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Martin O'Neill

The Hesk said:
Wes Brown, Seb Larsson, Kieran Richardson and many other have said on podcasts that they only seen Martin Oneil once max
Twice a week. If they had a good
Result he would let them have 4 days off. Absolutely
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The truth is MON is a decent footy manager who had the rug pulled from under him by short! youl be saying next you were at that snowy fekking cold night at stoke and you thought he was useless??I have a lot of respect for MON as a manager and so do many folk in footy ..Roy keane likes and respects him and he hates everyone!
 

oddbod said:
The truth is MON is a decent footy manager who had the rug pulled from under him by short! youl be saying next you were at that snowy fekking cold night at stoke and you thought he was useless??I have a lot of respect for MON as a manager and so do many folk in footy ..Roy keane likes and respects him and he hates everyone!
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He was a joke up here simple
 
Definitely Maybe said:
There's the story from Keane as well just after Short took over. We'd lost the previous game (Villa I think) and had Arsenal up next. Short rang him up and said "We gotta beat the Gunners, man!" :lol:

Haven't heard the Kilgallon bit, but Kilgallon tells the story of how they went up to Scotland after we lost to Man United for Fletcher's birthday when they found out MON had been sacked. They were on the train coming back the next day when they got the call to say Di Canio had been appointed and wanted to see them the next day. At the same time, the buffet cart came round and Graham ordered more Stella. When they got off the train, Johnson and Graham got in a taxi back to Graham's house to carry on drinking and came in hungover the next day, Graham even fell asleep in Di Canio's first meeting.

Graham tells a different but even worse version - he reckons he was in London and got arrested and had to get a taxi back up to training when they let him out at 5am. A few other ex players have corroborated Kilgallon's version though and Fletcher's birthday was indeed around the same date so fuck knows why Graham would be in London.
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Probably missed the stop. f***ing missed everything else.
 
The Hesk said:
He was a joke up here simple
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We’ve had joke managers up here and he wasn’t one of them. One of the best points to games ratios of any Sunderland manager in the top flight in modern times.

It wasnt pretty to watch, but we weren’t blessed with good football to watch for much of that last top flight spell.

Joke managers are Di Canio, Beale, Grayson, Johnson, Parkinson.
 
Sarnie said:
It's not simple though, is it? If he had several jobs and an excellent hit rate, then his first failure was Sunderland, maybe he wasn't just somehow a shite manager overnight.
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I think “excellent hit rate” is being more than kind.
Take out his tenure at Celtic and the couple of jobs where he managed twenty games or less and his “hit rate” is far from excellent. Just have a look at his win percentage on wiki.
I think anything above ‘journeyman manager with some modest success sitting more credit than he’s earned.
 
oddbod said:
The truth is MON is a decent footy manager who had the rug pulled from under him by short! youl be saying next you were at that snowy fekking cold night at stoke and you thought he was useless??I have a lot of respect for MON as a manager and so do many folk in footy ..Roy keane likes and respects him and he hates everyone!
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He pulled the rug out from under himself when despite all the fans being against it he signed the mag wanker Danny Graham.

It was pure arrogance and ignorance to sign that clown.
 
Tex said:
I think “excellent hit rate” is being more than kind.
Take out his tenure at Celtic and the couple of jobs where he managed twenty games or less and his “hit rate” is far from excellent. Just have a look at his win percentage on wiki.
I think anything above ‘journeyman manager with some modest success sitting more credit than he’s earned.
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Seriously? He moved Wycombe from non-league to a top half third tier team, turned Leicester from second tier also-rans to a trophy winning Premier League team and got Villa back to playing in Europe and competing in the top half of the Premier League. If anything his Celtic tenure is the bit with question marks because it's ostensibly one of the easiest jobs in football.

He's one of the best managers of his era imo. It was shite at Sunderland and painful to watch but he's had a phenomenal career.
 
Tex said:
I think “excellent hit rate” is being more than kind.
Take out his tenure at Celtic and the couple of jobs where he managed twenty games or less and his “hit rate” is far from excellent. Just have a look at his win percentage on wiki.
I think anything above ‘journeyman manager with some modest success sitting more credit than he’s earned.
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Two trophies and consistent top half finishes with Leicester at Filbert Street was a superb achievement. Ending Rangers dominance in Scotland and taking Celtic to a UEFA cup final was an achievement. Consecutive top 6 finishes with Villa over three campaigns was an achievement. Taking Ireland to tournaments with an incredibly mediocre crop of players was an achievement (as can be seen with how they’ve struggled since).

His time at Sunderland was ultimately a disappointment and the football was poor (though no worse than what we’d seen before or after). And, if Im not mistaken, he achieved 65 points from his 55 games at Sunderland in the top flight. Thats objectively decent for a Sunderland manager in that chaotic era of managerial change, player turnover and directionless boardroom decision making.

Speaks fondly of Sunderland and its supporters. Some very disproportionate dislike IMO.
 
Gentwo said:
My memory of him is of him going absolutely ape shit at David Meyer for passing the half way line and playing a forward pass
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That’s funny recently I was thinking of goals by Ballard and Nordi and seeing Hume last week battling to try and win a corner at the by line I was trying to think which of our managers forbade defenders from crossing midfield. 😁😁
 
Coeus said:
Can't imagine Ellis Short is a big Martin O'Neil fan tbh.
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Short should have stuck with O’Neil til the end of the season. If we got relegated, we get relegated and we would had went down with a better team than the one we ultimately did go down with and possibly be able to keep a few to get back up.
If we stay up, review at the end of the season

Instead what followed was 5/6 seasons of firefighting with short thinking “firing a manager worked last season” until he decided to stick with David Moyes 😂
 
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