Mayne Man

Mick McCarthy walked into Wolves in the summer of 2006, with Glenn Hoddle just gone and a much younger squad being pieced together. He wanted the whole club pulling the same way. On day one at the training ground, he got chatting to a cleaner, Dan Morgan, and asked what he did. “I’m Dan.” “I’m just the cleaner.” McCarthy cut him off there and then. “Never say you’re just the f****** cleaner.” “You’re the cleaner, and you’re doing a job, and that’s important.” His thinking was simple. Turn up to a dirty dressing room on a Monday morning and the players notice soon enough, so whoever keeps it clean matters as much as anyone else at the place. “Don’t ever say that to me again.” “You’re one of us, come on.” “There’s nobody beneath me.” From then on Dan was one of the group, in on the dressing-room banter, and across the next six years that first chat said a lot about how McCarthy treated people at Wolves. “From that first moment he always made me feel so comfortable, like a part of the team.” McCarthy got Wolves up to the Premier League and kept them there for three seasons, before being sacked in February 2012 after almost six years in charge. A few weeks on, Dan and his partner Sarah had a new baby and a new house. McCarthy, clearing out his own place in Seisdon before leaving the area, rang to ask if Dan needed anything. Dan helped load furniture into a van, and McCarthy came back with him to drop it off. “He went and sat in the baby’s bedroom and put all the drawers together for me.” “He didn’t have to do any of that.” The man had just lost his job and could easily have paid someone to empty the house and driven off. Instead he hired the van, carried everything in, built the furniture and ended the day on the sofa with a cuppa. Whenever Dan was asked what Mick McCarthy was like to work for, that's the story he went with. “That just sums him up for me.”