I couldn't have been much more wrong about this fella. I thought, when he was at Wigan, he was passive and Rodwell-like in his game, both with and without the ball and may not have enough competitive edge to his character.
Since he's joined he's been haring around, flying into tackles all over the shop, making his opinions known to the ref (seems to have been in every pic of the ref from saturday) and what I seem to have mistaken for passiveness and being too "nice" is actually just understated, blunt, dry, NEA, ace Scottish-ness, seen below:
Just watching a bit of the game back. Suarez doing all sorts of arm waving about a Coleman tackle on Gerrard and you can clearly make out McCarthy look him in the eye and say '[Poor language removed] off you [Poor language removed]', great stuff.
Seems he's not flashy but he gets the job done and also takes no sh*t from the sh*te. Another player that's gone up in my estimation this season and especially on saturday.