O’Neill’s quiet REVOLUTION
I learned very quickly as manager that I don’t have selection issues. I can’t say “Listen, **** off out”. It is a tricky line to tread
IN LYONS
GROUPS of kids spilled out of the new primary school next to the Northern Ireland training base and walked up Rue du Vernay on their way home, swinging their satchels at each other in combat. They paused for a second to stare at the two gendarmes guarding the entrance to the Parc Montchervet complex and then resumed their battles.
Groups of journalists wandered away, too. They had watched the first 15 minutes of training at the team’s picturesque camp on the edge of this small, linear town huddled around the main road that runs south to Lyons and north to Macon. The rest of the session was closed. The camera crews packed up and walked back down the ramp to the media centre.
Some of the photographers laughed among themselves. A few reporters from Poland, Northern Ireland’s opponents in their opening Group C clash in Nice today, had turned up to training. They had been asking questions. ‘One fella thought Martin O’Neill was our manager,’ said one of the photographers. ‘I told him it was Michael O’Neill. Then he wanted to know if they were brothers. I told him in Ireland, there are lots of O’Neills.’
It may be a common name but Michael O’Neill is an uncommon man, a man who has come up the hard way in management and achieved something utterly remarkable with Northern Ireland. In a survey of managers’ salaries at Euro 2016, O’Neill was 14th out of 24. If wages were based on accomplishment, he would be top.
A softly spoken, clever, engaging manager who has, a friend says, ‘a little bit of ferocity about him’, O’Neill, 46, has husbanded his meagre playing resources quite brilliantly. He has coaxed the best out of his band of journeymen, mavericks, wannabes and veterans and taken them further than anyone ever imagined they could reach. No wonder the team bus is inscribed with the logo ‘Dare to Dream’.
O’Neill’s achievement goes beyond the fact that he has led Northern Ireland to their first ever European Championship finals and their first major tournament for 30 years. It goes beyond the fact that his team qualified by finishing top of Group F, ahead of Romania, Hungary, Finland and Greece.
Northern Ireland have not lost a match since March 2015 and boast the longest unbeaten run of any of the finalists. O’Neill has built it on a mean defence and a spirit that has made his side hard to beat. He is a student and admirer of the Atletico Madrid way. He knows his team are not good enough to dominate possession but he has found a means of turning it to their advantage.
‘We had the second lowest possession of the six teams in our qualifying group but we scored the most goals,’ he pointed out. The final Group F qualifying table, which shows O’Neill’s side won 21 points and lost only once in 10 games, has been printed on the floor of the room at Parc Montchervet where the players do their interviews.
But he has done something else, too. In the midst of all the religious and social issues that still blight the Six Counties, O’Neill, the first Northern Ireland-born Catholic to ascend to the rank of manager, may help enable a section of the population otherwise uncomfortable supporting, to reconsider their preferences.
Historically, Catholics have viewed the Northern Ireland team as the preserve of Unionism. It was not their team. To lend support, therefore, was to deny the goal of a united Ireland. And while it may only be a small step, O’Neill’s presence, and the success he has brought, has helped soften attitudes somewhat.
It has been a quiet revolution because polemic and provocation and bluster are not O’Neill’s way. But when he took the Northern Ireland job at the end of 2011, he was determined to bring a new inclusivity to football north of the border.
He has become a symbol of change. What he has done can be seen in the same detoxifying context as many of the country’s political developments. Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness went into government together in 2007 and the co-operation between Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party continues to be endorsed by the electorate. Bit by bit, Northern Irish society is tackling its taboos.
Windsor Park, once a Loyalist stronghold, a monument to sectarianism, has been rebuilt. In its new guise, it, too, is seen as a symbol of the fact that O’Neill’s Northern Ireland are a team for all its people.
O’Neill is too modest to see himself as a catalyst for change but when he sank down into a sofa at the team hotel before they left for France, he mentioned how pleased he was that the Irish Football Association had put up giant pictures of each player on billboards in their hometowns. Before O’Neill took over, there would have been no point doing that, especially in nationalist areas or mixed towns like Dungannon. ‘In the past, they would have been damaged or defaced,’ said O’Neill, ‘but we want people to be proud that Kyle Lafferty, who is from Kesh in Fermanagh, is representing his town and the same with Shane Ferguson, who comes from South Derry.
‘With every new generation, you hope that society continues to improve and that we are a reflection of that. I think that the IFA have done a great job to try to eradicate some of the problems. That’s how it was at Windsor Park. I remember playing for Northern Ireland as a Catholic. I never had any abuse but you did sense it at times.
‘When I took the job, there were players like James McClean and Darron Gibson who were opting to play for the Republic. There was a trend that was developing. We were trying to build an inclusive team but the players were making statements about how it wasn’t an inclusive team. So we had to try to make it totally inclusive.’
Losing eligible stars like McClean and
Gibson to the Republic was a desperate blow to O’Neil, who has such a small group of players to choose from in the first place, but he overcame it. He does not have the luxury of selection dilemmas like Roy Hodgson. When he gets past his defence and Southampton midfielder Steven Davis, he runs out of Premier League players.
The majority of the squad play for teams like Doncaster, Notts County, Millwall, Kil marnock and Hamilton Academical. It is worth remembering that right-back Conor McLoughlin’s final club game before he faces Robert Lewandowski et al today was against Crewe Alexandra.
But O’Neill, who worked at Cowdenbeath and Brechin City before taking Shamrock Rovers into the Europa League, has a genius for man-management. He knows he cannot afford to be a disciplinarian with Northern Ireland. He cannot rule with a heavy hand. He has to find a balance between indulgence and a duty to his other players.
A player who was thrust into the hurly burly of the Newcastle dressing room as teenager with men like Paul Gascoigne and Duncan Ferguson, O’Neill has always relished the verbbal jousting that comes with co-existing with mavericks. He knows how to handle Lafferty, the team’s problem child and most talented forward, and get the best out of the rest, too.
‘Kyle has done some stupid things,’ said O’Neill, ‘but I look for the good in him first. There are things about him still that would drive you mad. His timekeeping is poor sometimes but when you put him on the training pitch and into matches, he gives you everything he has got. As a manager, there is not much more that you can ask.
‘I liked being tested as a player. I was still studying when I was playing so they would make fun of me and call me “Professor” and stuff like that. They would take the p*** out of me for that and I would take the p*** out of them for being thick.
‘I learned very quickly as manager of Northern Ireland that I needed to get my best team on the pitch. I don’t have selection issues. I can’t say, “Listen, f*** off out”. It is a tricky line to tread. You don’t let things go but you just have to manage that situation.
‘If one of them does something wrong, you just have to put it back on the players and say, “It’s you that are waiting for him”, or whatever it may be. The most frustrating thing I had to deal with was the availability of some players. I could have been really hard and said, “Listen, if you don’t come now, you are never coming again”, but then we wouldn’t be sitting here now.’
Now they are here, the next stage begins. It will not be easy. Group C was not a kind draw. Many people are tipping Poland as an outside bet to win the tournament. And then there is the prospect of playing the final match against world champions Germany in Paris. In between, Ukraine lie in wait. But O’Neill refuses to be overawed.
‘I think we can use the underdog thing to our advantage,’ he said. ‘What we have reinforced to the players is that we are here as group winners. We would be here if there were 10 teams here. We are not here because there are 24 teams. They want to continue to achieve. They believe they can achieve.
‘There is no doubt we are in a tough group. In our qualifying group, none of the teams had a big player. The Poles have. I don’t think there is that much difference between Poland and Romania if you take Lewandowski out of the team. Ukraine have the two wide players and the Germans, we know all about them. That will be our biggest challenge: how we manage to stifle the big players in the opposition.
‘Our goal is to try to get out of the group. We recognise where our best opportunity for points comes and it comes in the opening two games.
‘There’s an excitement for us about the tournament and there’s a naivety about us. You hope that that excitement is going to help you rather than hinder you. I have fairly low-maintenance players and the excitement of being in the tournament, I think, will be the overriding thing for us.
‘They are not going to come like the bigger countries whose players are playing Champions League football, who were at a tournament two years ago and another tournament two years before that. It’s the same s***, just a different country. That won’t be us.’