This man’s story with Ireland will be a page-turner
charged with gross managerial misconduct to a football club, O’Neill’s testimony would have sent him down for a lifetime. Clearly, the sharp legal mind, shaped at Queen’s University, and honed in a lifetime study of criminology, has never left O’Neill.
AT one point, O’Neill voluntarily charged headlong into the inferno of Saipan, something few observers of Irish football would ever dare without bullet-proof vests. Quite rationally, he explained why he disagreed with Keane on his stance, comparing his own experience, with Northern Ireland at the 1982 World Cup finals, where he was captain and stayed on the bridge despite difficulties.
He spoke casually of mentioning this to Keane who, he impishly revealed, had replied with a counter-initiative over O’Neill’s Celtic team selection for the 2003 UEFA Cup final. ‘ He said he probably would have won,’ he smiled.
The line was educational, not so much that O’Neill and Keane have spoken of the most combustible subject in Irish football history, but that Keane was shadowing O’Neill at Celtic while in his playing prime at Manchester United.
Slightly built, nimble, with closely-cropped dark hair, O’Neill could pass for 51, not 61 and it’s hard to accept he is a decade older than Jack Charlton was when he became manager in 1986.
As he politely fielded questions with an assurance built up over 20 years in the front line, it was, he observed, a far cry from his early days at Wycombe Wanderers where the press briefing consisted of ‘two men and a dog’.
Since then, he has swam in far bigger waters, and commanded far greater attention. But his Sunderland exit stung, as much because it was the club of Charlie Hurley and Clough, the club he supported as a kid.
He i sn’t damaged goods; he can’t be after his feats at Leicester and, particularly at Celtic, where he won three SPL titles, three Scottish Cups and oversaw the grand march of Caledonia to Seville.
On his arrival at Dublin Airport on Saturday, O’Neill bumped into Alex Ferguson, who was on his way out of the city after his book promotion. The brief chat was of books, a new challenge, and of the boy Roy. It was not all that long ago when O’Neill was tipped to follow Ferguson at Old Trafford. Their paths have diverged since and Ferguson is now peddling his wares while O’Neill has a few more chapters to write. If Saturday’s introduction was anything to go by, the next episode in the remarkable football career of Martin Hugh Michael O’Neill promises to be a gripping page-turner.
But first, there is another audience — with Keane on Wednesday. For the moment, it’s the double-act that keeps on giving.