Paul Fennessy reports from Versailles
MARTIN O’NEILL’S WORST moment as Ireland manager so far came just over a year ago.
Despite a promising start, Ireland had ultimately stuttered in their Euro 2016 qualifying campaign, and the team were forced to settle for a 1-1 draw with Scotland at the Aviva Stadium.
Qualification for France now looked unlikely. Despite all the money invested and the hype created, the much-vaunted management team of Martin O’Neill and Roy Keane were supposedly on the verge of becoming a disastrous flop.
A report in The Guardian summed up the feelings of many — O’Neill’s career took a disastrous detour, it had seemed, to the extent that he found himself slumming it with an awful Irish side.
The 64-year-old coach was a has-been, the report seemed to suggest, that modern football had left behind, and the idea that O’Neill is ‘old fashioned’ for his association with player motivation rather than sophisticated tactics has perhaps been somewhat detrimental to his managerial career — it’s not as if clubs were queuing for his signature when he agreed to take over as Ireland boss.
“Albeit outside of his pronounced time frame, O’Neill was needing victory here against an apparently resurgent Scotland,” the reporter wrote. “He needed it all right, not only to keep alive the Republic of Ireland’s hopes of progression to Euro 2016 but to remove the unavoidable sense that O’Neill’s career is destined to peter out in an insipid fashion that seemed so unlikely for so long. This scene, this movie, could never have been factored into the grand plan.
11 years ago the notion of O’Neill coaching what is essentially a Championship team in international shirts was ludicrous. Not so on a June evening in Dublin where he was seeking to invigorate an Irish campaign and move the narrative away from one of disquiet towards the FAI’s chief executive, John Delaney.”
O’Neill, however, has never been short of self-belief and he invariably manages to instill this quality into his players too.
Consequently, many Irish followers were resigned to the team failing to qualify for a sixth major tournament in seven attempts. O’Neill, however, insisted the team were still in contention for the Euros. He was right. It took two surprise results — Scotland’s defeat in Georgia and Ireland’s win over Germany — but the Boys in Green qualified for France via the playoffs and his critics were silenced, temporarily at least.
When the Irish lost 3-0 to Belgium at Euro 2016, of course, the famous Germany victory was swiftly forgotten and the knives were out again. Football can be a cruel game.
It was O’Neill’s third competitive defeat as Ireland manager but the first in which the team were truly outclassed — progression from the group stages suddenly seemed a distant dream, even if it was still only one game away.
But, having been largely written off again, O’Neill and Ireland responded with their most resounding the triumph yet: a 1-0 victory against Italy — one of the favourites for the tournament outright — in a must-win game in Lille with thousands of passionate, emotional Irish fans cheering them on.
Most of all, the success was vindication for O’Neill. His tactics and management style had been called into question following the Belgium debacle and so he responded with a team selection that is now routinely described by journalists and fans as ‘ballsy’.
Shane Duffy was given his competitive international debut, stalwarts such as Glenn Whelan and John O’Shea were dropped, as was fan favourite Wes Hoolahan, goalless international striker Daryl Murphy was included in the starting XI, and James McCarthy — the most under-fire Irish player after the Belgium disappointment — was retained. All tough decisions that left O’Neill open to severe criticism had the night not panned out as it did.
Against all the odds, ringing the changes worked. Ireland secured a famous victory and reached the second round of the European Championships for the first time in their history — not bad for a coach who was effectively being dubbed a ‘has-been’ a year previously.
Nonetheless, anyone who has followed his career closely will know that O’Neill has always been rigorously single-minded and unafraid of making tough and at times controversial calls. One of his first decisions as Celtic manager was to sign then-Chelsea flop Chris Sutton for £6million against the wishes of the board. Both player and manager thrived thereafter.
What also makes the veteran coach stand out is his understanding of player psychology and ability to get the most out of often ordinary enough players.
Ireland players have talked about this quality while past players who have worked with O’Neill also tend to cite it.
Of his time at Celtic, former player Bobby Petta recalled:
He came in after a really horrible, horrible season, not only for myself and the players but for the club too. The fans weren’t happy, there was a lot of expectations, but then he comes in, and you see it on TV now with Sunderland, there is something about Martin O’Neill where he is so good in motivating you, he makes you believe that you can do anything and man management is what it’s all about at that level.
“That’s what Martin O’Neill is good at and he came at the right time, there was a lot of expectations and we needed something new to do and obviously he came in there and before he started getting people in, he looked at what he had to deal with and that’s what he did.”
He got the Scottish side to the Uefa Cup final and frequently had them competing and beating sides of the calibre of Liverpool, Barcelona and Juventus in the Champions League. Fans appreciated the Derry native’s efforts and even dubbed him ‘the Messiah’.
His impact was similar at Leicester where he guided the club to Premier League promotion, turning them into a solid mid-table side and inspiring them to two League Cup final victories — and keep in mind, it was a Leicester team probably even less fancied and with vastly inferior resources to the team that secured an improbable Premier League triumph this season.
Indeed, he was so beloved by the Foxes’ fans that, amid rumours that he was leaving them to join Leeds in 1998, home supporters convinced him to stay with a ‘Don’t Go Martin’ campaign (see pic above) organised by the Leicester Mercury ahead of a vital home game with Spurs — Leicester won 2-1 thanks to an 85th-minute Muzzy Izzet screamer (see below) and their manager stayed on at the club for another two years.
At Aston Villa, a club who had been sliding towards oblivion, O’Neill reversed their fortunes and even had them in strong contention for a Champions League spot in the 2008-09 campaign, getting the best out of players such as James Milner and (prior to then) Gareth Barry, before falling out with the chairman Randy Lerner and leaving over a dispute about transfer funding. And Villa have not been the same since the manager’s shock exit, leading to their ignominious top-flight relegation this season — the first time they have suffered this fate since 1987.
O’Neill has made no secret of his annoyance at the way his Sunderland reign ended. Despite taking the relegation-threatened club to 13th in his first season there, he was dismissed in March of the following season — the first sacking of his career — with the team sitting one point above the bottom three. O’Neill felt he deserved more time at the club, and his disgust at the decision to part ways said it all, hanging up the phone before chairman Ellis Short could even offer an explanation.
The Irish boss is someone who clearly loves football, possessing a childlike enthusiasm about the sport that so few managers seem to possess these days, exhibiting his glee during big moments such as the Italy win by jumping up and down the sideline amid the sheer frenzy of unexpected glory.
His passion for the game can be all-consuming at times, but in recent years, there have been suggestions that O’Neill feels somewhat fatigued and exhausted by the modern game and all its frustrating complications — a far cry from his days under the tutelage of the legendary Brian Clough at Nottingham Forrest.
I wake up a number of mornings and convince myself that I need this. Sometimes it takes longer to convince myself that I need it,” he said in a 2010 interview. “Occasionally I have to work harder at it and it might take me into the afternoon to convince myself I need it.”
Yet it’s often said that a football team are a reflection of their manager’s personality, and Ireland, with their boundless energy and enthusiasm on Wednesday night proved to be just that.
O’Neill has taken a so-called “Championship team in international shirts” to the brink of Irish footballing history. A win against France, as unlikely as it seems, would undoubtedly be the Derryman’s crowning achievement as a manager.
Many people will write off the Boys in Green’s chances as ‘impossible,’ just as they have more or less continually done for the past two years.
But O’Neill won’t mind. His managerial gifts are perhaps best encapsulated by a quote from when the then-37-year-old secured his first managerial job that was in anyway notable, on a reported annual salary of £25,000 plus bonuses, at non-league Wycombe, taking over following brief stints at Grantham Town and Shepshed Charterhouse.
Getting into the Football League is obviously the aim and that is why I have come here,” a young O’Neill said. “I never give up. That is how I survived for so many years in the game with so little ability!”
So of course Ireland “can’t” beat France on Sunday. Just as Nottingham Forest couldn’t win the European Cup, Northern Ireland couldn’t defeat Spain at the World Cup in their own backyard, a newly-promoted Leicester couldn’t win one of England’s major trophies in their first season in the Premier League, Celtic couldn’t knock Barcelona out of Europe, Aston Villa couldn’t be turned from relegation contenders into Champions League hopefuls and a young law student from Kilrea couldn’t become an Irish footballing legend.
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