IT WAS AUGUST 2004 when Jon Macken was called up to Brian Kerr’s Republic of Ireland setup.
He was 26 and a £5 million player, signed by Kevin Keegan’s Manchester City two years beforehand.
Just months prior to his Irish debut, he scored his very first Premier League goal as City claimed local bragging rights after a 4-1 thumping of United at the newly-opened Etihad Stadium.
By the end of the season, he had found the net four times in all competitions and handed starts in key fixtures, despite Nicolas Anelka and Robbie Fowler being the first-choice attacking pairing.
So far, so encouraging.
But beneath the surface, injuries were derailing things. And after a 30-minute cameo for his adopted country in a friendly with Bulgaria at Lansdowne Road, he’d never play for Ireland again.
“It was such a frustrating period over about three or four years”, Macken tells The42.
“I’d come back and get injured again and it was stop-start. And it’s the one big disappointment I think about in terms of my career: that I didn’t make any more appearances for Ireland. There were the fitness problems and other people coming in and doing well. The disappointment was with not representing your country any more because I would’ve loved to have done it. It was a fantastic experience and I loved every minute of it. I’d like to think if I got a good run at it, I would’ve been successful and would’ve done well.”
Macken had represented England at the Under-20 World Cup in Malaysia in 1997. He featured in one game, coming on as a substitute for 27 minutes in a big win over the United Arab Emirates.
With minimal chance of ever representing the senior side, Macken was handcuffed by that single appearance. He had an Irish passport and paternal grandparents from Cavan. But it wasn’t until Fifa allowed players in certain circumstances to switch allegiance that he could do anything about his ancestry. But, he also had to wait for the FAI to show an interest.
When that came, the rest followed quickly and though it was too short, it remained a very sweet thing for Macken.
I’ve still got the shirt and the tracksuit at home. A fantastic experience and one I’ll treasure for the rest of my life. Once you make one appearance, you want two and then ten and twenty. But circumstances didn’t allow it and it’s the one thing I’ll look back on with that little bit of disappointment”.
Macken’s career was slowed by repeated interruptions and it wasn’t until a two-year spell at Barnsley did he find consistency again in terms of game-time and goals. There was another impressive stint at Walsall before he retired in 2013.
But it was in Manchester and the surrounding area where local kid Macken reveled.
He joined the United youth side as a teenager in 1995 and pushed hard to impress in a competitive reserve team.
But as much as the Class of ’92 were blossoming, the summer of 1996 saw Sir Alex Ferguson open the cheque-book and sign the likes of Karel Poborsky, Jordi Cruyff and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. An already-difficult path to the senior side had been made even tougher for the next group of youngsters and, at 19, Macken decided he needed to get away.
He dropped down two levels, joined Preston and scored a ton of goals in five seasons at Deepdale. The club achieved promotion to the old First Division under David Moyes and it was there that Macken caught the eye of Manchester City.
At the time, the side had just been relegated from the top-flight but Keegan arrived, signed Macken in March 2002 and City were promoted as champions after a blistering season.
But it’s the Manchester derby two years later that stands out for a couple of reasons.
“Coming from Manchester, it was a massive occasion”, Macken says.
“It was the first derby in the new stadium and it was my first because I was injured for the previous ones. I didn’t get nervous. I was excited for it. You can feel the build-up days before. You could smell it on game-day. When you’d go to the shop or drive into town, you could just smell the atmosphere. You could feel it. The buzz around the city.”
The other thing was that Macken had stepped away from a Premier League team and gambled on making a name for himself lower down. He had earned the move to City. He had earned his moment in the sun. The hard work had paid off.
“Moving to Preston was the best thing I did – it gave me a football career”, he says.
Sometimes you can wait around, hoping to get that appearance for two or three years too long. There’s a lot of young kids who get paid handsomely to sit around and play in the reserves. In my eyes, that’s not right. Lads go out on loan and try to get experience that way but by doing that, they’ll always have the comfort of knowing the parent club is still there in the background, if it doesn’t go well for them. I made the decision to go to Preston and I wanted to make it work. I had to make it work.
It’s not always easy stepping out of a big football club and going into the lower leagues. You play with men who have been playing the game for 10/15 years and their careers are on the line because maybe they only have a year left. You step into that environment and, when I went to Preston first, we were struggling towards the bottom of the table and not winning many games. At United, be it the reserves or the youth team, you’d win the majority of games. So you’ve got to get that mentality right too.”
Macken’s family are a mix of City and United fans. On the day of the derby, they were sitting in different sections of the ground.
The away section had already been silenced when Robbie Fowler opened the scoring right in front of them after just three minutes before Macken had his moment half an hour later.
“When you have an opportunity, you’d like to think you’ll stick it away”, he says.
“Fortunately for me, the ball just bounced in the right area and a lot of times, with defenders, when you shoot they try and block it so you can put it through their legs when they commit. And that’s what I did. And it went in the bottom corner. Once it hits the net, that’s when the adrenaline kicks in and you run off to celebrate with the fans. When you score in any derby it’s good. In a Manchester derby, it was extra special scoring against the club where it all started.
Some people don’t like to celebrate and I’m not into that, really. Sometimes it can come across as a bit disrespectful for the team you’re at because they’re supporting you and you want to do your best for them and you want to be successful for them. So not celebrating, in my eyes, is a bit disrespectful to them and the supporters. For me it was a great chance to play in a Manchester derby – something I’d always dreamed of doing – and I was always going to run off and celebrate after scoring just to show how much it meant to me to get the goal and get the win on the day.”
With so much build-up to tomorrow’s clash at Old Trafford, Macken struggles to see any similarity between the clubs then and now.
“They look like completely different organisations now”, he says.
The game changes and moves on. It’s a weird one at the moment, football. Big football clubs seem to have that much money, they can make decisions and not worry about them. Years gone by, if you were a top manager and signed a player for £10m and it didn’t work out, people were questioning you straightaway. Now you can sign someone for £50m and if it doesn’t work out it’s ‘Oh, well. We’ll just move on to the next one’.
It’s a strange atmosphere.. Nobody knows which direction it’s going to end up. I might be wrong but I don’t think it can go any further in terms of wages and transfer fees. Is it going to level out and plateau or will it go again and go to the next level again?”
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