LOCKERROOM/Tom HumphriesThis is a Mick McCarthy column. Mick and management. Those are the chosen topics. We'll come to that stuff by and by. First though you'll be wanting to know about Ulrika and myself. You're like that. You'll be wondering if this column isn't about to be dragged into the gutter like the noble Sven.

You'll be rubbing your palms together at the thought. Well, let me tell you tittle tattlers a couple of things. When canoodling with glamorous (no less!) Swedish TV stars this column is always very careful with what it says about the Sports Editor. No shop talk and handy with the GAA gossip is the rule there.

Secondly, whatever she may maintain, the stories about myself and Ulrika Johnson are grossly exaggerated and I am seeking legal advice on the matter.

Say what you like about that incident between myself and Bananarama, but I will not be linked Clinton-like to every woman who has a story to tell. Not for nothing anyway. Enough said.

Surely last week was the best ever for those with an anthropological interest in the management game. Managers everywhere walking under ladders. You wouldn't do the job for twice the money. It's not a position that lends itself to grace.

Even if you are Paul Gascoigne and thinking of taking charge at Exeter you know that your reserves of dignity are about to be stretched. Nah, you have to be ill, dysfunctional and fond of stress. It helps to be Scottish, but it's no guarantee.

Jock Stein it was who said that management is about keeping the six first teamers who like you away from the five who despise you. Ah, but life was all so simple then.

Take Peter Reid. This column has always marked him down as a decent man, because one day at Whitburn watching Sunderland train in the sort of conditions which cause such discomfort to brass monkeys, Reid came out and gave me a cup of coffee. Me and several other punters. A cup each that is.

This week, Reid should have been looking forward to a gentle run of three games against West Ham, Bolton and Charlton, which would have set his nascent side up for a respectable season.

Reid had won two out of his last three fixtures, one of them 7-0. Word is, though, that the decision to sack him was taken a couple of weeks ago after Sunderland's loss to Newcastle.

Sunderland were never going to let him get near his own self-imposed deadline for resigning. Bob Murray, the chairman of Sunderland, had Peter Reid down as a nice man too. He'd let him have a whole sheaf of Sunderland shares in the good times.

Shares and shareholders are the black plague of the modern game. A faceless Plc in London decided that Peter Reid should walk the plank. A Plc has no interest in how decent a fellow you are.

Neither, of course, have those who, as Mick McCarthy might say, do their peeing from the outside of the tent inwards. These incontinents include those sirens who waylaid, so to speak, Alex Ferguson and Sven Goran Erikson this week.

And, of course, even from within the canvas on a windy day it can be hard to tell from which direction the peeing is being done. Cathal Dervan certainly got Mick McCarthy's shoes wet last week. Wrong time to be wearing soggy brogues.

Mick is the best example of what management can do to a man. It can wither him. When Mick started out in the game this hack interviewed him at Millwall and, while it would be an exaggeration to say that he was full of the joys of spring, he was as close to capacity with those joys as any Barnsley man has ever been.

Compared to the Mick McCarthy we see before us today, he was Julie Andrews singing Climb Every Mountain.

Again when he started out in the international racket, I was slightly involved in a documentary following him about on his first campaign, the one that ended in Brussells. As attitudes have hardened on the Mick McCarthy issue, people have rewritten the history of that brave attempt to qualify for France 1998.

People have forgotten or decided to forget the difficulties involved in culling the elderly refugees from the Jack Charlton era from the squad, they have forgotten the new style of football the team attempted to play and they have forgotten the bravery of the away performances.

The series of games is remembered by fans for the loss to Macedonia and are dusted down generally only by historians looking for evidence of the beginnings of a fissure between Mick McCarthy and Roy Keane.

He handed out debuts like a drunk gives out hugs. And he built a new young team around him. They played the diamond system. They played five at the back. They experimented.

McCarthy learned, but at least he experimented. He improvised as he went on and he continued to be adventurous.

He's at endgame now and he is a changed man. More conservative, more suspicious, more obsessed like a Shakespearian king with loyalty and betrayal. Genuinely perplexed as to why he is better regarded in England than he seems to be in Ireland.

A man trying to find the measure of where he stands. This week though is the time to cut loose. The Irish footballing public are ready to be wowed or they are ready to be lost. They are prepared to forgive almost anything but cussed perversity.

The World Cup is over (almost literally it's over bar the shouting) and the only way of springing back off the ropes is with a touch of adventure and a splash of youth.

Loyalty to old comrades is second nature to Mick McCarthy, but this week is as big a challenge as any he has ever faced. It's not about loyalty.

I remember the first interview of the sequence which we did with him over 10 months or so. Mick sat stiff and suspicious in a shirt and tie in a PR company's office.

Asked what his greatest fear about the new job was, he said it was that he'd lose what he had with the Irish people, the bond he'd built up as captain of the 1990 team.

He had more than an inkling then that the business of management was going to be a lot more complicated than the business of centre-half play.

With or without Ulrika, management jobs tend to end with tears. Mick McCarthy had a bad week last week He has a book coming out next week at what could be just the wrong time.

This week is the one when he should turn back the clock and roll the dice one last time. Winner takes all.