Dundee and Mark McGhee brushed off the impact of his outstanding six-match touchline ban after the former Motherwell and Aberdeen boss was handed an unexpected return to front-line management.
McGhee was appointed within 24 hours of James McPake being sacked and admitted his close friendship with Gordon Strachan, Dundee’s technical director, had helped him.
The 64-year-old, who was Strachan’s Scotland assistant, received a six-match ban from the Scottish Football Association shortly after being sacked by Motherwell in the wake of a 5-1 home defeat by Dundee in February 2017.
The ban, for a misconduct charge relating to his touchline behaviour during a 7-2 defeat by Aberdeen, was not carried over into his subsequent managerial job at Barnet.
Dundee have 13 games left to avoid relegation – they sit second-bottom in the cinch Premiership, one ahead of St Johnstone and six adrift of guaranteed safety.
But McGhee dismissed concerns that sitting in the stand for about half of those remaining matches would be a hindrance.
“It won’t be any problem, it really won’t, and I don’t say that lightly,” he said.
“We have a guy on the bench, Simon Rusk, with Dave Mackay, who are well capable of marshalling the troops from the side.
“We have communication methods these days, mic’d up and phones of course, that I can be in touch with the bench.
“The way the ban works, I have got to be out of the dressing room for 75 minutes before the game. Normally I address the players 90 minutes before a game.
“At half-time I am able to meet somewhere in the building with Simon and Dave and discuss what we have seen.
“We have no issues about it. The issue was more about perception, how guys like yourselves would view it.
“It was definitely a difficulty and we did try to deal with it by speaking to the SFA and see if there was some way they could look at it within the rules. There’s not a way of doing that, so we have to accept that. The club have accepted that and I think we can live with it.”
McPake was sacked two days after leading Dundee into the Scottish Cup quarter-finals with their most recent league game an impressive away win over Hearts.
Dundee had only lost once in six matches – having been defeated the previous six – and the appointment comes soon after backing McPake in the transfer window.
Managing director John Nelms did not field questions at the club’s media conference but did issue his thanks to McPake.
“James is like a son to us,” Nelms said. “He has been with us for eight-and-a-half years. He has been player, captain, under-18s manager, caretaker manager, manager. We put his knee back together.
“We want to thank him for everything he has done. He is a much loved and beloved member of the Dundee Football Club family.
“We are in a situation where we thought it was time to have a change. We have a problem, we need to stay in the league.
“Gordon and I started having conversations a few weeks back and started talking about what we can and cannot do. We started having external conversations to say ‘is there a better solution?’ and came to the resolution that we think there might be.
“Mark has a touchline ban, everyone knows that. We think there are ways around that and that it’s not going to hinder anything we do.”
McGhee’s previous managerial job was a caretaker role at Eastbourne Borough in 2019 and he was most recently Rusk’s assistant at Stockport in 2021.
After being handed a permanent managerial post at a 10th club, he insisted he had only held discussions about the job in the “last couple of days”.
“I think I have benefited from my relationship with Gordon, let’s not kid ourselves on,” he added.
“John appointed me so it only went so far, in the same way that when I got my first job, Alex Ferguson phoned John Madejski and said ‘you should give it to Mark McGhee’. That happened then and I got the Reading job.”
