Joey O'Brien

[youngirish]

O'Brien looks like he could be top class. In O'Brien and Ireland I think we have the 2 most promising young players from any nation to breakthrough to their first teams in the Premiership this season. He was solid again on Saturday and is playing out of position.

I'd like to see him starting to get a game in central midfield in the future as I reckon himself and Ireland could be an excellent pairing for us at International level for many years.

With Doyle looking leagues ahead of all the strikers in the Championship (not in goalscoring terms but in overall contribution), Garvan at Ipswich being touted for great things and Keogh at S****horpe banging in goals for fun (and still only 19) perhaps the future isn't as bleak as we thought a few short months ago.

[livehead1]

o'brien was excellant against arsenal, helped keep their attack very quiet and put in a peach of a cross for one of the goals

[finlma]

In O'Brien and Ireland I think we have the 2 most promising young players from any nation to breakthrough to their first teams in the Premiership this season......
With Doyle looking leagues ahead of all the strikers in the Championship (not in goalscoring terms but in overall contribution),
A slight case of rose tinted glasses there but I agree that they are looking like good prospects. They should all get a run out in the March friendly.

[Hulsey]

Ian Morris is doing a fine job at Blackpool on loan from Leeds. Put in great performances for the Ireland U 19's too. More youngsters should be given a go in friendlies. No point in having the likes of Doherty on the bench as their not going to gain anything from it. Every time Doherty gets ready to come on you know that the manager has bottled it and going for a long ball approach!

[youngirish]

Ian Morris is doing a fine job at Blackpool on loan from Leeds. Put in great performances for the Ireland U 19's too. More youngsters should be given a go in friendlies. No point in having the likes of Doherty on the bench as their not going to gain anything from it.

I agree 100%. The added bonus is if a youngster does well in a friendly for Ireland then it puts him in the shop window and could potentially get him a move to a better club (or at least improve his profile at his current club). In Doherty's case even if he plays a stormer in one match everyone knows he's s***e by now and won't take a gamble on him.

I see Billy Clarke has now also made the breakthrough to the Ipswich bench. At 17 I think he has serious potential.

[Hulsey]

Joe Royle rates Clarke very highly. Could be the new Darren Bent for them? Their young irish keeper Shane Supple (18 I think) was on the bench at the weekend and is also earmarked by Royle to have a bright future. They have another young Irish lad too but can't think of this name at the moment:rolleyes: .

[youngirish]

Joe Royle rates Clarke very highly. Could be the new Darren Bent for them? Their young keeper Shane Supple is also earmarked by Royle to have a bright future. They have another young Irish lad too but can't think of this name at the moment:rolleyes: .

Thay have a few:
Owen Garvan
Cathal Lordan
Michael Synott

At present Garvan looks the most promising as he's a regular for the first team when he's fit.

[Hulsey]

Garvan was who I was thinking of. Cheers for that it would have annoyed me all day.

[as_i_say]

whats o briens natural/preferred position?

[Stuttgart88]

I see Billy Clarke has now also made the breakthrough to the Ipswich bench. At 17 I think he has serious potential.
It seems that's the case with almost all of that Irish U19 team.

Owen Garvan in particular has already made a big impact but is injured at the moment. But you need to be careful introducing these guys to senior international football. The better U21s would probably be best served by promotion to the senior squad but Billy Clarke has only had 20 mins of club football so let him develop at his own pace.

[youngirish]

whats o briens natural/preferred position?
Central midfield

[Fergie's Son]

Bobby McMahon on Fox Sports World had high praise for O'Brien's performance against Arsenal.

[mchurl]

he is a great prospect but he needs to be given more time to develop. Its a big tep up from club football to international football and he is still only young

[Stuttgart88]

he is a great prospect but he needs to be given more time to develop. Its a big tep up from club football to international football and he is still only young
Even still, I reckon he's our most credible back-up to Finnan. Sure, we shouldn't rush him, but he's playing at a high enough level to be included in senior squads at least. It's the guts of a year to our next competitive game & what happens if Finnan is injured?

[tetsujin1979]

I wouldn't mind seeing Finnan at left back and O'Brien at right full just to see how it would work out. Mind you, plenty on the forum have been screaming for Finnan to get a shot at left full for an age

[as_i_say]

if o brien is a central mid then we need to see him playing there-we dont need another utility boy like oshea really-always thought o brien was a center half, anyway-its great to see him coming through.

once o neill gets the job we'll be looking healthier again

[drinkfeckarse]

Featuring all day today on Sky Sports News on one of those "one to watch" features that they are doing at every Premiership club. Kevin Nolan had some good words to say about him.

[youngirish]

Article is here:

http://home.skysports.com/list.asp?hlid=332482&cpid=8&CLID=30&lid=&title=O'Brien+loving+life+at+Bolton&channel=uefa_cup

[Plastic Paddy]

Another good article here:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2767-1937714_1,00.html

:ball: PP

[eirebhoy]

Nicky Hunt is back from injury and will most likely move back into right back. Hopefully O'Brien keeps him place in the team.

bwfc.com:
"Wanderers made their first change after the hour when Nicky Hunt came on for Okocha. This allowed Speed to go into midfield when the outstanding O'Brien moved into the left-back position."

[Fergie's Son]

We really do have a nice cadre of young players coming through the ranks. The chances are most will not make it but it's encouraging to think we could have several good internationals in the making.

Right now, Ireland have two of the more exciting prospects in the Premiership in Ireland and O'Brien.

[Irish_Praha]

J O'Brien and Given got into Sky'S team-of-the-weekend
http://home.skysports.com/list.asp?hlid=346140&clid=&channel=premiership&title=Team+of+the+weekend

Given and Andy O'Brien got into the soccernet team
http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns/story?id=352622&root=england&cc=5739

[Stuttgart88]

Anyone read The Times (Irish edition) this weekend? I read it online this morning and they did a 2 pager on Joey O'brien.

It says just how close he was to getting binned by Allardyce. Frightening. It just goes to show you how fine that line is. Nothing scientific, but I have a hunch that we've been disproportinately unlucky in players falling the wrong side of that line in recent years.

My strongest wish for Irish football is that the eL can continue its improvement to remove this "luck factor". The more we can control the destiny of our better young players the better. Look at our really promising U19 team. If these were Dutch or Portuguese you'd really fancy them to stay together. Because they're Irish there's a real chance half of them will go on to do nothing. The flipside to this argument I suppose is that clubs like Ipswich have done us a big favour by nurturing this talent in the way they have, but we should be able to develop these players ourselves in an academy (or two or three) of some descrition.

[Donal81]

Pal Joey
The Sunday Times
December 18 2005

Having narrowly escaped rejection at Bolton, Joey O’Brien is shining in the Premiership — and that’s excellent news for Ireland

Away from his main body of work, Joey O’Brien has been given lessons by Bolton Wanderers in how to deal with the media. The club’s guidance is simple: speak slower, they tell him, so people can better understand what you’re saying.

As he sat in an executive box at the Reebok stadium on Friday afternoon, it was easy to see why Bolton want to hone their 19-year-old prodigy’s presentation skills. He is an intelligent, personable young man with the ability, despite the rapid-fire delivery, to choose his words carefully. More importantly, after Kevin Nolan, the club captain, he is the most outstanding talent to come out of their youth academy, now eight years in existence and on which much of their future is invested. He has already played in midfield in the Uefa Cup this season and appears now to have made the right full-back position his own, but when he jokes that “I might yet play centre-forward,” it’s easy to believe him. Should he get picked for Ireland in the friendly against Sweden in March – he should at least be in the squad – he will become the first full international to have been spawned by that academy. They’re certainly not pushing him too heavily, but down the line Bolton can see Joey O’Brien giving many, many interviews. Best now to get it right.

Despite its close proximity to Manchester and Liverpool, few Irish players have found their way to Bolton. Seamus McDonagh and Jason McAteer are two from the past few decades, the former from Yorkshire and the latter pure Scouse. Gareth Farrelly also had a spell there in the latter part of his career. It seems most Bolton folk associate Irish accents with TV or radio celebrities such as Terry Wogan and Craig Doyle. O’Brien’s leaves them puzzled.

“So where in Ireland is Joey from?” asked the official at reception. A question, as it happens, that many of us have been asking over the last few months.

He hails from Crumlin, on the fringes of the south Dublin’s inner city, Sundrive Road to be exact. He says that his father, Patrick, played Gaelic football for Dublin, but like most boys in the area, he gravitated towards soccer and the local club, Lourdes Celtic – Damien Duff’s old stomping ground – before he was spotted by a Bolton scout while playing for Stella Maris. By the age of 15 he was at Bolton, seven years after soccer stole his heart as he watched Ireland play in USA ’94. His best friend from Crumlin, John Paul Kelly, went to Liverpool at the same time and when they talked on the phone he would pine for home. But homesickness was not an option for O’Brien.

“A lot of the lads at Stella Maris had been over to England and I got a feel for that,” he says. “I knew straight away that that was what I wanted to do. Obviously it was going to be hard leaving the family, but when I first came over we used to get breaks every six weeks. After a few months I settled in. This is where you want to be.”

There has been one major hiatus along the way. In his second year at the club, when he returned from pre-season, the club – which places more importance on physical conditioning than probably any other in Britain – were not satisfied with his level of fitness and performance. The manager, Sam Allardyce, ordered O’Brien into the gym while the rest of the academy went on a pre-season tour to Italy.

“The gym I had been using at home wasn’t up to scratch. I was only one or two years into doing the weights. A lot of the other lads were a lot bigger so I was struggling anyway. When the lads went off for the pre-season trip I was thinking to myself, ‘Oh no, this is it.’ But I’m still here.”

“To be brutally honest, if we had to make a decision after two years on the lad,” Allardyce reflected earlier this year, “we would have shown him the door. But I suppose he’s a good example of the Fighting Irish. They never give in.” O’Brien didn’t quite see it like that, but the incident marked a pivotal moment in his fledgling career.

“I got my head down and started working hard and playing well,” he says. “I knew I wasn’t in his (Allardyce’s) highest thoughts at the start, so I knew I had to win him over.”

When O’Brien was sent out on loan this time last year to Sheffield Wednesday, he still didn’t quite know what to think. He wondered did Big Sam want him or not, but he didn’t ask.

“I didn’t know whether they were lending me out for experience or whether it was to sort out a new club. I just wanted to do well and it was brilliant. We were getting between 25 and 30,000 a week at home games.”

A measure of how highly O’Brien was valued in south Yorkshire was that Wednesday’s manager Paul Sturrock made him captain in his last game there after three months on loan. Sturrock wanted him to stay at the club as they scrapped for a Division One playoff spot, but Allardyce had seen enough to be convinced that O’Brien had the required appetite for competition and summoned him back to Bolton.

He made a low-key Premiership debut in the last game of last season, coming on a substitute against Everton, but this season he has been a revelation.

Faced with three games in seven days in October and in the throes of an injury crisis, Allardyce threw him into a Uefa Cup group game in Istanbul against Besiktas. Even some of Bolton’s most seasoned professionals had not played in an atmosphere like it, but O’Brien couldn’t get enough of the intensity. “People were saying it was very hostile, I thought it was brilliant. You want to play in front of crowds that are noisy and passsionate. That’s what I want anyway. As we were walking out they were all going crazy. I was thinking, ‘This is brilliant.’”

The home side took the lead seven minutes into the game after O’Brien slipped and squandered possession, but he then led a fightback that helped Bolton earn a point. O’Brien had hardly landed back in Bolton when Allardyce set him a bigger challenge. The Besiktas display had convinced him O’Brien could cope as an emergency full-back in place of Nicky Hunt, who had broken his leg in a Premiership game.

“It happened so quick because he told me on the Friday and I was playing Saturday. I was hoping to get a start in midfield after the Besiktas game, but when he said right-full I was just delighted to be playing. We went out and did a bit of a training game. He was showing me what to do, show the fella inside, get tight on him or whatever.”

Hunt, an England Under-21 international, is now returning to fitness but O’Brien appears to have done enough to keep his place. In 12 appearances this season he has been on the losing side just once. His display in Bolton’s 2-0 victory over Arsenal two weeks ago epitomised his form. O’Brien succeeded in marking Robert Pires out of the game, and also got forward to produce a delightful cross for Bolton’s first goal. O’Brien would prefer a midfield role, but is not complaining as long as he’s playing.

“He has everything,” Kevin Nolan says. “His passing is fantastic, he’s got good aerial ability and is strong in the tackle.”

It’s an accurate asssessment, even if Nolan is biased. The pair have struck up an excellent understanding on the pitch and a good friendship off it. Part of their banter revolves around O’Brien trying to convince his older teammate that it is not too late for him to switch his international allegiances from England to Ireland, where at least one of his grandparents hails from. Nolan, an England Under-21 international, is still clinging on to the slim chance of making Sven Goran Eriksson’s World Cup squad, though O’Brien is more circumspect about making his own leap from under-21 to senior international level.

Surely his ears must have *****ed when he heard news of Stephen Carr’s international retirement? “They’ve got the likes of Steve Finnan. In fact there are two or three players who can play there. To be honest I haven’t really thought about playing for the senior team. It would be a dream come true if I did, but it’s not a situation where I’m thinking ‘the next big team that comes out I should be on it’.”

Nor will he be drawn on where his future might lie when his contract at Bolton is up for renewal in 18 months’ time. The last thing you will catch him doing is getting ahead of himself. O’Brien moved out of digs earlier this year, but only into a rented house that he shares with one of the other teenagers at the club. The journey from training takes 10 minutes along the motorway, but would probably be quicker if he wasn’t still driving a VW Golf. Other than that, he is moving fast, and is proving extremely difficult to trip up.

[youngirish]

Glowing praise from Allardyce for him here:

http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/sport/football/boltonwanderers/s/192/192036_sam_kids_are_key_for_bolton.html

[Stuttgart88]

The journey from training takes 10 minutes along the motorway, but would probably be quicker if he wasn’t still driving a VW Golf. Other than that, he is moving fast, and is proving extremely difficult to trip up.I wish I had a Golf aged 19. I have one now (second hand too) aged 38!

[geysir]

I wish I had a Golf aged 19. I have one now (second hand too) age 38!
Are you referring to your missus who by some fluke happens to called Golf? Afair the Germans did not start to manufacture Golfs until the mid 70's

[Stuttgart88]

I'm pretty sure the missus is first hand.

[paul_oshea]

geysir read what he is saying, i think he means himself????

didnt realise you were that old stuts!!

years beyond your wisdom :D

[geysir]

'I wish I had a woman aged 19, I have one now (second hand too) age 38.'

Makes sense to me, I felt his pain coming through. I mean I could relate to that.