O’Neill is still haunted by infamous Ban
MARTIN O’NEILL has lived every boy’s faraway dream but his adult nightmare is rooted closer to home. Given he was a teenager when he scored against Barcelona in a European tie, a trick he repeated on his first visit to Old Trafford, a two-time European Cup winner who also captained Northern Ireland in the World Cup finals, the memory of losing a Gaelic football game 52 years ago should have long disappeared. Instead, it still plays out in his mind.
In the last play of the 1970 Hogan Cup final, his dominant St Malachy’s team were unable to shake off Cork’s Coláiste Chríost Rí.
‘I should have held on to the ball in the last 30 seconds instead of trying to pass it to my younger brother and maybe then Coláiste Chríost Rí would not have intercepted and scored.
‘I’m a fair age now but a few years ago I actually had a dream about the Hogan Cup so it must be somewhere away in the back of my mind.
‘I would love to have changed that and to have won the Hogan Cup,’ said O’Neill, speaking at a webinar this week organised by Queen’s University to mark the GAA’s 50th anniversary of the lifting of the Ban which, up to 1971, prevented members from playing, or even watching, rugby and soccer.
If his own error of judgment is one of biggest sporting regrets of his youth, the other is how the Ban was used to deny him the chance to make good on it.
His talent as a soccer player could never stay hidden from view and when his family relocated from Kilrea to Belfast, he joined up with the Rosario club on the Ormeau Road and was spotted by Distillery.
Even though he was playing Irish League soccer, Gaelic football with Kilrea, Derry and his new school St Malachy’s still came first, second and third.
‘Of course, this was unbelievably exciting, I had still work to do to try and get into the team at Distillery but I did not think it had affected any aspect of playing GAA, so this seemed just a natural progression,’ recalled O’Neill.
Others, though, saw it differently and when St Malachy’s got back to the MacRory Cup final to defend their Ulster title in 1971 in an all-Belfast decider against St Mary’s CBS, O’Neill was stymied by a rule that was on the brink of extinction.
‘Antrim GAA stepped in and said “No, this game cannot take place in Casement Park”. It was obviously a massive blow to us because Casement Park is where you want to play.
‘It was a big, big pitch and I am not saying we would have won the game but we would have had a better chance because the one thing we could do was cover the ground pretty quickly.
‘St Mary’s proved themselves by going on to win the Hogan Cup anyway but it all came to a head because I was playing soccer.
‘I had been there so often as a child, growing up watching Derry play there, either playing Antrim or in Ulster finals where most of them were played at the time. It was just very disheartening.
‘I do feel in hindsight, we should have taken a stance and said this is colleges football not senior inter-county, these are colleges playing. I don’t know where St Mary’s were standing on this at the time but I think, and hindsight is a great thing, we should have called their bluff.
‘I felt that I was at the centre of something that I really should not have been. It should have been a schools issues, you are talking about two Belfast colleges, and it should not have taken place and the furore following it should not have happened.’
It did, though, and St Mary’s beat his school in Omagh.
‘My father loved the GAA but remarkably and ironically in his barber shop in Kilrea he had this fantastic coloured photograph of the Busby Babes.
‘When the Ban seemed to affect me, it certainly affected the family, maybe not to the same extent but my father would have been disappointed.’
The Ban was not the only rule deployed to put the brakes on O’Neill’s Gaelic football career, as he was also denied the chance to win back-to-back Ulster MFC medals with Derry and another chance of playing at Casement Park in 1970.
This time, still registered with Kilrea, not getting clearance to play for Belfast club St Columba’s came back to bite him.
‘I am in the dressing room and we are about to play Antrim in the championship and there is a knock on the door as we are actually getting changed for the game and an Antrim official comes in and say, “if O’Neill is going to play this match we are going to protest”. ‘Because I had played for St Columba’s and not signed this document, I therefore became ineligible to play in this game.
‘It came as a big shock, not just to myself, but to the Derry selectors that I was actually pulled out of the game. ‘Thankfully, Derry won the match but it meant my first proper game for Derry that particular year was in the All-Ireland semi-final, rather than in the Ulster final, which was again played in Casement.’
But for that, he has no regrets.
‘I am a staunch Gaelic man. I might have been sour at that particular stage but my disappointment was that we didn’t get playing at Casement Park and to heck with those St Mary’s boys who went on to win the Hogan and spawned my real jealousy.’
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Derry native Martin O’Neill won the European Cup twice with Nottingham Forest