The Northern Irish 'Special One'

At 42 years of age, and with just five years of single-handed managerial experience behind him, Michael O’Neill has exceeded many people’s expectations (with the exception perhaps of his own) by being appointed to the role of manager of his country.

And when you consider the calibre of candidate he surpassed in order to secure the Northern Ireland job, it has to be conceded that it’s no mean feat.

His close friend, former playing colleague and former Ipswich Town and QPR manager Jim Magilton was also interviewed for the position as was Ian Dowie who has an impressive managerial CV which includes spells with English clubs like Hull City, QPR, Crystal Palace, Charlton Athletic and Coventry City over the course of the last decade.

O’Neill on the other hand took his first post as the ‘gaffer’ at Brechin City in 2006 before taking a calculated risk by leaving his work in finance and his home in Scotland to move to the Airtricity League and Shamrock Rovers.

To many in the upper echelons of the football establishment, it is difficult to fathom how O’Neill got the Northern Ireland gig. The lower tiers of Scottish football and the League of Ireland  are not necessarily what many perceive as being good grounding for immediate career progression to international football management.

But they are the Wikipedia brigade who are educated by underwhelming statistics and understand little about the motivation, ambition and drive of a man who has an insatiable hunger to succeed.

O’Neill is intelligent and calculated in all of what he does and he leaves very little to chance.

He is a workaholic and his attention to detail and frustration with those who do not operate to equivalent standards can sometimes make him seem aloof.

He observes everything around him and thinks for himself, educated on the information he has gathered and possesses the confidence, and when necessary arrogance, to make decisions for himself.

In that respect he is always responsible for the calls that he makes and has no fear of shouldering the burden.

That is partly why he was the ‘standout candidate’ for the job according to the IFA.

O’Neill has overachieved quite considerably in his managerial career. When he applied for the manager’s job at part-time club Brechin City he was also the ‘standout candidate.’

Recalling the interview, club chairman Ken Ferguson said, “We wanted someone young who wanted to succeed and Michael certainly had that appetite.

“He was very professional and very well prepared. Even though we were a part-time set-up he knew a lot about our club, our players and had really done his homework.”

During his time at Brechin City O’Neill changed many things particularly on the financial side. He used his experience of negotiating contracts when he was a player to improve the way the Scottish outfit did its business not forgetting the methodical skills that his degree in Mathematics and Statistics also gave him.

O’Neill is a problem-solver. He observes, dissects and then cleverly builds a solution in response to every challenge but always one that fits within the constraints of the parameters that contain him functionally.

In other words, he gets the best out of people.

The Brechin City chairman concurs. “He understands people and knows what makes them tick but that’s not to say he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

“If we had players slithering about, unsure of what to do, Michael was perfectly capable of convincing them to stay at his team.”

When asked if O’Neill is a good negotiator, Ferguson laughed heartily. “There is no doubt about that!” he responded, “but he’s not a bully. He fully understands how a deal has to be done and how it needs to benefit all parties.

“He will work to get the deal that suits everyone involved.”

That will be important for the future of Northern Irish football particularly as the IFA faces a growing challenge to maintain the allegiance of some of its greatest footballing prospects.

Northern Ireland manager Michael O'Neill (Image by Ed Scannell)
 

The success of the Republic of Ireland soccer squad under the stewardship of Giovanni Trapattoni is providing prospects which Northern Ireland cannot currently match and that is proving to be an irresistible carrot for young players with dreams of playing on the big stages of international football.

Defections from the Northern Irish ranks by players like James McClean, Darron Ferguson, Shane Duffy and Marc Wilson have been painful for the IFA to bear but the loophole of declaration that exists will continue to allow free choice in this football democracy.

O’Neill will prove strong in this respect but he will need to. When he officially takes the reins as Northern Ireland boss on February 1^st he will begin the task of building a squad that can compete and challenge in a very, very difficult qualifying group for the 2014 World Cup, which includes Portugal, Russia, Azerbijan and Luxembourg.

A few miles south of the border the battle will be on for players to secure a spot in the Republic of Ireland squad that will be heading off to Euro 2012 to play world and European champions Spain, Trap’s native Italy and Croatia for good measure.

It would not have made for pleasant reading for the IFA, but the November night the Republic defeated Estonia  4-0 in Talinn, Twitter gave voice to a number of underage Northern Ireland internationals who were thinking out loud about where they saw their international futures.

O’Neill has self confessed that he is ‘not a very emotional man.’ He said so at a press conference in Tallaght Stadium when Tottenham played Shamrock Rovers in his last game in charge after negotiations over his future broke down over differences in opinion with the board regarding the direction the club should take.

He was genuinely disappointed to be leaving, but not heart-broken, and the way he seemed to flit from club to club during his playing career would indicate that while he would make a full and passionate working commitment to his employers he would not feel the pull of the heart strings when the time came to leave.

Ambition does that to people.

In order to succeed you must possess the drive to keep moving forward and that means leaving things behind when you progress. The ability to detach is necessary to facilitate the process.

However, with the Northern Ireland job O’Neill is emotionally involved.

It’s his country and it’s every kid’s dream to play for their country. O’Neill the negotiator will now add that dimension of genuine heartfelt pride in the jersey to his ability to manage and extract the best from what can be perceived as being limited resources. That will make him more powerful as a man manager.

Look at what he achieved at Shamrock Rovers. Three years, two consecutive league titles, the Setanta Sports Cup, an FAI Cup final defeat on penalties and more significantly qualification to the group stages of the Europa League with a part-time team that was operating completely on a wage bill of less than €600,000 per annum.

Over a 40-week season, that equates to a wage bill for an entire squad of just €15,000 per week which doesn’t go far when you have the guts of 20 players in your panel. When you consider the modest money the Rovers players are actually being paid it gives a bit more context to the scale of O’Neill’s achievement in getting them to the last 32 of the competition.

Tottenham Hotspur’s wage bill for last season topped €80million and to think that midfielder Stephen Rice’s goal put Shamrock Rovers 1-0 up in White Hart Lane. Rovers lost 3-1 in the end but after the game Rice said he was disappointed not to get something out of a game they had led.

That’s the mentality that O’Neill delivers.

Spurs striker Jermaine Defoe who scored against Rovers in the home game in Tallaght earns €72,000 per week. It would take Defoe eight weeks and two days to earn O’Neill’s entire season’s spending capacity at Rovers.

And although his team didn’t win any of their group games, they scored in every away game against Spurs,  FC PAOK (wage bill of circa €7million) and Rubin Kazan (wage bill of around €18million) and competed very well in stages of every game despite sometimes having less than 72 hours to prepare for matches after league games.

Ranked at 88^th in the FIFA world rankings, Northern Ireland will not be expected by many to come out of their 2014 World Cup qualifying group where they face Portugal (7^th), Russia (12^th), Israel (37^th), Azerbaijan (112^th) and Luxembourg (128^th).

O’Neill is results driven and visionary and with international football he will have more time to prepare for each game and develop the football foundations in the province. That will potentially make him more potent and give him greater potential for plotting downfalls. His teams will be well organised, well drilled and well motivated.

His players will enter the fray educated about their opposition, schooled in their own style and enhanced in their belief.

Being lauded as a ‘Catholic manager’ won’t be relevant to O’Neill. To him he is the Northern Irish manager.  He owns a British and an Irish passport for convenience and doesn’t get bogged down in the tedious labelling and tagging that does little more than to distract from the standout passion he has which is football.  

He won’t falsely build hopes or expectations but he will relentlessly devise ways that will facilitate over-achievement. That will be why he has persisted in being the outstanding candidate in his short managerial career.

No doubt he will continue to learn over the next two years but he could become Northern Ireland’s real special one.