Bob Dylan is on the car radio, so Martin O’Neill turns up the volume and sings
along. “How does it feel/How does it feel/To be without a home/Like a
complete unknown/Like a rolling stone?” The words echo inside the car, which
is transporting the Aston Villa manager and three others to a golf club in
the Toronto suburbs, and for a moment nothing else matters.
“You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns/
When they all come down and did tricks for you/You never understood that it
ain’t no good/You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you/You used
to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat/Who carried on his shoulder a
Siamese cat/Ain’t it hard when you discover that/He really wasn’t where it’s
at/After he took from you everything he could steal/How does it feel . . .”
The air guitar comes out with O’Neill’s passion and all of a sudden it feels
like a concert, not a car ride.
“Mr Tambourine Man – the Byrds’ version, but Dylan wrote it, of course – would
be in my top five songs of all time,” he says. “I like my music: the Kinks,
the Small Faces, Jethro Tull, the Who.
“My daughters [Aisling and Alana] try to drag me out of my era, so I listen to
the Killers, a Leicester band called Kasabian – who named themselves after
Linda Kasabian, a member of the serial killer Charles Manson’s cult – a
Northern Irish band called Ash and Snow Patrol, who were formed in Scotland,
but most of the band members are from Belfast and Bangor.
“Mo Johnston [the former Celtic and Rangers striker, now coach of Toronto FC,
whom Aston Villa defeated 4-2 on Wednesday in a preseason friendly] took me
to a concert last night, the Police. When he told me we were going to the
police, I thought, ‘What have the players done now?’ . . . I know, it was
crappy the first time I told it too, but the concert was really great. Did
you know that Roxanne was not a hit first time around? It flopped and had to
be rereleased.
“But never mind about all of this. We have a game to play [at Rattlesnake
Point Golf Club] for the championship of the world. I’m concerned about my
playing partner [Seamus McDonagh, Villa’s goalkeeping coach] because I asked
him what he shot last time he was out and he said himself. So that’s a
worry. I’ve not played too often recently or too cleverly myself, although
we’ll win in any case.”
O’Neill’s enthusiasm survives the round, but only just. His fears prove well
founded.
“I played like a drain,” he says, “and as for Seamus . . .” He rolls his eyes
as he sits down in the clubhouse to a glass of Coke. “The shot he hit on the
fourth hole when he moved the ball about five yards – considerably less
distance than his divot travelled, I hasten to add – was an indictment in
itself, but then he climbed in the buggy to get to his ball! One step
forward and he would have been standing over his ball! But not to worry,
we’ll be back here in the morning, crack of dawn, double or quits,
championship of the world on the line.
“I’m going to make sure that Seamus is in bed by 11, so that he has a good
night’s sleep. He’ll be ready tomorrow, no doubt about it . . . and so will
I.” And of course when dawn comes, he is.
IN A spacious hotel room overlooking Lake Ontario, O’Neill is contemplating a
different challenge, one to which he has dedicated, for better or for worse,
most of his life. As a player, a European Cup-winner no less, he felt
unfulfilled by the success he enjoyed with Nottingham Forest and Northern
Ireland, whom he captained in their improbable run in the 1982 World Cup
finals in Spain, where they beat the host nation. Financial imperatives
drove his decision to turn to management after his playing career was ended
by a cruciate ligament injury in his right knee, but something deeper needed
to be sated.
Instinctively, he set about trying to forge his reputation from the manager’s
dugout, and he realised quickly what it would take to earn the acclamation
he craved.
Twenty years after taking charge of Grantham Town in the Midland Division of
the Beazer Homes League and a year since returning to football after a
14-month sabbatical brought about by his wife Geraldine’s ill health (next
Saturday will mark his first anniversary in the Villa Park hot seat) this is
what O’Neill is still about. “Will Aston Villa be able to get up there and
challenge the likes of Manchester United and Chelsea next season? It’s
debatable,” he suggests. “Will we be able to do so in the next couple of
seasons? Whatever the view of other people, this is precisely what we are
aiming for. Me, personally, I want to be successful because that’s why I’m
in this business.
“Ego, pride, call it what you will, but I would genuinely love to be
successful with the football club, as much for the Villa people who turned
out on that day a year ago [when O’Neill succeeded David O’Leary, whom
supporters had grown to vilify, coming to the ground with banners that read:
‘We’re not fickle, we just don’t like you’]. I can say honestly that I’ve
got the same drive and the same determination now at my age [55] that I had
when I was 20. I’m older, but I’m still exactly the same. Being competitive
is really important to me.
“Did I miss the game during my time away? Well, actually, there were quite a
number of months when I didn’t have the time to miss it [as Geraldine
underwent treatment for cancer]. But of course I wanted to come back because
I still had things to do and I wanted to do them. Now I’m getting this
opportunity and I don’t really want to fail at it.”
His reluctance over the past 12 months to speak about his wife’s battle with
lymphoma goes beyond the natural inclination to protect his family’s
privacy. O’Neill would be troubled by any hint that private circumstances
could be construed, ultimately, as an excuse for failure. If he fails, it
will be down to his shortcomings and those of the team he assembles over the
coming weeks and months, and he would not want his career to be judged by any
other criteria, much less saved by a sympathy vote.
“Inevitably, events happen in every person’s life which put many things into a
perspective, maybe a supposed perspective, even if it only remains there for
a certain period of time,” he rationalises. “Then, if everything were to get
better again, you would look at life once more in a different light.
“Some time ago I watched a programme on TV about a surgeon operating on a man
who had a cancerous lump in his forehead. The man wasn’t going to live if he
didn’t have the lump removed. I watched in absolute amazement, because,
whatever Bill Shankly [the legendary Liverpool manager] might have said to
the contrary, this really was a matter of life and death and I was
transfixed.
“Sport has been my life, this sport in particular, but whenever we talk about
the supposed pressures involved in the game of football, it might be
worthwhile taking a broader view. In the context of life, it isn’t really so
important. Up and down the country surgeons are saving people’s lives every
day. That’s real life.
“Now, does this prevent you from being as competitive or wanting to achieve
the things you once did? I don’t think it does. Somebody will say that’s a
contradiction, but life’s not black and white.
“When I was a player I used to look to whoever was managing the team and I
felt that if he wasn’t competitive, we had an excuse as players not to be
competitive staring right back at us. I’m not talking about a show, I mean
genuinely being competitive, because they’re two different things.
“Maybe I’ll not relate everything to Geraldine’s illness, if you don’t mind,
but the point I’m trying to make is that many different people in all kinds
of circumstances go through something like this and they get on with their
lives. And that’s just what you have to do.”
IF O’NEILL is fair game, then the season’s opening shots have already been
fired. In a newspaper column last week Tony Cascarino, the former Villa and
Republic of Ireland striker, conveyed his scepticism about O’Neill’s
transfer dealings so far this summer. “The sky was the limit last summer
when Randy Lerner bought the club and O’Neill replaced David O’Leary,”
Cascarino wrote. “So imagine my surprise when O’Neill decided to pay West
Ham United £4m for Marlon Harewood . . .
“And then there is Nigel Reo-Coker [also signed from West Ham]. Many Villa
fans think that he will justify his transfer fee of up to £8.5m, but I am
not so sure. Reo-Coker is good, but he is not good enough for a club who
want to get into Europe every season . . . I do not want to have a dig just
for the sake of it, because for getting the best out of players, nobody
comes close to O’Neill. He makes average players good and good players
great, but can he make great players fantastic?
“Are top-flight defenders going to quake in their boots at the prospect of
facing Harewood, John Carew and Ashley Young [the latter two of whom O’Neill
brought to Villa last season, Young for a fee that could rise to a club
record £9.65m]? I don’t think so.”
Predictably, when relayed to O’Neill, Cascarino’s misgivings draw a forthright
response. “Let everybody have their viewpoint. It’s of no significance to me
and it’s not important,” he says. “People have opinions, but I’ve got to
make judgments, and there’s a world of difference. I could pontificate from
now to next Tuesday about Arsène Wenger’s team, Sir Alex Ferguson’s side,
Jose Mourinho’s team, but it would be of no concern to them, and that is how
I view it.
“Reo-Coker was a player I chased during the summer and he’s absolutely ideal
for us. He’ll give us a lot of energy and a bit of direction. I know he has
a reputation for speaking his mind, but as long as it makes a bit of sense,
I have no problem with people speaking their mind. He’ll enliven us with his
pace, for he can get from box to box, and if he could improve his finishing,
he would be an automatic selection in the England set-up.
“He’s a totally different player to Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard, both of
whom would score far more goals. But at 23 years of age he has the scope to
improve greatly. He not only has the scope to improve himself, he has the
scope to improve our team.
“Marlon Harewood, great credit to him for deciding to come to us, for he’s not
guaranteed anything and he’s prepared to battle. He had a great season the
year before last [when he scored 16 goals] obviously a poor output in terms
of goals last season [four] but he chose to come here knowing that his place
is far from secure, and that’s admirable.
“Our job is to be able to try to compete with the bigger teams, so we also
need to build a squad. This has become very important. Liverpool [whom Villa
will entertain on the opening day of the season] have improved their squad
immensely, and this is a team that reached the Champions League final last
season. So just when you start to think that you’re putting a squad together –
I’m not saying we have yet – then the other teams seem to be
pulling out of sight again.
“It’s difficult in this day and age to go and get players of decent quality.
Lots of people questioned the decision to buy Ashley Young last season, but
Ashley will prove to be a bargain, I firmly believe, especially given the
inflated prices that are being paid now. I want to try to keep a semblance
of normality about this when normality seems to no longer exist, in terms of
the market, and I want to make sure that Aston Villa and thereby the
chairman [Lerner] get real value for money.
“I don’t want to run this thing like I have an open chequebook. But the two of
us are aware that to give ourselves a bit of a chance, a leg-up to begin
with, we will have to go into the market for players, and I intend to build
a competitive squad here. If somebody says that doesn’t make us strong
enough, well, we’re not strong enough at the moment, but that’s because we
haven’t got all the players in yet.”
In sharp contrast to the frequently turbulent dynamics at Chelsea between
Mourinho and the club’s billionaire owner Roman Abramovich, the Villa
manager and chairman have built a solid relationship as well as a shared
vision of how to get the job done. One a former criminal law student at
Queen’s University in Belfast, the other a Wall Street lawyer who inherited
the business empire of his late father, Al, they speak almost daily and
consult even over the minutiae of club business.
“He attended 27 of our games last season, so this is no absentee landlord,”
O’Neill emphasises about the billionaire owner of the Cleveland Browns
American football team. Gridiron was one of the topics they discussed on
first meeting, O’Neill being an avid fan of the game, but Lerner’s passion
for football runs just as deep. He studied at Cambridge in the early 1980s
and lived in the northwest of England during the 1990s and is sensitive
towards the traditions and culture of the club he acquired for £64m from
Doug Ellis in September last year.
“The old Holte hotel would be the most significant example of this, overseeing
its restoration to its former glory, but he has embraced the whole history
of the football club and has been extremely supportive of me. In terms of
asking for anything so far, he’s been on the other end of the telephone,”
O’Neill reveals.
“During our poor time last season [when Villa won only two of 20 games before
finishing strongly] he would have been hurting as badly as anybody else, but
he was always on the phone, saying, ‘Listen, we’ll get this right. This is a
long-term strategy’. He would remind me that we’re in it for the long haul.
That is always nice to know in a business that is not renowned for long
haul. He has an understanding of what I want to do and supports that
viewpoint. We established a rapport pretty quickly and I think he was
pleasantly surprised that I knew some things about American football,
although he may have felt I’d done a bit of homework the night before.
“Naming all the teams in the National Football League, however, is not
something that would be wildly impressive to him. He’s a man who would need
to be impressed by other things. The biggest thing about him, from the fans’
perspective, is that, like myself, he’s here for it, he wants to have a go
and he wants to do it and this is very much the common goal.”
O’Neill had a taste of jousting with Mourinho when his Celtic team lost 3-2 to
Porto in a compelling Uefa Cup final in 2003. There was no love lost.
“I felt that every professional trick in the book was used and Porto gave us a
lesson in it, but it wasn’t the way that I would have wanted our players to
behave,” O’Neill says.
“But my regard for Mourinho has grown immeasurably, given what he has done
since. My admiration for Chelsea is very deep. I’ll tell you why. They go
for everything and they treat the League Cup like the Champions League, and
that’s great.
“We got through a few rounds of the competition last season and people were
starting to think about another League Cup run for Villa. The one team at
that stage of our development that I didn’t want to play was Chelsea at
Stamford Bridge, because you knew they would go with as strong a team as
they possibly could. They did, and they beat us. Whatever you say about
Mourinho, he’s gone and done it and Chelsea have set a standard for a club
like ourselves.
“I know what Aston Villa fans want.
They want us to be competing with the very best. I’m trying, and in the
not-too-distant future this Aston Villa team will.”
It will need to. Just ask Seamus McDonagh.
Crime scene investigator: the dark side of Martin O’Neill
Born in Kilrea, Northern Ireland, on March 1, 1952, O’Neill is not your
stereotypical football man. An outstanding Gaelic footballer, he was snapped
up by Irish League club Distillery, but O’Neill has also had a fascination
with crime since embarking on a law degree at Queen’s University, Belfast
He maintained his interest even during his glorious playing days at Nottingham
Forest, and queued outside the Old Bailey with wife Geraldine, who was then
pregnant, for seats in public gallery during Yorkshire Ripper trial
Has visited site of A6 murder by James Hanratty, who in 1962 became one of the
last men to be hanged in Britain. O’Neill also visited London’s Lower
Belgrave Street, where Lord Lucan murdered nanny Sandra Rivett, before
disappearing n Fascination with the JFK assassination in 1963 led to a visit
to Dealey Plaza, Dallas, where Lee Harvey Oswald shot the president. O’Neill
also stood in the cell in which Oswald was held after his arrest and on the
spot where Jack Ruby shot Oswald at the Dallas County Jail
O’Neill now plans to visit New York’s Dakota building, scene of John Lennon’s
murder, and Chappaquiddick, where Teddy Kennedy drove off a bridge, leading
to the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne
Awarded an OBE for services to sport in 2004, right with wife Geraldine,
O’Neill had previously been given an MBE
