‘Arsene Wenger hated getting beat by Tony at Stoke – he just moaned all the time… psychologically, coming to the Britannia seemed too much for them’: Tony Pulis and Mick McCarthy on battles with Arsenal and the return of the long throw

We meet in a cafe in north London, about half a mile away from the stadium where set-pieces and long throws are suddenly back in vogue. Have Arsenal really reinvented the wheel, then?

Tony Pulis grins and recognises the trap. ‘It’s amazing, really, how things spin round isn’t it?’ he says. ‘Arsenal are playing a certain way so it’s OK because it’s Arsenal. When we were doing it at Stoke, it wasn’t always seen as OK.

‘But I’m absolutely delighted that Mikel Arteta has taken this on. They are the best team at defending, they’ve got players who can tear you to bits and off set-plays they are brilliant.

‘So they’ve now joined the circle. They are a proper title-winning team who don’t win football games in just one way. Fashion moves – and it’s moved.’

Pulis, once of Bournemouth and Gillingham and others but most famously of Stoke City, Crystal Palace and West Bromwich Albion, did not invent direct football. Nor did his teams only play that way. Palace – where he was voted Manager of the Year in 2014 – certainly did not.

But he knew how to do it when necessary and so did Mick McCarthy. And as the two of them sit with coffee and biscuits, there is firm logic.

‘They turned their nose up at it for a while but now they don’t,’ nods McCarthy, successful at clubs like Sunderland, Ipswich and Wolves and with the Republic of Ireland.

‘Arsene Wenger hated getting beat by Tony at Stoke and he was quite vocal about it. But I would have gone the other way round. I would have been desperate to beat him, not go away moaning all the time. Personally, I loved rubbing people’s noses in it.’

Pulis and McCarthy have managed more than 2,100 games between them. The former is 67 and has no appetite to manage again. ‘I want to see my grandchildren grow up as I missed my children growing up,’ Pulis says.

McCarthy is a year younger and has a different view. ‘I still get excited by the thought of it,’ he says.

These days they record an excellent podcast called The Managers. Pulis is a bundle of energy, McCarthy more laconic. They make a good partnership. Pulis, for example, cannot ever seem to discuss Wenger without laughing, something that reflects the discomfort the great Arsenal manager used to feel when he brought teams to the Britannia Stadium. Faced with Stoke’s direct football and Rory Delap’s long throws, it didn’t often go well.

‘Psychologically, them coming to the Britannia seemed to be too much for them,’ smiles Pulis. ‘After one game Wenger called us a rugby team and then he wanted to ban throw-ins.

‘We just did things that annoyed and frustrated him. We brought the pitch in and let the grass grow. I remember Fergie coming in one day after a game against Manchester United and saying: “Listen, Tone, I know the grass is long, but when there’s a rabbit in the corner popping his head up, do you not think you’ve gone too far?”

‘But we did everything to win. We’d have the groundsman put a heavy roller on to flatten the grass at around about 1pm. Wenger would walk on and think it was fine but by kick-off, after the warm-ups, it would have sprung back up again. It’s psychology.

‘I did a coaching seminar in Wales and Patrick Vieira and Jens Lehman were on it. Two Arsenal greats. I was a bit worried! But they said they enjoyed the session and told me Arsene only really coached when they played Stoke. Lehmann said they once did a whole session on defending our throw-ins, then lost 3-1 to us anyway.’

Arsenal’s long-throws are taken these days by Declan Rice and Riccardo Calafiori while clubs like Brentford have their own experts. Pulis reveals now that he came across his rather by accident.

‘Six or seven of them were messing around after training,’ Pulis says. ‘It was £20 for who could throw it furthest. And Rory’s thrown it straight off the pitch on the other side. He was double jointed, a javelin champion. But it wasn’t just the distance, it was because it was so flat. It became a weapon, just as it has for some clubs now.’

Snobbery abounds in modern football and nowhere more so than within the debate about hurling a ball on to somebody’s head. McCarthy, a central defender in his day for the Republic, Barnsley, Manchester City, Celtic and Millwall, has a rather pertinent view.

‘Clubs pay millions for wingers who can beat a man, get to the byline and drop a ball on a forward’s head,’ he says. ‘The truth is that with a throw-in you can put the ball in the same spot more accurately than you can with your feet. Why wouldn’t you utilise this?’

McCarthy and Pulis were both defenders so the value of heading is not alien to them. If not a lost art, it’s one that sometimes appears to have gone missing as players block, grapple and pull shirts awaiting set-piece deliveries.

‘I was brought up to think that if you pulled shirts, that’s not what proper players do, ‘ says Pulis. 

‘Exactly,’ nods McCarthy. ‘I would put myself in an area where I thought the ball was going to be. Marking someone. Compete against them. There would be physical contact but never pulling shirts. It would be a penalty. 

‘In training at Barnsley we used to stand on the goal line and the forwards would shoot at us from 18 yards. The aim was to block it with anything you can. If you pulled your head away you were in trouble. The other drill was have them chip it into the 18-yard box and if it lands, it’s a goal to them. If we headed it over the halfway line or volleyed it over the halfway line, it’s a goal to us.

‘If I missed a header in a game, I was raging. You have to be passionate about it, don’t you? Goalkeepers didn’t roll it out and certainly not to me. I wasn’t good enough to play from there. But I could b****y head it.’

McCarthy and Pulis worked at 18 different clubs and now have 12 grandchildren. Pulis is winning that one 7-5 and life is different. McCarthy, meanwhile, is reaching a new audience thanks to a press conference clip. When it was suggested to him after a defeat while manager of Blackpool two years ago that a run of losses couldn’t go on, McCarthy’s response was blunt.

‘It can,’ he said, without blinking. Having been spun through the social media washing machine a few million times, it’s a meme that is starting to follow him around. 

‘I get 12-year-olds at the station Googling on their phones,’ he laughs. ‘Then it’s: “Oh yeah, that’s him” and they are over. “Mick can you do it for us?” Fame at last for a new generation, eh? If I was getting a pound for every clip, I would be OK. But obviously I didn’t say it, or any of the other ones, for any reason other than to find my way through a difficult press conference.’

Pressure and how to deal with it forms a part of our conversation. Pulis is one of the game’s warmest and most garrulous characters. As a manager, he was not always the same. ‘My biggest thing was standing up in press conferences,’ he says. ‘I never wanted the Press to look down on me. I always wanted to stand up and look down on you f***ers.

‘But can I just say this? The person who turns up and trains and watches games and who’s the manager of a football club is one person. The person that then goes home and talks to his friends and his family and looks after his children is a completely different one. I guess that’s the nature of the game. I was always obsessive.

‘I was once on the running machine at Stoke and through the window I’m looking at seven groundsmen covering about two yards of turf. And I’ve run for about 35, 40 minutes and I haven’t seen them move.

‘I called the chairman and said: “The club’s going downhill. There are people taking the Mickey.” Every time I’d do that or pick people up or complain, he would always go: “Tony, I think it’s time for us to go out and have something to eat.”‘

McCarthy listens to his friend and takes his point about image a little further. ‘I was playing at Barnsley,’ he says. ‘And I remember somebody asking my wife Fiona: “What’s he like to live with?” It was almost like: “Does he knock you about?”

‘They perceived me as the same person that was playing. And you do have to guard yourself at times. When I was manager of Ireland and the bus broke down, it was my first game. They asked me what happened. “It broke down.” “Would you like to elaborate?” “Yeah. It wouldn’t go any further.”

‘I probably sounded like I was being smart but I knew they wanted me to talk about that in terms of whether it affected the performance or the result and that was just my way of making sure I didn’t go there. It’s still work in that press conference. You have to make sure you get it right.’

This is a chat as varied as the pair’s podcast. They touch briefly on Ruben Amorim at Manchester United and the rigidity of his playing style. McCarthy in particular preaches flexibility – ‘if you are getting smashed after 10 minutes you have to change something’ – but also likes the United manager’s stubbornness.

‘I admire him for sticking to his principles but the problem is that if you keep getting beat, the players start to wonder if you are playing the right system,’ he says. ‘I like listening to him. He’s brutally honest. But when managers get interviewed for jobs now they feel they have to say they will play a certain expansive way.

‘Then someone inherits a team with two big centre forwards and two wingers and a couple of midfield players who are a bit dogged. And they try to play expansive football and, what a surprise, it doesn’t work. There’s no point trying to play beautiful football if you haven’t got those players. Winning games is what it’s about.’

We end where we started. With the old and the new and back again. ‘What Pep (Guardiola) has done has been absolutely extraordinary,’ says Pulis. ‘He has influenced a hell of a lot of young coaches today to play the way that Manchester City play. Amazing.

‘But I remember being at Bath University when I was 18, 19 years of age in the early 1970s. And Malcolm Allison put a session on. He set his team up without a striker.

‘He played with five at the back, three in midfield but also two wide players. And he wanted the midfield players to join (the attack) as soon as the ball was played wide. Fantastic. Now they would talk about a false nine, wouldn’t they?

‘The problem is that many of the people who worked with me and Mick or before me and Mick have passed away. So they can’t tell their stories. But there’s not that much difference, you know. 

‘There’s a shift in it all the time. And it will shift back again, I promise.’

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