This may be as good as it gets, not just for Martin O’Neill but Ireland. Had he taken the Stoke City job, his week would have been spent swotting up on Watford and Bournemouth rather than settling down for the night in Lausanne to figure out exactly what the Nations League has to offer, apart from a January junket to a nondescript Swiss town.
Certainly over the next few months, when dates with Watford, Bournemouth and Brighton & Hove Albion are replaced by a run of games that includes Stoke City hosting Manchester City, Everton and Tottenham Hotspur, there may be times when the Ireland manager will have wished that he had accepted the ticket back to the Premier League.
And then he’ll remind himself of what he’s missed out on. Out of the running for both Cup competitions, and having never finished higher than ninth in the nine seasons they have spent in the Premier League, O’Neill knows that money talks in this game and that Stoke don’t have enough of it. Nor do they even have their priorities in place. Conscious that relegation could spell financial disaster, they are obsessed with mid-table mediocrity rather than tempted by the dream of having one of those years that defined an era for Sunderland, Southampton, West Ham United and Ipswich Town.
Walk to the Stadium of Light and Bob Stokoe’s statue, complete with his trilby hat, anorak and smile, blocks your pathway. Commissioned by Bob Murray, the club’s former chairman, it wasn’t put there out of respect for Sunderland finishing sixth in the 1972-73 season. It’s there because the FA Cup came back to the northeast that year; two years before West Ham United won it, three seasons before it was Southampton’s turn; five shy of Ipswich’s day.
Today’s chairmen or owners, however, couldn’t care less about tradition. Why else would Crystal Palace push Alan Pardew out the door, just seven months after he had brought them to just the second FA Cup final of their history? Steve Bruce and Hull City had a similarly painful divorce, the memories of their day trip to Wembley for the 2014 FA Cup final having long since faded by the time that he left the club two years later. Claude Puel took Southampton to their first League Cup final in 38 years. Four months later he was sacked.
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So that’s what O’Neill is missing out on, the insecurity of a profession where good is never good enough. Why then would he swap Ireland, where he can lose 5-1 in a World Cup play-off and know his job is safe, for a world where Claudio Ranieri, who only got the Leicester City job because O’Neill turned it down, was sacked within a year of capturing the unlikeliest of Premier League titles?
It’s a jungle, the Premier League. In this regard, it’s no surprise O’Neill stayed. Even a sentimental trip back to Nottingham Forest, the club where he won two European Cups as a player and who got in touch with him this month, carried zero appeal. They’ve gone through 12 managers this decade. White House press secretaries have greater job security.
But now that he is hanging around, and now that he is in Switzerland awaiting the joys of a Nations League draw, it is time for him to appreciate that his tetchy exchanges with RTÉ’s Tony O’Donoghue are hardly the kind of image he should want the country to see.
As the face of the FAI, it’s galling that O’Neill has spent more time speaking to Stoke City than the Irish public over the last three months. Yet deep down, it doesn’t matter. Results do. And in this regard O’Neill has overachieved. Absurd as that may sound in the aftermath of November’s play-off defeat, which came three months after an appalling performance and result in Georgia, the reality is that no one else could have got more out of such an average bunch of players.
Consider for a moment the present: only two Irishmen — Jeff Hendrick and Shane Duffy — have played more than 20 Premier League games this season, while no Irish player has got anywhere near any of England’s top six teams in the last six years. Criticised for his underuse of Wes Hoolahan, O’Neill will have noted that the 35-year-old has been selected to start only 11 of Norwich City’s 28 league games this season. And yet Hoolahan was the player who O’Neill was forced to turn to for salvation in the second leg of the World Cup play-off, after Denmark had established a 2-1 half-time lead. Age Hareide, the Danish coach, looked to Christian Eriksen, who finished the World Cup 2018 qualification campaign with 11 goals and three assists, one more goal than Ireland’s players managed in the entire campaign.
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Now consider the past: since the FAI first attempted to qualify for the finals of a leading tournament, back in 1933, there have been 35 qualification campaigns, and just six success stories, O’Neill’s first in charge being one of those. Just once, in those 35 campaigns, has an Irish side finished top of their qualifying group. O’Neill’s Ireland finished this campaign in second. Better Irish sides, backboned by European Cup winners, from Tony Dunne and Shay Brennan in 1968 through to John O’Shea in 2008, fared worse.
When time won its battle with O’Shea, Robbie Keane, Shay Given, Richard Dunne and Damien Duff, we wondered who’d keep the flame alight. O’Neill provided the answer. Fourteen years after Ireland’s last competitive win over a first or second-seeded side, he inspired his collection of journeymen to win over Germany, Italy, Wales, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Austria.
Let’s not ignore the fact that he oversaw a mediocre 2017, that the football his team plays is aesthetically ugly and that he blundered horrendously against the Danes. And yet it’s hard to escape the view that this imperfect manager is a perfect fit for this deeply flawed team and that Ireland are better served with Martin O’Neill spending today in Switzerland rather than Stoke.