Martin O’Neill: ‘The irony is that Keith Andrews uses the long throw, which is not that inventive’

Over the past few weeks Martin O’Neill’s memories of a Friday afternoon in June 2019 have risen up with fresh clarity. This month Nuno Espírito Santo was sacked as the manager of Nottingham Forest by the club’s owner, Evangelos Marinakis, in a scenario that echoed O’Neill’s fate six years previously.

O’Neill had meant so much to Forest fans after his key role as a player in the club’s greatest period in their history, winning the league and then successive European Cups under Brian Clough in 1979 and 1980. But the 73-year-old is too intelligent to overplay the comparison to Nuno. O’Neill’s final managerial post, at Forest, lasted 19 games, while Nuno achieved huge progress in his 21 months in charge. Forest were serious contenders for Champions League qualification until the final weeks of last season.

Nuno was still cut loose by Marinakis with the same ruthless edge the Greek owner showed in dismissing O’Neill when he was preparing Forest for a new season in the Championship. “We won the last three games I was in charge,” O’Neill says. “I’d come into the job in January after I met Marinakis in London. We agreed that we’d work over a 17-month period and he said: ‘Don’t worry about [chasing an unlikely] promotion now. Next season we will really make the charge.’ I thought that was absolutely fine and I didn’t want any longer, because if I couldn’t get them promoted that would be it.”

Having finished his truncated first campaign with three consecutive wins, did O’Neill feel his job was endangered? “Absolutely not. I’d spent a few days with Marinakis in Athens some weeks earlier and he seemed in good spirits. Perhaps in the one week I did of preseason I could detect a little change from the director of football [Kyriakos Dourekas] and the chief executive [Ioannis Vrentzos]. But I did not think that after my first week of pre season a new manager, Sabri Lamouchi, would be announced 24 minutes after I had been dismissed.”

In his new book, which documents how football has changed during the 50 years he spent as a player and manager, O’Neill wrote the preface with a fierce eloquence as he described his sacking. He was having lunch with his backroom staff when Dourekas ordered him brusquely to an impromptu meeting in the directors’ suite – where O’Neill had often been lambasted by Clough.

It was obvious something ominous loomed, but O’Neill coolly informed Dourekas he would join him after his lunch. The meeting lasted less than a minute, but the real shock followed soon after when O’Neill broke the news to his assistant coaches Steve Guppy and Seamus McDonagh.

“They are genuinely taken aback,” O’Neill writes, “despite seeing [Dourekas’s] sour face 10 minutes earlier. We sit down, take some tea and ruminate. Suddenly, Seamus’s phone rings. It’s his daughter Amy, telling him that Nottingham Forest have appointed a new manager and a full complement of coaching staff. We haven’t even left the building. Twenty-four minutes have elapsed since I left the directors’ suite. I completely understand that’s the business of football, but 24 minutes may well be a record from sacking one manager to the appointment of another.”

O’Neill smiles when I remind him of his dig in the book where he pointed that, earlier in his career, Dourekas had apparently been a swimming instructor: “That was my little cynical point.”

He had never worked under a director of football before and O’Neill is dubious. “The role is supposed to be a conduit between the manager and the chairman but I think it can lead to a vacuum of responsibility.”

Nuno was not helped by the arrival of Edu as the head of football. “I don’t know what that relationship was,” O’Neill says, “but seemingly that was part of Nuno’s annoyance.”

In his book it almost reads as if O’Neill would prefer the now ubiquitous sporting director to disappear. But surely the demands on the modern manager are so onerous that the load should be shared, particularly in the transfer market? “You’re dead right. But somewhere along the way the manager’s still got to have a proper look at a [prospective] new player. Not taking snippets from an agent.”

In terms of his own fleeting experience as Forest’s manager, he says: “When myself and Roy Keane were there, the chief executive and director of football would be hanging around the dressingroom. You think: ‘Hold on a minute. Let us do our jobs.’ In my more aggressive days, I would have told them: ‘Don’t be here.’ I was hoping to make some of those changes in the summertime because I was surprised on one occasion when I was told that the chief executive actually spoke to the players one day. He was telling them that they’ve got to get a move on. I definitely wouldn’t have allowed that.”

O’Neill admits: “In fairness, without Marinakis’s money Forest would still probably be in the [Championship]. They have a very fine side, and he has been able to bring in good players.”

Was he surprised by Marinakis’s appointment of Ange Postecoglou as Nuno’s successor? “I think they know each other, and both being Greek helps, so probably not.”

O’Neill and Postecoglou were highly successful managers of Celtic, but will the Australian adapt his risky attacking strategy to fit Nuno’s counter-attacking squad? “I think there will be a change of style, but managers, and I include myself in this, have got to learn. If something you’re tried before is not really happening you’d be foolish not to make some changes.”

How would Clough have dealt with the interference of club executives? “He wouldn’t have stood for it,” O’Neill says. “Life has changed, and Brian Clough would have had to make some adjustments, but he definitely wouldn’t have allowed Marinakis to walk all over him.”

O’Neill argues that man-management, more than tactical tweaking, remains the essential ingredient defining the best coaches. He is sceptical of the reliance on data and modern tactical trends, which he suggests make some teams more willing to take risks in their own penalty area than the opponents’ box.

Reflecting on the grip data analytics exerts over football he is scathing of discussion around expected goals. For O’Neill this metric “is total nonsense”.

“You’ve got to remember what the game is about: winning football matches, and that means scoring goals, not recording the expectation of them. ‘Expected goals’ have only come about in the last few years. It’s a clueless development. Some people just use these words to try to sound clever.”

But when the conversation turns to Brighton and Brentford, two clubs who have used data analysis so effectively, he is affable and fair. Keith Andrews, Brentford’s new head coach, used to be a vitriolic critic of O’Neill’s management of the Republic of Ireland and accused him of being excessively wedded to set-piece strategies. O’Neill points out wryly that Andrews’s unexpected appointment at Brentford stemmed from his work as the club’s set-piece coach.

“Keith is not my favourite person because he was very critical of me in Ireland. The irony is that Brentford are using the long throw, which is not all that inventive because it’s been around for years. But take my irritants aside. He’s a young fellow coming in [to management] and it’s a great challenge because he’s taking over from a person whose character pervaded the football club.

“Thomas Frank was excellent and so it’s a strange and interesting dilemma for [Andrews]. Do you want to change things straight away? Do you want to show your personality immediately? Or do you take your time, because the players do know you? But knowing you as a set-piece coach and then knowing you as a manager is a wee bit different. If you overcome those things, then you should be on the right path.”

An hour in O’Neill’s engaging company spans contrasting eras and he captures the enduring drama and compelling characters that mean football can never be fully sanitised. It is also timely to remember that he was often mentioned as a potential replacement for Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United and was in contention to become England manager when he lost out to Steve McClaren in 2006.

“My interviewing technique might not have been the greatest and maybe I didn’t have a power play,” he says, joking. “But deep down I probably thought I hadn’t really done enough to merit being England manager at that stage. The England manager’s job is up there alongside managing Brazil.

“Thomas Tuchel’s now in and the only thing he can do is to win the World Cup. He has got to win it because everything else would be relative failure. That didn’t worry me at the time because England then wouldn’t have been considered as extraordinary – apart from the fact they had some really good players. If given the job, I would absolutely have taken it.”

O’Neill is the chair of the League Managers Association – is he concerned about the dearth of British managers? “Absolutely. The Premier League now is so big it has seemingly untold wealth coming in. I hate to use the word ‘foreign’, but you’re talking about foreign investment, foreign owners, foreign agents. So the younger British manager is often managing a team in the third division. He’s getting 12 or 14 games to prove himself, and if he doesn’t do it in that time, he’s in the wilderness, even before he gets started. The British manager is all but disappearing.”

We soon return to the way that language around football has changed. “It’s essentially still a simple game,” he says. “We all want to complicate it. There are newfound words for this game. People talk about the high press and the low block. But, as players, we sat round [Clough’s assistant] Peter Taylor one day and asked him what made a really good football side. He said: ‘I get good players and get them hustling.’ Hustling is essentially the equivalent of [Pep] Guardiola getting the ball back. Remember [Guardiola] had this invention, only so many seconds could pass before you get the ball back. That’s exactly what Peter did.”

It was a form of pressing? “Exactly. Hustling is doing the dirty part of the game. Quickly getting back possession of the ball so you can play.”

O’Neill can no longer play the game and he will not manage a team again. But he still talks with real fervour about football and, when he calls a few days after this interview, it is just before he settles down to watch a Champions League match as a fan. He remains a pundit but, in the constant whirl of football and his blunt dismissal from his final job at Forest, has his love of the game lessened at all? “It honestly hasn’t. I’m fearful of becoming sceptical. I still love it.” – Guardian

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