It is from this entrance that John O’Neil emerges, the latest former Premierleague name of note to make the seemingly now customary drop down the divisions to help Gretna up them. With Falkirk making no use of him after their own promotion to the top flight, O’Neil, previously with Dundee United, St Johnstone and Hibernian, has signed with Gretna until the end of the season, when he will turn 35 in June. He doesn’t need telling there is not much left of his playing career, but promises Gretna is more than just the semi-retirement last payday a move there is often presented as. Not that he would view that assessment as too cynical. As it quickly transpires, O’Neil does a pretty forthright line in cynicism himself.
As players age they mature as interviewees as well as footballers. There is often no better time to get a player talking than when the end is approaching. Leave it until their retirement and it is too late, nostalgia has kicked in and the memories become rosier. In the closing seasons of their career, however, there is greater scope for some bitterness at having to face the end. The question of what might have been is never more pressing. Nominally, O’Neil’s mind is on next week ’s Scottish Cup fourth-round replay against Clyde, a tournament Gretna could now reach the semi-final of without meeting Premierleague opposition, but the midfielder is looking back as well as forward and when he does it is not without some anger.
The lowlight is obvious. In April 2003, O’Neil was captain of Hibs when the Easter Road club told him they could no longer afford him. His four-year contract, which still had one year remaining, was heavily based on appearance money. Attempting to rapidly downsize, Hibs informed O’Neil that, as a consequence, he would no longer appear. “The really disappointing thing for me was that it was Rod Petrie (the then managing director now the club’s chairman) who called me in to tell me that I wouldn’t be playing rather than the manager (Bobby Williamson,” says O’Neil. “It wasn’t anything to do with my ability, it was financial. When I signed the contract I hadn’t thought about the appearances clause, I just saw it as another four years at a big club like Hibs. I wasn’t alone. They wanted all the big earners out the door to try and balance the books. The Sky TV deal had collapsed, which the clubs hadn’t budgeted for, and a lot of people had to take the consequences of that.”
The Edinburgh club did attempt a compromise solution: replacing the final year of his existing contract with another deal at a heavily-reduced rate. “Even if I never played another game, I’d have been better off with the contract I was on,” shrugs O’Neil. “It didn’t make sense. I didn’t see what motivation there was for me to sign for another year and lose money by doing that. Who in their right mind, in any profession, would sign for another year in their job for less money, to effectively work for nothing for a year. It would have been stupid.” ()
In August 2003, he departed for Falkirk and, until this season, featured regularly, but John Hughes, his manager, adjudged O’Neil to be too old for the Premierleague, a verdict the player disputes. “Of course I do,” he says. “I 100% genuinely believe, particularly the way things were going at Falkirk with them not winning games, I should have been in there and given a chance to play, but it wasn’t happening. I wasn’t told in so many words, but I knew I wouldn’t get another contract in the summer so I asked John Hughes for another club. Gretna have taken me until the end of the season and, in a way, I’m now playing to get another deal beyond that. Motivation wasn’t the money side for me, it was to try and play at as high a level as I can before I finally quit.
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“Everybody has got their own reasons for being here,” adds O’Neil of his Gretna colleagues. “I would definitely say the team Gretna already has would be up there challenging at the top of the First Division. Everyone knows Gretna doesn’t have a big catchment area and the club doesn’t have a massive following, but that doesn’t mean we have to stop having ambitions about going as far as we can. I don’t think Brooks Mileson (the Gretna owner is throwing money at this club for the sake of it. He’s an honest, straightforward guy who loves football. He’s forever asking questions, wanting to find out as much as he can, and he’s a nice guy to get on with. Unlike Vladmir Romanov, he doesn’t want to pick the team either.”
O’Neil admits to being “demoralised” post-Hibs, but “pleasantly surprised” how the youngsters he left behind at the club have developed. “By some, but not by all,” he stresses. “Derek Riordan and Garry O’Connor, you could see how good those two were, even as a teenager Riordan was a superb finisher. Kevin Thomson and Scott Brown, too, I knew all about them and how good they were. The club had to throw them all in together and it ’s worked for them. I just wish I’d played longer with them, even that I was still there now. Sadly people never saw the Hibs team that would have combined the experience we had with the young players’ emergence.”
It was at Hibs that O’Neil claimed his one and only Scotland cap in an April 2001 friendly in Poland under Craig Brown, though, in keeping with how unfulfilled he was by that lone award, he has yet to receive it. “I didn’t actually get a cap,” he reveals. “It’s in name only because they never sent one to me. I don’t know why that was so maybe I need to look into that again. I roomed with Charlie Miller and it turned out to be his only appearance as well. I hoped more would come of it. I feel as if I could have got more Scotland caps, but that was outwith my control. I was played out of position in the game at left wing-back, but felt I did reasonably okay in a 1-1 draw. I don’t think my performance was anything to do with it, it was just that the injured players came back in.
“I suppose everyone looks back in their mid-thirties and says, ‘Maybe I could have done better’, and I’m exactly the same. I’m relatively pleased, but if I’m honest with myself I could have worked a bit harder. And been a bit luckier, as well,” he smiles, ruefully.
He has taken some of his coaching badges, but doubts he will ever use them: having learned not to trust his employers as a player, he is disinclined to be let down as a manager, too. “Coaching isn’t really the long-term aim, so many of them can’t get work and I don’t want to be another. I won’t pin all my hopes on being a coach only to have it come and slap me in the face,” he insists. “If it happens then great, but football’s plan B. Plan A is just to work when I finish.”
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Davie Nicholls, a fellow Gretna veteran who is sharing transport with O’Neil, needs to be in Stirling by mid-afternoon to collect his children from school and is haranguing O’Neil to bring proceedings to a close. “What is this interview, your f***ing life story?” Nicholls quips savagely, as O’Neil gestures at him to delay their departure a little longer, but there is some truth in the joke.
In a way, though it was never the original intention, it has ended up being just that.