Keith O'Neill - Sunday Times
I remember seeing this guy's debut against Croatia - such potential...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...524227,00.html
Look back in anger
Paul Rowan
Keith O’Neill was only 27 when injury forced him to quit the game. Three years on, he is determined to set the record straight
Keith O’Neill woke at his home in Truro, Cornwall, on Friday morning and realised it was raining. As he got out of bed he also realised, far more acutely, that his back had seized up. Instead of playing golf with his mate Andrew Ridgeley of Wham! fame, he knew immediately that his assignation that day would instead be at the Cornwall Chiropractor Clinic. Dr Jay Morrell would lay him on his side and push his sacrum and pelvis back into place, a weekly occurrence now for the 30-year-old former Ireland international with the back of an 80-year-old. Even on the good days, O’Neill walks with a slight stoop and the arch in his spine is obvious. Ten years ago he made his Ireland debut as one of the most highly valued players in the English game. Three years ago he was diagnosed at Coventry City with two degenerative bone conditions in his spine called spondylolisthesis and spondylosis, essentially a double fracture of part of the cord that threatens to turn him into a cripple.
“That would explain why Keith never played more than 10 games in a row in his career,” the Coventry City physiotherapist, Michael McBride, said on Friday. “Keith’s was the worst case I’ve seen of this kind in 14 years working full-time in sport, both clinically and looking at the x-rays. He did very well to extend his career for as long as he did.”
O’Neill has always been a buoyant, chirpy character and remains so. But the end of his career was bitter, with recriminations on all sides, and the bad taste lingers. He could take the endless gruelling recovery programmes but what deeply upset him was that people — his managers, fellow players, fans — doubted what he was saying to them and trying to describe.
Armed finally with conclusive medical evidence, he would like the world to know that he wasn’t faking it and he did care. And he would like Mick McCarthy in particular to know that.
A 16-WORD report in the Daily Mirror on March 12, 2003, was the last we had heard of Keith O’Neill. “Ace in fight quiz”, the headline said. “Cops have quizzed Coventry soccer star Keith O’Neill, 27, over a club brawl in Leamington Spa.”
That was 16 words too many, some of his legion of detractors would have said. The brevity of the report was a sign of how much he had exhausted the rest of us. Those who still cared to listen would hear O’Neill deliver a longer version, complete with a sinister twist.
“Coventry were hoping and praying that I had something to do with it,” he says, by way of explanation. “They phoned up the police to find out what happened. And they were trying to fine me and put it out in the press that I was a disgrace. It was all kind of a master plan to get me out of the place.”
Not for the first time O’Neill had provided his detractors with plenty of ammunition. His extended family and friends from one of his old clubs, Tolka Rovers, had travelled over from Dublin and he had taken them to the Mirage nightclub. “Afterwards I had gone to get in a taxi and a bloke came over and said, ‘That’s my f***ing taxi’ and he basically attacked me. I was with quite a handy lad and he decked him. A woman jumped on his neck and bit him, so she got a smack. I didn’t get involved. The lucky thing for me was that there was CCTV and the other guy was the aggressor. We had nothing to hide.”
O’Neill had already been at the club for two years and had made just eight appearances. Shortly after arriving there in March 2001, he had twisted his left leg horribly on the training ground, resulting in a double fracture and a dislocated ankle. The club had gone into administration around that time and O’Neill, as their highest-paid player on about £10,000 a week, had become a liability. There were suggestions that he should quit the game. He was tempted. He would have been entitled to an insurance payout of close to £2m. He decided to battle on.
“People were telling me I’d never be able to play again and I was thinking, ‘I’m sick of these f***ing injuries, I cannot let my body take this any more.’ And I really considered throwing it in. But I felt in my head that I hadn’t achieved what I wanted, that I had too much I still wanted to give.”
His recovery was delayed when he broke a hand hitting a punch bag. When his back broke down on the verge of his return to action, Coventry had had enough. “The chairman was spitting blood. The club doctor said my back couldn’t live up to the strain of being a professional footballer. Bryan Robson brought me to see the Manchester United surgeon. He looked at all my scans and said, ‘You’ve done really well to do what you’ ve done, because you’ve got the back of an 80-year-old man.’ He said, ‘You could play 50 games in a row, but it will break down and you could end up in a wheelchair.’ I wasn’t expecting that and I was deeply shocked. I was hoping for a report that I could throw back at Coventry and say ‘F*** you.’ Coventry offered me six months of my contract and I accepted it. I couldn’t claim for insurance because it was wear and tear, so I lost a lot of money by not getting out when I had broken my leg.”
It had been a messy, horrible ending but at least O’Neill now knew the reason for the endless injuries. The stress fractures, the hernia operations, the strained hamstrings, thigh and calf muscles. At his first club, Norwich, he had missed six months by inexplicably breaking the fifth metatarsal of his right foot. He eventually had to have a screw inserted by his little toe to fuse the bone. At Coventry, the fifth metatarsal of his left foot went and he had instructed the medical staff on the quickest way it could be fixed. Even at the age of 13, his club in Dublin, Home Farm, had paid for him to go for physiotherapy because of hamstring trouble.
At Norwich City as a 19-year-old he had noticed how he had to drag himself out of the bath after winning a game while the rest of his teammates were still jumping around. In all, over the 10 years of his career, he reckons he played in only 17% of the games he could have been selected for. “All the movement in your body goes through your spine, so all those problems stemmed from my back, because it was so unstable and it just wasn’t lined up right. Because my spine is not stable, my sacrum moves around a lot, so muscles go into spasm and lock into place.”
Even if the diagnosis was never properly made, some managers were more understanding of his difficulties than others. At Norwich, Mike Walker would lose patience from time to time. At Middlesbrough, Bryan Robson was very supportive and sent him to a surgeon in Munich where an initial diagnosis was made. O’Neill regards Steve McClaren with contempt and accuses him of a complete lack of man-management skills.
