Ferguson and his 4 shadows from the 4 floodlights.
the game moved on tactically and he didn’t adapt. similar thing happened to Clough. Apparently MON got sad and his personality changed so he wasn’t a good manager any more though
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That’s not true mate. Eoin Hand was appointed Ireland manager on the back of his “success” managing Limerick Utd. He came within a kick of the ball of getting us to a World Cup.
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Different times
If Martin O’Neill had been 10 or 15 years younger than he was he probably would have won English league titles as a manager and maybe won a European Cup. That was the era of football he was suited to as a manager - the Howard Wilkinson/Howard Kendall/George Graham era.
He did very well with Wycombe, Leicester and Celtic, there’s no doubting that. However there are caveats. Wycombe is a low level. Leicester played a 1980s British style but that was good enough for late 1990s Premier League.
At Celtic O’Neill was the beneficiary of some very good recruitment under the four previous managers. He came in at a great time. The team had been underperforming, but he had Larsson, Petrov, Moravcik, Lambert, Boyd, McNamara, who were a very solid base to build a title winning team on.
He supplemented that by signing players he knew from the Premier League – Sutton, Thompson and Lennon.
Under O’Neill, Celtic went from a very exciting recruitment policy where they were bringing terrific attacking or creative players from abroad, to a largely British signing policy. The foreign players who came in under O’Neill were largely centre halves, big bruisers like Balde and Mjallby, or known quantities who were already playing in Scotland and were available for bargain basement fees like Didier Agathe.
This worked for quite a while, and O’Neill’s messianic personality was a perfect fit for Celtic and his solid if stodgy coaching was good enough for the environment he was in, but the thing that was holding it all together was the genius of Larsson. Once that went, it was over. Other central players were aging or wanted away. Celtic suddenly went from a dominant team domestically – though underperforming in the Champions League, to bang average. Celtic barely signed a decent player under O’Neill after 2001. John Hartson was probably the only decent signing in that period, again a known quantity from the Premier League. By 2005 O’Neill’s extremely conservative recruitment policy had caught up with them. Strachan had to completely rebuild the team within a year or two.
O’Neill ended up at Aston Villa in 2006. Look at O’Neill’s signings when he went to Villa. As conservative as a pensioners’ day out in Eastbourne, but costing a net spend of £82m, when that was a hell of a lot of money. He didn’t have the eye for a player that was required in the Premier League by then and was relying on exactly the same methods he had used at Leicester a decade previously. Again his solid if stodgy coaching ensured respectable league positions, but when he went, he did not leave a good situation behind. He is widely blamed for starting the rot which led to them becoming perennial relegation strugglers and eventually getting relegated in 2016.
You have to understand that Martin O’Neill by 2001 was being talked up as the next great manager in English football – there was wide speculation that he was in line to replace Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, when Ferguson was expected to leave in 2002. In truth he was never at that level, not in the era he found himself in. He was a reasonably good coach, but his style was suited to the 1980s, not the 2000s.
When he managed Ireland, he made the team hard to beat, which was no surprise in an arena where tactics had become far more rudimentary compared to club football, but after that good period in 2015/16 he became lazy and increasingly conservative, by late 2017 he had become so conservative in his approach it was almost parody.
He is holding up more fingers there than games he lasted during his last tenure.
A huge amount of O’Neill’s success was in his messianic personality, best exemplified by nights at Celtic Park against Porto, Juventus, Liverpool, Anderlecht, Barcelona etc. O’Neill himself created energy in the stadium. He was constantly jumping around and whipping up the atmosphere which swept Celtic along on those nights. As you get older you lose that ability.
By the time he went to Villa, he had mostly lost that.
He produced it in tiny bursts at Sunderland and Nottingham Forest, but he couldn’t sustain it. He was old by then. He produced it in fits and starts with Ireland, who didn’t have to play many matches.
But after about 2004 he had mostly lost his main USP as a manager, which was the ability to create high energy emotion which sucked the crowd in and created its own dynamic which helped to drive his team on.
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No surprise, they’ll get the next fella the job too. He surely knows the game.
Martin O’Neill believes Stephen Kenny has been propped up by the Irish media during his reign as national team boss, as he admits he is “bitter” about the manner of his own exit from the job.
Kenny is under huge pressure after a disappointing Euro 2024 qualifying campaign continued with a 2-1 home defeat against Holland in Dublin on Sunday night.
Now the last manager who took Ireland to a major championships in 2016 believes the Irish media need to shoulder some of the blame for giving Kenny an easy ride despite a long run of poor results.
“Obviously, I managed the side and I lost my job over some of the results at the end and I thought international football was about winning football games, it’s about winning,” O’Neill told talkSPORT.
"The Irish media have put Stephen in charge and therefore they are still going to pedal this idea that he has changed the course of football. That the Republic of Ireland play a different type of football.
"They (Irish media) put him in charge because they were very strongly in favour of him and the FAI succumbed and went with that, which was fine.
"The whole idea Stephen would change the course of football. We are going to be a possession team, we are going to change it.
"That’s very, very difficult to change when you are an international manager. You have players for two or three days.
"You’re not going to change a lot of things in that time and it’s all very well having possession when your two centre-halves pass the ball to each other on a number of occasions and you get your stats up.
"The bottom line is you have to win football games. The Republic of Ireland want to qualify.
"The Republic of Ireland have qualified for six tournaments; three World Cups and three European Champions. History is against them, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t go.
"I heard them saying this was a difficult group, which it was. France are a very good side.
"But we qualified from a group in 2016 that featured the world champions Germany. We actually beat Germany. So you have to go and win some football games.
“The Republic of Ireland have lost four out of the last five and qualification through this group is exceptionally difficult and it looks like it’s beyond them.”
O’Neill was asked by host Jim White whether he is bitter about his exit as Ireland boss in 2018 and he again suggested the media had a role to play in his downfall.
“Of course, if you lose your job, you are going to be bitter at the end of it all,” he continued.
"I didn’t get on with it (the Irish media). They didn’t like me at the end of the day and I’m not wildly sure I was all that fussed on them.
"We qualified for the European Championships in 2016 and we had a fantastic time. We were playing to full houses at the Aviva Stadium.
"Stephen (Kenny) talks about full houses, but we had full houses for all the big matches. There was a great rapport, a fantastic rapport between the players and the crowd.
"I got back to the day that we opened in Paris against Sweden and we had 25,000 Ireland fans and 25,000 Sweden fans and it was the most colourful, atmospheric atmosphere I seen in international football.
“The Republic of Ireland fans have a great history with Jack Charlton and they want to be there again, they want to be in the tournaments. They don’t actually care how they get there. They want to be in the competitions again.”
When asked whether he felt he got different treatment from the Irish media than Kenny he added: "I think Stephen is well backed (by the Irish media), but eventually you get to a point.
"You paint a colourful picture about something, but you have to win football games.
“It’s just me, I have this viewpoint. It was like Euro 2016 never existed from their view point.”
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There aren’t many people who think Stephen Kenny should stay on at this stage I think, there are almost none.
What is apparent is that those who championed him from the outset are feeling pretty embarrassed about them doing that and it irks them a lot that they were wrong.
People were very confidently dismissing the concerns of people like former YBIG poster sid waddell, Ian Harte and Phil Babb, who said from the outset that a League Of Ireland coach would be out of their depth at international level and wouldn’t have the confidence of the players.
It’s time to say who was wrong and who was right.
Those who were wrong.
Tony O’Donoghue.
Dan McDonnell.
Joe Molloy.
Mick McCarthy from Off the Ball on Newstalk.
Stuey Byrne.
Alan Cawley.
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Ah would you stop. Dismissing his success at celtic because of what happened after he left? And Celtic had amazing players before he came But had only won the league once in 12 years? So they needed a good manager obviously… Sounds like Oneill did a brilliant job there then. 3 titles in 5 years and cups and a uefa cup run.
You blanked leicester cos it didnt suit you. You dismissed wycombe. That’s surely the sign of a great manager. Going to a tiny club and winning loads. And then repeating it with leicester.
You love a theory and talking about it but youre completely wrong on oneill and digging in. The fella had more than 25 years of good management. Your messiah theory of burning bright and fast falls flat there.
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Did Holland have more 24-30 year olds on the pitch last night?
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Darragh Moloney.
Joanne Cantwell.
Crucial
I backed Kenny and I don’t feel embarassed. The man tried and failed. We move on to the next man
I didn’t dismiss his success. I said there were caveats to it. Compared to the way O’Neill was being written up in 2001 as the next great manager in English football in the lineage of Busby-Shankly-Revie-Paisley-Clough-Ferguson, his managerial career ended up falling below expectations. Ultimately his conservative signing policy and limited tactical approach were both exposed.