MARTIN O’NEILL INTERVIEW: MY BIGGEST REGRET AS A MANAGER? TAKING NOTTINGHAM FOREST JOB
Martin O’Neill was one of the finest managers of his generation but at the age of 72 has reluctantly come to accept his career in the dugout is over.
It is at moments like this that reflection is needed and O’Neill, who rarely grants interviews, has much to say about his life in football.
There are a few regrets and a treasure trove of memories and anecdotes. O’Neill has just replaced Howard Wilkinson as the head of the League Managers Association and is about to start a podcast with his old friend Clive Tyldesley around this summer’s European Championship, but he has come to terms with the fact his day-to-day involvement with football is over.
Few have enjoyed a more successful career than the former Nottingham Forest winger, who won the European Cup twice under the legendary Brian Clough before a hugely-successful career as a manager with Wycombe Wanderers, Leicester City, Celtic, Aston Villa and the Republic of Ireland.
He was interviewed by the Football Association for the England job before Steve McClaren was given the honour in 2006 but still left a mark in the international arena, becoming the first manager of the Republic of Ireland to reach the knockout stages of the European Championship in 2016.
“I had no idea when I left Forest that it would be my last job in management,” said O’Neill, who looks fit and well, dressed in a suit and shirt as we talk over lunch near London’s Sloane Square. “I had turned it down a number of times previously and felt like I had to take it when it was offered again. I took it far too personally, in the sense I was angry about it. I took it too seriously.
“Instead of going on [in management], I’ve never been much of a networker, I’ve never been part of an agency, someone going out there looking for jobs for me. And of course, people start to look at your age too.
“In an industry, the changes that I’ve noticed taking place, the owners and CEOs want to run the show. I was a manager of football clubs. I wasn’t a head coach and that is what people are looking for now. They can dictate to the head coach who comes in and who might not, to a large extent.
“Do I regret going to Forest? Yes, absolutely. If I’d known we would win the last three games of the season and I would be called in a week into pre-season training to be told the way I was running the football club was not the way they wanted to run it – which is how they put it – I wouldn’t have taken the job in the first place.
“I have a special relationship with the football club, but playing and managing are two totally different things. You are almost a different person. Is there a pang of regret I didn’t take it earlier in my career, because of that connection… maybe.
“I had the most phenomenal time there as a player, particularly the last five years of my tenure under Brian Clough.
“You think about the negative end, but I have to differentiate a 19-game spell as manager and 10 years there as a player which I absolutely loved. It’s not to be patronising or sycophantic, but those years there as a player, being a professional footballer in England, coming over from Ireland as a young man way back in 1971, getting paid to play the game, not phenomenally, but more than the average wage, it was a brilliant time.”
O’Neill was always being compared to Clough as a manager. He was his most successful protege – not that this is a word either man would have used – in the dugout and much of O’Neill self-written autobiography On Days Like These focuses on their complex relationship.
“I don’t think about Clough much unless I’m asked about him now, but what an impact he had on me,” O’Neill explained. “Not all of it positive, or so it felt at the time, you know.
“It’s funny, when I was a young manager I used to wear a green jumper (like Clough) and my dear wife (Geraldine) said to me, it’s about time you dumped that green shirt and won some football matches.
“That was the best advice really. It was subconscious, I wasn’t deliberately trying to look like him on the touchline. I just loved the shirt, loved the colour, it was a lightish colour green, but I wore it for every game in my early days at Wycombe. I ditched it and we started to win football matches so I didn’t wear it again!
“When I’m asked about him (Clough), the questions are often along the lines of how would he have coped in the modern game? I understand why, but the answer is easy.
“He would have coped the same as Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley, Matt Busby and Jock Stein, they would have found a way. I’m absolutely convinced of that. Football might have changed, but life doesn’t change in that sense.
“They would have found a way to manage players, which is what the game is still about. Anybody can imbue themselves with tactical knowledge, not a problem, but it’s like saying how would George Best have coped with the modern game?
“Well, George Best, with the pitches and the pristine condition they are in, with virtually no tackling taking place… seriously go and look at some of the tackles made on him, it’s almost a non-contact sport compared to the game he played.
“He would have scored another 150 or 200 goals, easily, no question. George Best would have played and dominated in any era.
“So, back to Clough, he would have more than coped. He would have initially railed against all the change that has taken place, young players and the types of lives they lead, he would have railed against a lot of that early on. But when he realised he couldn’t win that battle, he would have adapted, no problem.”
Asked to reflect on his career, O’Neill is modest. “I have had a pretty good run,” he said. “It’s hard for me to assess myself. I belonged to a really successful team at Forest, and I’m really delighted about that.
“I was a team player, that’s how I played the game. I belonged in that football club. I was very popular with the crowd for the 10 years I was there, but sometimes the manager wasn’t always all that pleased about that.
“But here is my point, John Robertson, Tony Woodcock, Viv Anderson or Ian Bowyer, would they have been really successful as players elsewhere?
“No doubt, they had real quality. But would the football club have been successful without Brian Clough? No, it wouldn’t. I was extremely lucky to work with someone like that, even though I didn’t necessarily get on with him for a long period of time, I appreciated everything he did for the club and what he was always about.
“I’ve had, by normal standards, a really, really terrific time as a player and a manager. But, you know, like everyone, you still have moments when you think, ‘if only’.
“Absolutely, I have those thoughts. As a player or a manager I didn’t win the FA Cup. The FA Cup is what I grew up on. I knew all the FA Cup winners from after World War Two and I didn’t win it. The only thing I didn’t win. I won the European Cup, the League the League Cup, which are major things. When I was growing up, it was THE major thing.
“I’m so sad about what has happened to that competition, it’s just thrown in there now almost as a distraction, the replays scrapped. The demise of the FA Cup is the worst thing that has happened to football in my lifetime. No question, that’s how I feel about it.”
There is one other thing that still stings for O’Neill. The fallout from his dismissal as Ireland manager. O’Neill, with Roy Keane by his side, took over the national side in 2013 after they had failed to qualify for the World Cup. A proud Irishman – albeit from the North who he played for on the international stage – he made sure both his daughters were born on the other side of the Irish Sea and qualified for the Euros in his first campaign with famous wins over Germany and Bosnia.
In France, a victory over Italy in their final group game secured progress to the Round of 16 where they were narrowly beaten by the host nation. But a play-off defeat to Denmark in the World Cup qualifying campaign 18 months later saw opinion turn against him. He did not recover.
“They were good years that were underappreciated by some,” O’Neill said. “Listen, I think now, when you look back at 2016 when we qualified for the Euros, I had a great, great time.
“We beat Germany, then we beat Bosnia, going to France, that was as big a moment as I had in my career. I have to bring in Roy Keane here. If you think of all the things he achieved in his wonderful career, he describes those days as some of the most enjoyable of his life. He hasn’t just said that once, I’ve heard him say that numerous times.
“It’s right up there with everything I did. But I never won over the media. I don’t know why, but I said in my book I was made to feel like an outsider. I was called the Ulsterman, I’ve tried to explain this… just recently I heard an Irish commentator saying we have had outsiders as managers, we had [Giovanni] Trapattoni and we had O’Neill.
“I’m definitely an Irishman. I’ve always considered myself an Irishman. No doubt about that. It does hurt me, of course it does. Deep down, at the end of it all, I honestly felt, from pretty early on, they were almost looking for the team to lose so they could have a go at me.
“I think they have started to realise the job is a lot more difficult than they thought it was. They had an experiment with a manager (Stephen Kenny) that didn’t work, whatever they say, it didn’t work.
“They couldn’t win football matches. It was all about this new style of play and here is the point, you are not a club manager, you don’t have these players every single day. The most important message which I think Irish football now realises is you cannot devise an elaborate style of play with the time you have with those players.
“Your job is to win football matches and try and qualify for competitions. The Republic of Ireland don’t qualify for these tournaments too often, which is why it was so sublime when we did. You have to find a way knowing that, even at home, you are playing teams who are probably going to have more of the ball then you.
“They haven’t been near a play-off game for years now. We lost a play-off game. I can’t say we got to Russia, so fine... the experiment after I left hasn’t worked, nobody can argue otherwise.”
It seems wrong to finish on a negative. O’Neill was once at the vanguard of a new generation of managers and one of the few to combine a glittering playing career with success in the dugout. He will be the perfect choice to lead the LMA.
2024-04-24T11:04:55Z dg43tfdfdgfd