WE ALL know how the Terry Butcher and Maurice Malpas managerial partnership has done it; how they not so much revived Inverness Caledonian Thistle as reanimated the corpse of a team that seemed cold on the mortuary slab. Butcher has been the bawler, Malpas the method man. The latter explains it himself. "Terry takes all the holidays and I do all the work," he says.
It is a quip that doesn't fit with the theories over the duo's dovetailing. It doesn't matter to Malpas that pigeon-holing him as the lugubrious one and Butcher as the ebullient one takes no account of his own droll sense of humour. What bothers him
more is that such lazy labelling fails to recognise the nuances in Butcher's approach.
"Terry is now using more than 20 years' experience of management and that means not flying off the handle as much as people think, not being the iron-rod type of his reputation but being a right good coach," Malpas says, stopping short of adding "as people don't necessarily think".
Malpas, meanwhile, does indeed consider himself a fellow of even temperament, as people think. He is convinced that was central to the consistency he attained across 20 years as a Dundee United player. As for as the upsurge in Caley Thistle's fortunes since Butcher and Malpas arrived, put that down to an even spread in terms of the pair's input.
Victory at home to Hamilton today would all but guarantee Inverness's place in the SPL next season. On taking over from Craig Brewster in January, the new management pairing inherited a dispirited side five points adrift at the foot of the table. Despite adding only Richie Foran and Brian Kerr to a squad that seemed utterly ill-fitted for survival, they headed into this weekend four points and four places above last place. Malpas admits the turnaround has "surpassed" their expectations. "We never thought there was no hope, but our main hope was that we could get back in the crowd and maybe win three of the five post-split games to drag ourselves off the bottom."
The "huge enjoyment" he and Butcher have derived from being back in the game – "back dealing with hassles like talking to you", Malpas jokes – has patently proved infectious. It also seems to have proved that Butcher and Malpas, who bonded when they were on the coaching staff at Dundee United, have potency as a coaching combo that evaporates when they are apart.
Malpas had an unhappy season in charge at Motherwell across 2006-07 before his longest period out of football was followed by a brief stint at Swindon Town. Butcher, meanwhile, left Lanarkshire to head down under. He endured a sorry time at Sydney United before a poor spell at Brentford. Malpas has said he didn't miss Butcher at Motherwell, the friend and confidante he can say anything to, and with whom he can spend any amount of time without it ever feeling overbearing. "Our families get on and live out of each others' pockets during the season," he says. That figure for him at Fir Park was Paul Hegarty, another man he became tight with at Tannadice. The absence of such a sort at Swindon is why he feels his time there was restricted to eight months.
"I missed Terry there because I was brought together with an assistant called David Byrne I didn't know," he says. "It made settling in awkward, as did the fact that the entire coaching staff had get to grips with the way I wanted to work. I had to devote a lot of my time and energies to explaining how I wanted drills to work. They didn't want to take responsibility for fear of treading on my toes and would come up and ask me at training in front of the squad: 'Is this how you want it done?' Players are smart enough to pick up signals if it appears not everyone in coaching team has a clear idea of what they've to do. And if you hit a bad run of results, as we did, it will be the cue for the players to look for excuses and decide those in charge don't know what they are doing."
No player under the tutelage of Butcher and Malpas would arrive at that conclusion. For one, Malpas wouldn't allow the messages to become mixed. "Terry and I go into a room, shut the door, and batter back and forth ideas. I give my opinion, that's what I am there for, and hope he takes it on board," he says. "But if I suggest a team and Terry's thoughts are completely different, mine is binned and I sell his team to the players, and defend the selection regardless of what result it brings."
Malpas knows, too, his place on the training field. "You need only one voice; some weeks it might be mostly mine, other weeks it will be all Terry's," he explains. "On a typical week, I will take the sessions on the Monday and Tuesday. As we move into the Thursday and Friday and work on shapes and shadow training, Terry will take over. It is his team and it is important for him and the players that that comes over strongly in the immediate build-up to games."
Perhaps surprisingly, Malpas has a strong desire to branch out once more on his own. He won't accept that riding side-saddle to Butcher is what he is best suited to do. "I would have no qualms about becoming a manager again; that's what I want," he says. "And if the chance comes, the only thing I'd do differently is bring in my own team. I understand why people do that now."
The conundrum for Malpas is that he is forever destined to be the perfect assistant to the one man who would make the perfect assistant to him.
The full article contains 1005 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
