Michael O’Neill ‘more tolerant, more reflective and wiser’ on Northern Ireland return (2024)

Michael O’Neill is scrolling through the photographs on his phone, searching for a black-and-white image that takes him back to 1987. He was 18 then, still at school in Northern Ireland, doing his A-Levels, when suddenly he joined Newcastle United.

He finds the picture — he is there, with his curly hair and bad leather jacket and his father Des beside him. Both sport uncertain smiles.

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“We’d just got to the hotel in Newcastle,” O’Neill recalls. “And there were photographers waiting! That was a bit unexpected. I think my dad was a bit uncomfortable with it all.”

He is showing it to me because he was recently back in Newcastle for 24 hours to check up on Northern Ireland players at nearby clubs Middlesbrough and Sunderland. And because Des died last month.

O’Neill has been clearing out his dad’s things. He has been warmed to find comprehensive press-cuttings on his career. Like many a father of that generation, Des O’Neill was not effusive in his praise but that did not mean he did not care intensely about his son’s progress. He did, and as O’Neill now says: “The fact he kept everything about me meant a lot. He wasn’t one to tell me how well I was doing.”

Michael O’Neill ‘more tolerant, more reflective and wiser’ on Northern Ireland return (1)

Michael O’Neill seen here with his father, Des, shortly after arriving in Newcastle in 1987 (Photo: Mirrorpix)

O’Neill’s mother, Patricia, passed away in 2017, so it means the 53-year-old goes back to a different personal world these days when he returns to his childhood areas. But going back he is.

After almost three years at Stoke City in the Championship, O’Neill is back as Northern Ireland manager and starts a qualification campaign for Euro 2024 away to San Marino tomorrow (Thursday).

His family situation, his Stoke dismissal six games into this season and his previous eight years managing his country offer him plenty to reflect upon. O’Neill, though, is also seized by the urgency of now. That San Marino trip and then Finland in Belfast on Sunday represents a chance to start down the road to the finals in Germany with some momentum. It’s then Denmark away and Kazakhstan at home in June. There is renewed energy audible and visible when he speaks about what could be.

Of course, talking about the European Championship takes him and the Green and White Army back to Euro 2016, when his Northern Ireland side came out of pot five in the draw to win their qualifying group, ahead of Romania, Hungary, Finland, the Faroe Islands and 2004 champions Greece. In the finals in France, they beat Ukraine 2-0 and lost 1-0 to both Germany and Poland, reaching the last 16, where they lost 1-0 to Gareth Bale’s Wales in Paris through a late own goal.

The achievement was in being there at all — a first European Championship for the country.

Michael O’Neill ‘more tolerant, more reflective and wiser’ on Northern Ireland return (2)

Wales went on to reach the Euro 2016 semi-finals after squeezing past O’Neill’s Northern Ireland (Photo: Alex Grimm – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)

By the time of the draw for 2018 World Cup qualification, Northern Ireland were up to pot three and finished second behind Germany. They lost a play-off 1-0 over two legs against Switzerland, the Romanian referee later apologising for the decisive penalty he awarded to the Swiss in Belfast.

Euro 2020 brought a qualifying group featuring Germany again, this time with the Netherlands in it as well. Northern Ireland finished third, but they were ahead in the 80th minute away to the Dutch before losing 3-1 and Steven Davis missed a penalty against them in Belfast in a game the visitors were relieved to draw 0-0. Single-leg play-offs against Bosnia & Herzegovina (a semi-final won on penalties) and Slovakia (a final lost 2-1 after extra time) followed.

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By then, with the COVID-19 pandemic meaning there was almost a year between the groups ending and those play-offs, O’Neill had left for Stoke and Ian Baraclough had taken over.

For the 2022 World Cup, Northern Ireland drew European-champions-in-waiting Italy and the Swiss in another testing qualifying group. They again came third, holding the Italians to a draw in Belfast four months after their Euros triumph at Wembley. Some unconvincing performances in the third tier of the Nations League last June and September, losing to Greece twice and in Kosovo, led to Baraclough being removed — although O’Neill takes confidence from his successor/predecessor’s record of keeping clean sheets in all four home World Cup qualifiers.

“People forget that about Ian’s record,” O’Neill says. “When this group came out, it did remind me of the 2016 qualification group. We were a pot five team then, we’re a pot five team now. We see an opportunity; so do Denmark, Finland, Kazakhstan and Slovenia.

“But it’s not like when you’re in with Germany and Holland. I believe we can qualify, but we need a lot of things in our favour — an excellent home record being one. We’re probably going to need in the region of 18 to 21 points overall and there are 15 available at home. We need to take as many there as we can.

“We’ll need availability of players, which we’re stretched with already. So we’ll need young players to step up. When I decided to go back, in my head I was wondering if it was a step backwards, but when I first went to watch the three lads at Bolton — Dion Charles, Conor Bradley and Eoin Toal — that invigorated me. I’ve basically had a season ticket for Bolton ever since.”

This is another O’Neill return — to scant resources.

When he named his 26-man squad, only six had a Premier League club in brackets after their name. Of those, Liverpool’s Bradley, 19, is on loan at Bolton in the third tier; Nottingham Forest’s Dale Taylor, also 19, is on loan at Burton Albion in the same division; Isaac Price, another 19-year-old, has three substitute appearances totalling 45 minutes for Everton; Shea Charles, who’s 19, too, is yet to play for Manchester City’s first team; Jamal Lewis has played seven minutes of Newcastle’s 2022-23 league season… and Jonny Evans has withdrawn through injury having played just a handful of minutes since the World Cup break.

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Leicester City’s Evans joins his brother Corry (of Sunderland in the Championship), captain Davis (Scottish giants Rangers) and Leeds United’s Stuart Dallas on the sidelines. Two Championship players — Preston North End’s Ali McCann and Shayne Lavery of Blackpool — are also injured and while their absence would not trouble some international managers, it is likely all six of the above would have started this week for O’Neill. He is hardly going into the campaign tooled up.

But those teenagers do offer promise. During his first tenure, O’Neill and then-technical director Jim Magilton initiated a national academy called Club NI. These players are some of its first fruit.

“It’s a different squad to what I had before,” O’Neill says. “But it still has a lot of the mainstays. It’s what is around it that excites me — I didn’t have numbers of players coming through in those years. Now we’ve Shea Charles, Isaac Price, Dale Taylor, Conor Bradley, Trai Hume (Sunderland). They could all play in the under-21s. With Jim Magilton, we did a huge amount of work setting up Club NI. There’s Ethan Galbraith (a Manchester United youngster out on loan at Salford City in League Two) as well.”

Northern Ireland have dropped to 59th in the FIFA rankings, but then there was a moment in O’Neill’s first year in the post in 2012 when they fell to 129th.

That he lifted them from there to 20th in five years is why he is a local hero and why clubs came knocking.

When Stoke City lost 2-0 at home to league leaders West Bromwich Albion in early November 2019, they were bottom of the Championship with eight points from the season’s first 15 games. A Premier League club as recently as May of the previous year, Stoke were staring at a second relegation in as many years and life in League One.

O’Neill got the SOS call; he was allowed to take charge of any Northern Ireland play-off to get to Euro 2020, but keeping Stoke up was his principal task. Winning the first game 4-2 at Barnsley that Saturday was useful and gradually they climbed away from danger. That Stoke survived at the end of that pandemic-extended season, eventually finishing eight points clear of trouble, seems inevitable today, but it required work. Even O’Neill may underestimate that achievement.

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The challenge for the 2020-21 season that began only a month later was for Stoke to mount a promotion challenge. O’Neill felt they could do so and in the December they defeated Middlesbrough 1-0 at home to sit fifth, three points off the top. A lot had changed in 13 months.

But Stoke lost the next game, 2-1 at home to Cardiff; worse, during that match they lost Tyrese Campbell to injury for the rest of the season. Campbell had scored six goals in 12 games and was beginning to link well with Scotland striker Steven Fletcher up front.

“That was a big blow because those two looked like they had a partnership developing,” O’Neill says. “We still had Joe Allen out (the Wales midfielder missed nine months until the December with an Achilles injury), but we had balance and I thought the team was going in the right direction — we were getting a good version of Nick Powell.”

Michael O’Neill ‘more tolerant, more reflective and wiser’ on Northern Ireland return (3)

O’Neill’s dismissal by Stoke in August made him the first Championship manager to be sacked this season (Photo: Lewis Storey/Getty Images)

Stoke fell away, finishing 14th with 60 points. Respectable, but underwhelming.

The following season was similar in that Stoke were a point off the top in October, fourth in November and then 10th by the February. They again ended 14th, this time on 62 points.

This season began with one win in five across all competitions and after a 1-0 home defeat by promoted Sunderland — managed by Alex Neil – O’Neill was sacked for the first time in his career. “I was a little bit numb, I suppose,” he says.

John Coates, Stoke’s co-chairman, delivered the news. Neil arrived from Sunderland a week later.

“It was difficult because I’d never had it before,” O’Neill says. “I went to see John. He’s a really good guy and I think he found it hard to do. As club owner, he felt it was the right thing to do. We’ll never agree on that and we’re fine with that.

“I felt a bit empty because I genuinely wanted the club to do well. I made a lot of tough longer-term decisions around players and staff and I had to correct a lot of things to help the club move forward. I did it always in the best interests of the club — I was totally invested in it.

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“I had, and have, a real affinity with the club. Maybe supporters thought I didn’t because I don’t jump around the technical area. They think that’s a lack of passion — a lack of passion is when you’re driving away (from the training ground) at one in the afternoon to play golf. I never did that once.

“We did the work — all our staff. We just couldn’t get to the point where we could jump the club forward. There were moments when I thought we had a decent team but it was a bit Snakes & Ladders. That’s how it felt.

“I think John would say it was a difficult situation I undertook and we did a good job. I felt for the owners as well because they were trying to do the right thing. The club came down from the Premier League and they spent heavily in the first two windows of the Championship trying to get back up.

“Unfortunately it didn’t work and then you have to correct that and you’re in a difficult position. Go back up at the first attempt and it’s done — £100million ($122.3m). That washes away all your problems. That’s why the Championship is the league it is. Everyone’s chasing the pot of gold and they think they’re closer than they are.”

O’Neill’s entire time at Stoke has to be seen within the frame of financial fair play and the restrictions that meant they could not spend more than a fraction of their owners’ vast fortune.

In six transfer windows, O’Neill spent money on only six players, the most being around £2million on Ben Wilmot from Watford. Wilmot replaced Nathan Collins, who had been sold to then-Premier League Burnley for an initial £12million as one of more than 40 senior players who left in the restructuring O’Neill was charged with overseeing – not that he wanted Collins, sold on to Wolves last summer for just over £20million after Burnley’s relegation, to be sold as part of that.

It is all summarised in a phrase O’Neill uses about 2020-21, his first full season at Stoke: “I was dismantling a squad while at the same time trying to build a team.”

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O’Neill inherited a “fractured” dressing room when he succeeded Nathan Jones, who had replaced Gary Rowett, who had replaced Paul Lambert in a swift turnover of managers following relegation under the latter. Parachute payments from the Premier League had been spent.

“Those players cost a lot and were highly paid, plus there were loan players,” O’Neill says. “I felt I had control from fairly on, but I still had players coming to my door saying they wanted to leave. They were on contracts reduced due to relegation from the Premier League.

“Every manager will tell you the same: high earners who aren’t in the team are generally a problem and you’re conscious of them.

“All the time you’re trying to protect the culture in your dressing room and build a team that can get off the bottom and compete. But you’re building with free agents and loans and it can feel very temporary. That’s why you get inconsistency.

“With hindsight, I probably wouldn’t have turned over as many players in the January windows, I’d have stuck with players and just accepted I’d to carry a player on his current contract for the next six months.”

The conversation with O’Neill continually refers back to the economics at Stoke. It was not something he or the club could get away from. He talks of “legacy contracts” and the market reality of being unable to sell those who had been bought for large sums. Gradually he whittled down the squad and its cost and gave debuts to players from the academy. But there were occasions when he thought to himself: ‘Are we actually going anywhere here?’

Should Stoke be released from FFP this summer and be allowed to spend freely again – as has been mooted – O’Neill will wear another uncertain smile.

“I was disappointed how we finished last season,” O’Neill says. “We drew games we should have won. It was a big dent. When you’re over 60 points, you’re probably four wins away from the play-offs and you can look at four games (out of the 46)…

“We got ourselves in a bit of a rut, February through March. The staff knew they were good and you’re constantly trying to get the formula to win. We came out of it and started looking a team again, but we were too far away. And I was tired.”

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The last comment concerns O’Neill’s hip replacement, following a 20-year senior playing career including over 400 appearances, which came at an early age last April.

“I thought I had a sore back but when I went to see the surgeon he told me I needed a hip replacement. I didn’t think I did but I wasn’t sleeping well — that’s the worst thing about your hip, you feel it at night. I was more tired than I realised. I went to Middlesbrough away on crutches.”

There is no sense of grievance in O’Neill’s tone, it is more frustration and disappointment.

Of his two full Championship seasons, he says: “If you look, 92 games, we were in the top half of the table for around 75 per cent of them, in the top eight for a proportion of that. You’re two or three wins from the play-offs. I don’t think we were as far away as it looks; the finishing positions distort where we were. I understand fans thought we should be in a better place.”

There is, though, one general point O’Neill makes regarding managerial churn and the Championship: “There’s an impatience there. That’s why I look at Brentford — they were prepared to miss out on promotion via the play-offs (in 2019-20) and go again.

“Nearly every other club would have changed manager, but Brentford didn’t, they believed in Thomas Frank. I think that’s part of the reason they’ve stayed in the Premier League.”

That churn of managers is why, post-Stoke, O’Neill declined some club opportunities. Instead, he has signed a five-and-a-half-year deal to return to the Irish Football Association. They are, he says, getting a better manager and coach than the one they hired that first time in late 2011, a more reflective man as well as manager. Dad Des, he hopes, would approve.

O’Neill had some tough managers of his own as a player, not least the ferocious Jim McLean at Dundee United — a man who made fellow Scot Alex Ferguson sound meek.

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“I’ve done the international job for eight years and then been in club football for three,” O’Neill says. “And it’s like anything, if another club took me now on the back of the years at Stoke, they’d have a much better manager than they would have had in 2016 or 2018.

“You can’t not improve — you’d need to be an idiot not to learn.

“I think I’m more tolerant, maybe a little bit less emotional and more reflective in my decision-making and how I deal with players, a bit softer than I was. Not that I was ever Jim McLean, but when I needed to be I was pretty authoritative. I still am. I probably bend a little bit more now than I would have.

“I’m different, much wiser.”

(Top photo: Liam McBurney/PA Images via Getty Images)

Michael O’Neill ‘more tolerant, more reflective and wiser’ on Northern Ireland return (2024)
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