CHRIS SUTTON: Martin O’Neill reveals he would have been ‘delighted’ to have taken the Leicester job

‘As Groucho Marx once said, I’ve had a great afternoon, but this wasn’t it.’ With that zinger, three hours in the company of Martin O’Neill are over.

He’s talked Leicester City and replacing Brendan Rodgers; Nottingham Forest and Steve Cooper’s hollow vote of confidence from Evangelos Marinakis, the owner who sacked O’Neill after 19 games in 2019; how if Roy Hodgson and Neil Warnock are still going at 75 and 74 respectively, he is nowhere near retired at 71; why Brian Clough would cut it with Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp if he was managing today.

Chris Sutton spent five trophy-laden years with O’Neill in Scotland and they start this reunion by addressing those rumours — the ones which suggested it was between him, Rafa Benitez and Dean Smith for the Leicester vacancy, four years after his last job. KIERAN GILL listened in…

O’NEILL: I would have been delighted to have gone back, even for a short period. I wouldn’t have been looking for anything. If they’re in dire trouble, absolutely, I’d go back. But I don’t put myself out there.

SUTTON: You don’t have an agent throwing your name into the mix, much like Roy Hodgson. Leicester ended up going with Smith, and John Terry and Craig Shakespeare as assistants.

I sat down with Martin O’Neill (L) to talk all things football – both past and present

The Northern Irishman discussed the topic of returning to Leicester, where he spent five years

O’NEILL: I thought it was a no-brainer for Roy to go back to Crystal Palace. He knows the club but, more importantly, he knows the players. It’s not as if he’s saying, ‘Jesus, what team shall I pick?’ Maybe that’s why Leicester went with (their choice) because Craig Shakespeare had been there before.

SUTTON: Did you enter into talks with Leicester?

O’NEILL: No. They never spoke to me. I thought they might have called and it didn’t materialise. But good luck! I genuinely like Leicester. It would be incredibly sad to see them go down.

SUTTON: Do you think with Hodgson going to Palace, and Warnock to Huddersfield, the perception towards older managers is changing?

O’NEILL: That’s helped! I had this feeling that ageism plays a part. Experience does not necessarily guarantee success.

But you think your record in the game might suggest somebody might (want to hire you). Would I have the enthusiasm to do the job? Absolutely.

SUTTON: What about Forest?

O’NEILL: I worked at Forest. I worked with the owner. I had 19 games there, the last three of which we won, believe it or not.

SUTTON: You once told me, ‘I’ve spent longer on a sponsored walk from Land’s End to John O’Groats than I did as manager of that club.’ But they’ve backed Cooper by making 30 signings this season.

O’NEILL: Deep down, I wouldn’t have minded having 19 players brought into the football club at the time!

O’Neill says he was open to a return to Leicester but they appointed Dean Smith instead

I spent five trophy-laden years with O’Neill in Scotland during our respective time at Celtic

SUTTON: Cooper got the old ‘vote of confidence’ from Marinakis. It was, ‘We back you, we back you, we back you… but we need immediate results.’

O’NEILL: A caveat! I’ve always been sceptical about ‘votes of confidence’. In truth, they don’t exist. My daughter, Aisling, told me that at Wycombe — not because she knew whether I was going to lose my job, but she knew on a Saturday night we could go to a Chinese restaurant in High Wycombe if her dad could beat Bromsgrove Rovers.

Her words to me, leaving the house every weekend, were: ‘Dad, just win.’ If an 11-year-old can tell you to ‘just win’, that’s what it meant. Did she know whether we were playing a 4-4-2 or 3-5-2? Not at all. Just win.

SUTTON: If you were still at Forest and that statement suddenly appeared, would you tell Marinakis where to go?

O’NEILL: I would say to the owner: ‘Do not be releasing statements on my behalf. Honestly, I don’t need it.’

The interview takes place in Signor Sassi, one of London’s finest Italian restaurants, and Sutton is hanging on every word as O’Neill holds court. Fitting, because in another life he might have finished his law degree at Queen’s University in Belfast to become a barrister.

Becoming one of the Britain’s greatest footballing figures was hardly a bad fallback option, though O’Neill never lost his fascination with the law.

Evangelos Marinakis has made headlines recently for his vote of confidence in Steve Cooper

In 1981, he watched the trial of ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ Peter Sutcliffe from the Old Bailey public gallery; in 1976, he watched Donald Neilson, the ‘Black Panther’ murderer, at Oxford Crown Court; and he once took a trip to Dallas to visit the book depository from where Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F Kennedy. O’Neill is still captivated by the law today and jokes that he saved Sutton from imprisonment at Chelsea by signing him for Celtic in 2000.

SUTTON: I heard when you suggested Celtic sign me, the board asked if you’d seen me play. You said, ‘Yes, for Chelsea’s Under 11s. He was head and shoulders above the rest.’ The rest was history, wasn’t it?

O’NEILL: You’d proved yourself! You won the league with Blackburn! I went to Manchester City. Did I think the midfielders were better than me at City? Absolutely not. I’d won the league at Forest. I’d done well at Norwich. But I couldn’t settle at City. When I thought about you, I thought about myself.

SUTTON: We won’t bore the readers with talk of which crime documentaries we’re watching on Netflix, but safe to say you’re still interested in that topic? I could have seen you as Rumpole!

O’NEILL: Rumpole of the Bailey! Do I still think about these murder cases from the past? Yeah. But I would’ve been a pretty poor barrister. You need speed of thought. That’s why some of these barristers are so brilliant because they need to be thinking miles ahead.

SUTTON: Clough might’ve been a good barrister in that case. Naturally, Clough features heavily in your autobiography On Days Like These, although my section seems to be missing?

The Northern Irishman had plenty of success with Celtic during his stint there from 1995-2000

O’NEILL: Sorry, Chris! I wrote it myself. That’s why there aren’t many words with more than two syllables. Clough didn’t spend a Tuesday afternoon coaching the team. He coached you during the games. Let me tell you. Half-time, Liam O’Kane had become fearful of Millwall’s Gordon Hill. Clough said, ‘If you back off any further, you’ll be in the River Trent’. But then he explained what to do. ‘Get out, engage him from a yard-and-a-half, stop, direct him wide so we can get our centre halves back into position. Then do your utmost to stop the ball from coming in.’

SUTTON: So after the initial Cloughism, he backed it up with tactical instructions. You get managers like Guardiola and Klopp being hailed as tactical geniuses today for sending a full back into midfield or telling players to press high. How would Clough have fared today?

O’NEILL: Everybody thinks the game has changed enormously. It hasn’t. The game is still essentially simple. Before the 1980 European Cup final, we lost Trevor Francis. How did he compensate that? He played Garry Birtles up on his own to cover the ground and we put an extra man in midfield to combat Hamburg. It was called ‘flooding the midfield’.

Nowadays there’s different terminology, but it’s essentially the same! This ‘high press’, it’s as if it was invented last week, but that’s exactly what Brian Clough taught us!

The year that we won the championship, we’ve come up and nobody is expecting us to do anything, but we closed the opposition down as quickly as we could. (Clough’s assistant) Peter Taylor’s idea was, ‘Get really good players and get them hustling.’

SUTTON: ‘Hustling’ as in win the ball back as soon as possible so the talented boys can do something with it?

O’Neill revealed how his former coach Brian Clough (R) taught him about the ‘high press’

O’NEILL: Guardiola told Barcelona’s players to get the ball back. You know if you’ve got Lionel Messi and Andres Iniesta and Xavi, there’s a decent chance you’re going to create something. So the quicker you get the ball back, the better.

It’s so logical it’s untrue. Taylor told us that in 1976. Clough got the very best out of us. Whether it was telling John Robertson how brilliant he was or rollicking me, he got the best out of you. Fast forward another 60 years when whatever changes have taken place in the game, someone will ask, ‘I wonder how Guardiola would have dealt with this?’

It’s like asking if George Best could play in today’s game? He’d score another 300 goals! You only have to look at Ron Harris’s challenge on him. That was an everyday occurrence on Best. The pitches are better, the game is less brutal and there are much fewer ‘hard men’ — there’s not a ‘hard man’ in the game.

The walls of Signor Sassi are smothered with pictures of celebrities, including Roman Abramovich. The talk turns to Chelsea’s new owner, Todd Boehly, and how he invaded the changing room to tell the squad their season has been ’embarrassing’.

O’NEILL: I have no problem with owners coming in afterwards, but it has to be positive. I wouldn’t want an owner saying something derogatory.

SUTTON: Jack Walker would come in before games at Blackburn to wish everybody well.

O’NEILL: That’s encouragement and different to somebody remonstrating at the end of a game. Before I got at Forest, they had the chief executive (Ioannis Vrentzos) and apparently he held a team talk after a game. They won the next game so he’s taking credit! If an owner comes in to remonstrate with the players, it’s going to undermine you. You are employed as the manager. That’s your job.

SUTTON: I could imagine you hitting the roof if Boehly did what he did on your watch.

O’NEILL: You can’t do that. That was my fallout at Wycombe with the chairman, Ivor Beeks. We drew at York, a poor 0-0, and I’d gone for a shower after speaking to the players. One came in to say, ‘Boss, Ivor’s been in, he’s really unhappy with the performance’. I’ve gone ballistic. I charged up to the boardroom. ‘Don’t you ever do that again.’ I don’t regret saying that. I do regret falling out with him. We’ve been good friends since. But no, that’s my job.

Todd Boehly has made headlines in recent weeks for his post-match actions at Chelsea

SUTTON: You became a great manager, but you were sparing in your praise of us Celtic players. We feared you. Did you ever doubt yourself?

O’NEILL: There’s not a man on this Earth who hasn’t at some stage doubted his ability. Did I doubt my ability as a player? Absolutely. There was the day I fell over about four times at Derby and we got murdered 4-0 in 1972.

I turned and some Derby player robbed me of the ball and said, ‘Don’t worry about it, son.’ I’m telling you, that’s the moment I thought, ‘This game is beyond me’. So I could feel how most footballers felt. Robbie Savage tells me I once said to him, ‘You only lack one thing and that’s ability’. Which I may well have done. But it was meant in a comical sense! The players know when they’ve done well.

SUTTON: And when they haven’t, so they don’t need an owner telling them that. Before we go, do you see any of Clough in you as a manager?

O’NEILL: It was difficult not to have been influenced by someone as successful as him. Almost subconsciously at Wycombe, I was wearing a green shirt and my wife said to me, ‘Take that bloody thing off and be yourself.’ That was the best advice.

Did I learn from Brian? Absolutely. But you have to be you.

Martin O’Neill’s new autobiography On Days Like These is available now