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Martin O’Neill has always been a little underrated. As a player at Nottingham Forest, he endured a testy relationship with Brian Clough and was once told by his manager that the linesman was having a better game than him. “You’re arrogant, with very little to be arrogant about”, Clough would regularly say to the Irishman, who ended up doing a pretty good job of proving his manager wrong. But maybe that was Cloughie’s genius, knowing which buttons to push.
As a manager, O’Neill earned back-to-back Evening Standard London Five-a-Sides titles (with Wycombe Wanderers, incongruously), promotion to the Premier League and two Milk Cup triumphs at Wembley with Leicester, and became the most successful Celtic manager since Jock Stein (played 282, won 213), in his first stint at Parkhead from 2000 to 2005. Despite that resume, O’Neill never got that big, big job either in England or with England, with whom he was occasionally linked. Even as a softly-spoken, bespectacled elder pundit slightly later in life, O’Neill often did not get the respect he deserved. As part of a three-person panel at the 2014 World Cup covering France v Switzerland, O’Neill briefly found himself as the butt of a joke, only to remind Fabio Cannavaro and Patrick Vieira that “despite the fact that there are two World Cup winners [here], actually when it comes to [Bigger Cup], which used to be the European Cup, I’ve won two of them. I’d just like to know, how many have you two have won?’” It’s zero, by the way.
