right time to appoint him senior manager.

“You can’t argue with what he has done, he’s mightily impressive, but I think appointing him to the senior job now would be a risk.

“It’s right that he should be in the reckoning but, even if people say it’s not being very adventurous, we need a safer pair of hands with qualification for Euro 2020 and those games in Dublin on the line.

"We have to give ourselves the best possible chance of getting to the finals. You can talk about long-term vision and all the rest of it but it would be embarrassing if we’re not there.

“It seems as if he doesn’t want it but I think the U21 job would be good for Stephen Kenny and he would be good for the U21s, especially with the way his Dundalk team play.

“And with Mick in charge of the senior team, I think that would take care of the short-term and the long-term goals.”

Andrews doesn’t go along with the notion that the new manager won’t have the talent available to enjoy success.

“I don’t buy into this idea, as a lot of people do, that it’s impossible to think of qualifying with this pool of players,” he says.

“I think it’s a cop-out to say the next manager won’t have enough to work with.

“There are obvious areas of concern, the biggest one being we don’t have a natural goalscorer, someone who is doing it regularly at club level, especially with Sean Maguire having his injury problems.

“But whoever the new manager is, he will have a group of players who will jump through hoops and buy into whatever he wants to do and whatever way he wants them to play to get results.

“People will say we haven’t got the players of 20 or 30 years ago.

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"With Mick in charge, I think we’d have a really good chance.”

Although he was never shy of criticising Martin O’Neill’s management over the past year, Andrews believes history will ultimately be kind to the Derryman’s overall time in charge.

“He has given us some massive moments with our national football team and that should never be taken away from him,” he says.

“When you stand back and look at his reign as a whole, three-quarters of it can be looked at as a success.

"The turning point on the pitch was the 5-1 defeat to Denmark but it was the Stoke saga that really didn’t sit well with me.

"If I’d been a player in that squad, having gone through the pain of that 5-1 defeat, I wouldn’t be best pleased that the manager was flirting with another job.

“And, from that, the only positivity was a couple of performances by Declan Rice and then even that got taken away from us.

“Then there were all the issues behind the scenes and, on the pitch, the subsequent deterioration in performances.

"By the end, the performances against Northern Ireland and even Denmark were just lifeless: No energy, no aggression, no enthusiasm.

“For the Northern Ireland game, the stadium was like a morgue. And in terms of the argument that we don’t have the players, there couldn’t have been a worse game for Martin O’Neill: Our nearest neighbours, with players playing at a lesser level than our lads, played us off the park and should have won the game.

“So ending it now was the right call for all parties, the management team included.

"I think they needed a change too.”