It’s a list which includes pretty much every good signing O’Neill made. What other good signings did he make that I haven’t mentioned? Ramon Vega on loan?
Of course Celtic had some misses in terms of signings in the 1995-99 period (Regi Blinker, Harald Brattbakk and Rafael Scheidt spring to mind) but they were bringing in good players from a wider array of sources. That pretty much went when O’Neill came in and the signing policy became deeply conservative.
In terms of competitiveness in Europe, yes O’Neill can point to reaching the UEFA Cup final, but he never qualified from a Champions League group in four attempts. Gordon Strachan who is not particularly fondly remembered by a lot of Celtic supporters reached the last 16 of the Champions League twice and nearly eliminated eventual winners AC Milan in 2007 with a hastily and cheaply assembled squad.
O’Neill had undoubted strengths as a manager - he wouldn’t have had a good managerial career otherwise - but he also had an inherent conservative streak in him which only became more apparent as his career progressed. He retreated into what he felt comfortable with rather than moving with the times.
A fair pivot from calling him a poor manager who burned bright early then fell away because it was only about his ‘messianic’ personality.
Most managers win nothing in their careers. O Neill won a shitload with a few different teams. He was a good/great manager for 5 different teams… the opposite of your initial argument.
Personally I consider Gordon Strachan to have done a superior job to him at Celtic with inferior players.
Would Wee Gordon be an option for us? I thought he got Scotland playing some nice ball when he was their manager and he had the better of the two head to head encounters against O’Neill’s Ireland team before Scotland’s inherent Scottishness screwed them over.
Lads ye’re arguing over nothing.
O’Neill was a “good” manager by any definition. His palmares are better than 95% of managers. I wouldn’t call him a “great” manager as I’d reserve that for fellas that won a title in a big league and a European comp or two, and/or took a national team on a deep run in a major championship.
All that said, the style of play he managed was by and large very old school and conservative.
O’Neill suffered from the same thing the likes of Pulis suffered from, his style went out of fashion and their relative success fucked them. Pulis consistently overachieved with Stoke and they went looking to do it with modern football, and fucked themselves.
2016 was so negative in set up and approach that the media went nuts looking to do it with modern football and kind of created this monster.
You’d swear he was some kind of visionary to be blooding these young players. They were simply better than their older alternatives in the vast majority of cases. The likes of Darren Randolph, Shane Long and Glenn Whelan were coming to an end which freed up space for players such as Gav Baz, Adam Idah and Jason Knight to slot into the team. Robbie Brady and Jeff Hendrick had seen their careers stall and Big Mick probably would have moved them aside too. Evan Ferguson was a non-brainer. Richie Keogh, Harry Arter and Ciaran Clark were easily dispensed with for younger and better alternatives such as Nathan Collins, Jason Molumpy and Andrew Obamidele.
I’d give great credit to Spock for entrusting Ogbene with so much gametime whilst still a League One player but aside from that I don’t think he’s done anything that any other manager wouldn’t have considered.
Poor Gordon Strachan with his inferior players seems to completely escape responsibility for his transfer dealings in your weird bubble. O’Neill has the best win record of any Celtic manager ever. There have been some very good managers in that list. O’Neill also inherited a team that (while it had some good players) had won one league title in 13 years. And he turned that around instantly.
More weird selectiveness in the international comparisons. It would be pertinent to mention that Ireland actually finished ahead of Scotland in the qualifying group when they came up against each other. You might even point out that Ireland qualified for Euro 2016 in that time when they played each other. Most people don’t assess managerial records on a random head-to-head basis.
Strachan won three league titles in a row with a squad that had to be completely overhauled on the cheap after O’Neill left it in a terrible state. Strachan brought in Nakamura, Vennegoor of Hesselink, Evander Sno, Artur Boruc, Georgios Samaras. O’Neill wouldn’t have signed these players.
Three league titles from four attempts is better than three from five. Two Champions League group qualifications from four attempts is better than none from four. he beat Manchester United and AC Milan in the Champions League. O’Neill did not beat that calibre of team in the Champions League.
Win ratios are in the same category as head to heads. Most people don’t assess managerial records on win ratios. By that rationale Brian Kerr was a better Ireland manager than Jack Charlton and Noel King was a better Ireland manager than Martin O’Neill.
I have a couple of friends who are still Pro-Kenny (one who laps up all those association football podcasts like OTB and Second Captains) and another couple who are on the fence and reckon nobody else could do much better either. There’s an awful lot of people burying their head in the sand regarding Kenny. The difficult group can alter perception. We needed a Wales/Austria/Serbia/Georgia and Moldova type group to utterly expose Kenny. He’d have ended up with about 9 points from 10 games. These 5 team groups don’t have enough matches to clear a grey area. The only disasters we can pick at are Luxembourg and Azerbaijan (H).
Kenny’s backers made his tenure a culture war thing from the off. They spouted slogans about “standing on our own two feet” and “building a culture” and “believing in ourselves” like they had eaten a load of Tony Robbins videos.
It was all tied up this guff about “having a defined system, an Irish football philosophy which teams from underage up to senior all play” and the deluded belief that the League Of Ireland could become an actual alternative to playing in England, that players in the League Of Ireland might play for Ireland.
That’s not how senior international football works. The brief of the senior international manager is to win matches and qualify Ireland for tournaments. You can’t play an off the shelf system dictated by some arbitrary “football philosophy”. You’ve got to cut your cloth and come up with a system which best suits your players. And you’ve got to give the players the moral courage to use their heads. The players last night were clearly blindly following a system they had no belief in. They were playing by rote, going through the motions, passing the buck.
Our attacking game is so fucking powder puff it’s depressing.
I think there were a good few leaks early doors. There was a bit of upheaval after that video before the friendly against England in late 2020 and a few murmurs over the Covid debacle before the Serbia play-off. In general I’d say we have a group of good lads who are just happy to represent their nation. Seamus Coleman was sent out to toe the party line on countless occasions after poor results in the first couple of years.
Over the last 20 odd years Ireland have always been a team who would acquire about 13-14 points from 8 games in a qualification group or roughly 17-18 points from 10 games. Usually enough to acquire a play-off place. Under Kenny that has slipped to 9 points from 8 games in the last campaign and I’ll hazard a guess that we’ll finish with 7 points from 8 games in this campaign.
Shortly before O’Neill took over Rangers had hockeyed Celtic. Celtics centre backs were Tebily and Scheidt. A Rangers wag suggested Celtic should sign David Weir so that their back three would be Weir Tebily Scheidt.
O’Neill was infamously cruel to Scheidt for some reason and delighted in humiliating him. Wasn’t a particularly nice trait.
I would say less than 5% of Celtic season ticket holders were happy when O’Neill resigned. More than half were happy when Strachan left. Because the football under Strachan had become really boring and his selections and tactics were ultra conservative.
These are the types of things you might know if you were watching Celtic regularly. But unfortunately Wikipedia doesn’t have that level of insight so you may as well just remain misinformed.
I don’t think it has occurred to you that you’re complaining about supposedly boring winning football on the same thread as people are lamenting the absence of boring winning football from the Irish team.
I found Strachan’s Celtic anything but boring and the run in of the 2007/08 season to win the three in a row from behind was probably the most exciting thing I’ve experienced as a Celtic supporter.
It’s up to you if you found the wins over Benfica, Manchester United, Spartak Moscow, AC Milan and Shakhtar Donetsk and Champions League group qualification boring. I didn’t.
