Joey O'Brien

[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?h...of+the+weekend

Given and Andy O'Brien got into the soccernet team
http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns...ngland&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/sp...or_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

[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.