O’Neill may want to move on but there’s one thing holding him back
IT was close to midnight in Wroclaw on Tuesday when Martin O’Neill was asked to sum up an eventful, if not extraordinary, couple of weeks for Irish football. Not for the first time as Ireland manager, he applied diversionary tactics.
‘With respect,’ he said to the four journalists in his company, ‘none of you asked a question about playing Poland when we were here last night. I’d like mostly to be dealing with football, on the pitch, rather than anything off it.’
The ‘off it’ was an oblique reference to the fall-out from Roy Keane’s rows with Jon Walters and Harry Arter which gained huge traction in the wake of Stephen Ward’s revealing audio.
For O’Neill, those ‘altercations’ as he called them, were out of sight back in the summer and should be out of mind now.
‘These things happen. I keep coming back to you, that was four months ago, and it’s reared its head now at the end of the day. I’m going to move on, I have to,’ he said.
Moving on is not always easy for O’Neill, particularly where Brian Clough is concerned.
At almost every press briefing in his five years as manager, there has been a reference to Clough, Nottingham Forest or the European Cup and sometimes all three when he’s looking to make a point.
Yet when it comes to in-house rows in the summer, ‘it’s gone’, as he put it this week.
Clough and his methods are representative of a bygone era. They are neither relevant to modern Ireland or modern football. They belong in the past. Perhaps, O’Neil should leave them there at this point.
Keane, by coincidence, learned his pro trade under Clough, who once cuffed him to bring him to heel. Another one (metaphorical, of course) might not have gone amiss when the Corkman and Jon Walters almost came to blows at a training session before Ireland left for Paris at the end of May.
The touchline ruckus followed barbs from Keane aimed at Walters and Arter. A reprimand from O’Neill at that time would, you’d imagine, have prevented the subsequent verbal assault on Arter on the squad’s return to Dublin a few days later.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it would appear that Keane’s behaviour went unchecked and led to Arter’s subsequent decision to withdraw from the squads named for the most recent batch of games.
It was all so avoidable. When informed of Keane’s expletive-laden put-down of the Cardiff City midfielder, O’Neill can’t but have realised that it was an oversight in failing to censure his right-hand man over the Walters run-in.
Perhaps he’d hoped that the two rows would stay in-house, but that is always a long shot; Ireland squads have never been known for exercising discretion when it comes to a bit of gossip.
When O’Neill was asked three weeks ago if there had been trouble between Keane and players in the summer, he was exposed.
The question was loaded, and he knew it.
While confirming there had been ‘altercations’, though, he firmly played down the level of aggression between Keane and Walters, and also the vitriol aimed by Keane at Arter.
O’Neill also stressed that the presence of Walters in the squad in Wales demonstrated that he had moved on from the incident and passed it off as a storm in a tea-cup. Intentional or otherwise, that was a slight on Arter, who had declined to make himself available for the Nations League opener. It was unfair. Walters is a senior player, aged 34, and has ‘previous’ form with Keane. He wasn’t going to allow himself be bullied. He stood up to Keane on the side of the pitch before the summer friendly with France. In the words of Ward, ‘Jonny was going to kill him.’
Arter, inexperienced by comparison and perhaps somewhat fragile given events in his personal life in recent years, took a different approach when Keane rounded on him in the team hotel on the return from Paris. He went to O’Neill, and explained what happened. O’Neill knew of Arter’s issues with Keane yet still named him in his squad on August 27.
When the Ward tape came out on Tuesday and confirmed suspicions that had been floating around, O’Neill defended his assistant and said the words on the audio didn’t tally with what he was told happened. Significantly, though, Ward, has not retracted any of what he said on tape. Nor have any of the players who witnessed either, or both, rows.
O’Neill wants to move on but whether Roy Keane will let him, is another matter. The manager’s loyalty to ‘a brilliant assistant’ has been staunch. At what cost to Ireland, though?