Why Mick McCarthy is looking up

Mick McCarthy prides himself on being straight with his public even when it's not what his public wants to hear.

Wolves fans, hurting and angry after watching a season of receding promise become a desperate survival struggle, are losing patience with the manager they recognise has played an admirable role in the club's rehabilitation.

But with the Championship sucking at his team's heels yet again, McCarthy knows there is a growing clamour for owner Steve Morgan to take the Sunderland-QPR route and opt for a managerial change.

Forty-eight hours after a cruel experience at the hands of Villa, yesterday dawned with McCarthy only too aware about the mood of his public and the demand for something, anything to enliven their sagging spirit and pacify their grumbling discontent.

But McCarthy, as we know, doesn't do token gestures.

"It's hard for me to give anyone an uplift in this moment of gloom because it depends which side of the fence you're on I guess in terms of me," he said.

"I speak to the press, but when you've just dropped into the bottom three with 16 games to play, it's not the strongest position to be in to be giving out inspirational spiel to fans. But that's where we are. I thought we played some great stuff against Chelsea, Spurs and Villa and should have beaten them.

"The fact we were in the bottom three for nearly all last season means we've just got to believe we can get out of it.

"I still feel we will get out of it, with whatever we've got, and whatever we do because I think we've got good players.

"I think there's nothing more that could have gone wrong in the Villa game and sometimes if you get near to being rock bottom, does your luck change?

"It has to turn because our lads work damned hard at it and they're a great bunch. They keep going and they will get us out of it."

It is this unshakeable faith in his players that McCarthy will cling to now just as he needs them to cling to an implicit faith in him.

For more than five years, McCarthy's managerial flagpole has been planted in the merits of unity which has carried them out of one bleak corner after another.

But there are qualities required, too, and for the second year running it appears a loan player is poised for a key role in adding to Wolves the polish they need to put a shine on that undoubted spirit.

Emmanuel Frimpong is this year's Jamie O'Hara and the news that his eye injury, sustained in one of several key moments against Villa, will not interrupt his loan from Arsenal was at least something for the manager to talk up.

McCarthy has Frimpong, a reviving Michael Kightly and of course O'Hara himself to come back in the not too distant future to offer as a ballast against the demands of his critics to step aside.

The prospect of this trio's contribution bringing fresh inspiration to a flagging team is a key ingredient to the inner belief within the camp.

But it is a perilous position for Wolves now, second bottom with key games ahead including a trip to fellow bottom-five side QPR and the Black Country derby, loaded as always with its ancient hostility.

If Manchester United's famed experience at getting 'over the line' at the top of the table is seen as a major weapon in their title battle, perhaps two years of playing football under the unrelenting pressures of survival give a battle-hardened group of Wolves players an advantage over some of their rivals.

But the errors must stop and the players must deliver on the promise of that blistering half-hour against Villa on Saturday.

"There were just little things, not glaring errors, but little things which contributed to the ball ending up in our net," the manager added as he reviewed Saturday's tide of events.

"Manny getting carried off didn't help and then Karl Henry getting sent off ultimately cost us the game because we were down to 10 men.

"But we've come back in and we've trained and we've just got to get on with it. There is no radical way that I can change that.

"I'm still believing in the same group of players and getting the best out of them, and that's what myself and Terry will carry on doing.

"We might not have won the game, but if we get that level of performance out of them that we did on Saturday, then that's all I can ask of them."

See also:

• Mick McCarthy: I have belief in my players

• Mick McCarthy: I will not listen to flak

• Wolves insist?Mick McCarthy is in charge despite rumours