QuoteMick McCarthy offered a sympathetic ear on the many occasions he rang up to pull out of an Ireland squad, and they had a good relationship, at least until Ireland’s European Championship qualifier against Macedonia in Skopje on October 9, 1999.
International football mattered as much to O’Neill as to any other Ireland player at the time. From an early age football had been his passion — he says he went to bed with a ball from the age of four —- but Ireland’s exploits under Jack Charlton at Euro 88 and the two World Cups that followed fuelled his ambition to be a professional footballer. As a young teenager he captained the Irish youths team and used to be let off school early on Wednesdays to stand on the terraces at Lansdowne Road before nearly everybody else. He went on to make a hugely promising start to his international career, scoring the first goal of McCarthy’s tenure against Croatia in June 1996. After he scored twice against Bolivia in a friendly at New Jersey’s Giants Stadium in the same month, the trivial nature of the tie was overlooked. On his return home, bunting stretched along Griffith Road in north Dublin where his parents lived and his father handed out bottles of Budweiser to the neighbours.
McCarthy had put O’Neill up front with David Connolly, hoping that his power and pace would complement Connolly’s natural goalscoring ability. They were talked of as a pairing that could end the international careers of Niall Quinn and Tony Cascarino but by the time of the Skopje game O’Neill had won only 11 caps because of persistent injuries and the emergence of Robbie Keane and Damien Duff. Ireland went to Macedonia needing a victory to qualify for the 2000 European Championship finals in Holland. They cruised through the first half and had taken the lead against patently inferior opposition. With the finishing line in sight, however, Ireland and McCarthy began to lose their nerve, something O’Neill had noticed even before he was put on as a substitute for Robbie Keane after 60 minutes.
“My instructions were just to get on there and run around and stop them as much as I could. But in the last half hour panic set in. Obviously that’s down to the players on the pitch but there was changes made and tactics were altered.”
Three minutes into stoppage time, Macedonia won a corner and Tony Cascarino lost his man, Goran Stravrevski. O’Neill, who was guarding the space near the front post, would still have been able to clear the ball if he hadn’t slipped. The unmarked Stravrevski scored with a header.
“Mick McCarthy never talked to me after that game. Me and him had a good relationship and he hasn’t f***ing talked to me since. On the way home, I remember the plane was delayed for two hours on the runway and everybody was sitting around. Mick walked by and ignored me. I was low as a snake’s belly anyway. It was a terrible way to end my last ever game for a kid like me who was so proud of playing for his country.”
At the time, O’Neill was in the best form of his life at Middlesbrough. McCarthy dropped him for the subsequent playoffs against Turkey a month later. It probably didn’t help his cause that in between times he found himself involved in another nightclub incident that again raised questions about his judgment if not his professionalism. O’Neill had helped his club collect three points, which pushed Robson’s side into the Premiership’s top six. Afterwards, he had celebrated with his Middlesbrough and Republic of Ireland teammate Alan Moore at a nightclub on Teesside.
“That was an absolute disgrace. I was at the bar, it was about half two, clearing-out time, we knew the owners so we were hoping to stay on. Alan was there with his wife and one of her girlfriends. A couple of bouncers came in and one of them said, ‘You’re barred,’ and I said, ‘I’m not barred, what are you on about?’ So they dragged me out of the place, two bouncers, Alan walking after me, dragged me into a corridor where there was no cameras and that’s all I can remember. I just got f***ing pummelled for no reason. I could have looked at them weird, I don’t know. They might have seen me in there with women every night and got jealous. I just don’t know. That’s the way it was. But when people read it and people see you injured all the time and people see a flash lad, they just don’t f***ing like it.”
McCarthy, apparently, was now counted among that number. He later wrote a small and seemingly innocuous sentence in his book Ireland’s World Cup 2002 for which O’Neill has been unable to forgive him. “Keith’s failure to make any further impact is down to Keith, not to anything that happened in Macedonia.”
“Now that’s what ****es me off,” O’Neill says. “It was down to Keith that Keith’s injured. So it’s my problem, it’s down to Keith’s diseased spine that he doesn’t have an international career. I don’t know what Mick’s thinking but he seems to be implying that it was down to Keith that Keith was injured. That is why I got tired of fighting in the end.”
The flash reputation is one that O’Neill has had since he was a teenager at Norwich and he has never seen the need to curb that image. With the Ireland team, he insists, he was just one of the lads. “Modern-day footballers need to look after their body as a business. Treat your body like a temple, which is probably one thing I didn’t do. Maybe when I was injured I would go out and have a bevy. I don’t want anybody to think that I was a saint and I never had a drink. I did, but I was going out with some players who drink for fun. Everybody thinks they’re saints.
“With Ireland we’d all arrive after the game on Saturday, all go out Saturday night, Wouldn’t do too much on a Sunday, a stretch or something. All go out on Sunday. Mick would say be in by midnight and the whole squad would come in at 5am. The lads’ thing was, ‘Well, he can’t get rid of us all. If three of us stay out till 5am, but if all of us stay out at Tamangos on a Sunday night, he can’t do nothing. Mick would turn a blind eye. We’d train Monday and Tuesday and then have the game on Wednesday.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, O’Neill is very much in the Roy Keane camp when it comes to the Great Debate of that era. He remembers flying back from the US tour in 1996 alongside Niall Quinn in economy, with the giant striker’s knees almost touching his chin. In O’Neill’s case, however, his specific needs weren’t catered for. “I suffered with injuries so I had a close relationship with my physios. I liked good strappings on my ankles before I played a game.
“I liked to get a good massage on my back, loosen my hamstrings up, because I would just get tight. Some people just don’t think younger kids should have massages. Not just the manager of Ireland, it was at some football clubs too. People would go, ‘Young players shouldn’t be having massages.’ But I didn’t have the body of a young fella. People mightn’t think that is a big thing, but I think when you’re playing for your country things need to be right and if you need a massage you should get one.
“When I was getting my strappings done, I like stirrups on my strappings, not just a normal figure of eight. I’d get one sometimes and I wouldn’t be able to put on my boot. The blood would stop running to my ankle and I’d be getting so nervous that I was running out of time that I would take the whole thing off. So I would whack on whatever strapping I could, whereas every game I played with my club was with a proper strapping on.”
It may sound like whingeing but bear in mind what happened, again away to Macedonia, when Ireland were beaten 3-2 in a World Cup qualifying game in April 1997, a game more famous for the karate kick that saw Jason McAteer sent from the pitch. O’Neill had had ankle ligament trouble but had still made the trip and, having been brought on as a half-time substitute, aggravated the injury, which meant he was out for the rest of the season.
“I was so desperate to come over to play. Mick didn’t start me because of damage to my ligaments. The strapping I had on that day was a joke, even though everybody knew my ankle was bad. After five minutes I got a bad knock on the ankle and I eventually had to come off. Mick didn’t really understand. He was really a big bruiser from Barnsley. He just wants you fit and he thinks you’re a big girl’s blouse. You’re the complete opposite, you’re playing through more pain than anybody would be playing through.”
It hasn’t all been pain. O’Neill has great memories to cherish as well and, with Kevin Moran as his agent, he had enough good contracts to leave the game as a millionaire. His marriage 18 months ago to a very strong woman, Zoe, has also stabilised him as much as a proper spine ever could.
He must still work and has invested in property and a boutique-cum-restaurant in Truro, where Zoe’s family are from. There is still much of the lad about him, though his luxuriant head of hair now has many strands of grey and he has a new-born daughter, Senna, to keep him occupied whenever he has a spare moment.
He can feel the back every time he changes her nappy. Hopefully, that will be the extent of it for many years to come.
Originally Posted by Donal81
"Currently residing in the where are they now category..."
) but not over the top with it.
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