Mick McCarthy liked Giuseppe Sannino’s “passion” after becoming the first manager to share a touchline with the new Hornets boss in this country yesterday.

The Ipswich Town boss admitted he enjoyed crossing swords with the Italian after the 1-1 draw at Portman Road, explaining: “I like him, I like his passion. He set his team up, they’re well organised. I think he’s got a good group of players that he’s come into. That’s nice. I don’t think Gianfranco’s left under any sort of a cloud. They haven’t been beaten away from home, he’s got a good group there. I liked him. He had a smile on his face.”

The two men became involved in what initially appeared to be a disagreement in their technical areas during the first half. However, McCarthy said this was not the case, before using some bad language to explain what had happened, sparking laughter in his press conference.

“Far from it, that’s a real misconception, you’ve got that completely wrong,” the Tractor Boys boss responded when asked about the apparent spat with his counterpart. “I was telling the fourth official to shut up, leave him alone.

“The poor fella’s just come over, he’s into English football for what? Four days, three days. He stepped out of the box [technical area]. Well f*** me! F***ing hell, the linesman can’t run up and down. It wasn’t like ‘sit down’ or ‘just get out of there’, it was either ‘stand in your box or I’m going to send you to the stand’. I’m like ‘you what? Do me a favour’. Let’s make him welcome for God’s sake.

“But I think some of their bench misconstrued what I was saying so somebody said something to me and I said ‘I’m trying to f***ing help him! I’m on his side, shut the f*** up! So I did have a bit of a...but it was with somebody else. I’m trying to be nice to him and they’re giving that to me.”

Watford’s head of medical Marco Cesarini, who was acting as interpreter for Sannino, caused more laughter by subsequently revealing he was to blame for the incident.

“To be honest, it was my fault,” he said. “The fourth official was complaining always because he was coming out of the box onto the touchline, so we put a bottle of water [down].

“It was my fault because I thought he [McCarthy] was trying to say something to the fourth official. He was angry with me, not with him.”