SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE, MARTIN?
O’Neill has explaining to do after weak excuse for Stoke U-turn smacks of disrespect
NEWS from Stoke City yesterday was never likely to arrive early, for Martin O’Neill has always been one of the great prevaricators.
But when white smoke broke over the Potteries a little before 7pm, it was a bombshell.
All day, folk in the FAI were preparing for LAM, Life After Martin, and there was already talk of beginning a recruitment process for a new Republic of Ireland manager. O’Neill, it seemed, was headed for a new challenge in the Premier League, leaving the FAI with their backside badly exposed on the contract front when, against the odds, talks collapsed.
Just like Gary Rowett and Quique Sánchez Flores before him, O’Neill didn’t like the cut of Stoke’s jib. It’s understood the length of contract was the stumbling block, with O’Neill reputedly standing firm on deal for two and a half years.
He was also adamant that his Irish back-room staff, headed by Keane, were coming with him. But the job he was clearly interested fell between the cracks, shattering to pieces like fine Wedgwood.
The Derryman’s late U-turn has left Stoke up the creek without a paddle and the FAI with a senior international manager whose dependability is entitled to be questioned.
First Everton, and now Stoke, have reached out to him. Is he inside the FAI tent or outside? It is high time he explained himself.
O’Neill’s behaviour has been somewhat bizarre. Not in 35 years has an Ireland manager ever angled to quit for a job elsewhere.
That he should choose to engage with clubs when he has already agreed to the €1.3m-a-year contract already on the table does him no credit.
For the FAI, the fresh twist has given them a chance to salvage something from the wreckage of a PR nightmare by giving O’Neill, Keane and company the heave-ho.
It’s what most employers would do if they found out that a highlypaid employee was chatting to other prospective bosses.
But ‘sling yer hook’ isn’t in the FAI vocabulary where O’Neill is concerned. For starters, he is a protected species.
As manager, he has the support of Denis O’Brien and Dermot Desmond and there is not a snowball’s chance in hell of the FAI standing up to the man who pays O’Neill’s wages, or the man who brokered the deal for him to become manager, and is also a close friend.
To many, the FAI would be entitled to ask him to take his leave but that might anger O’Brien, whose financial support has to stop at some point.
If he closed his wallet, the hardpressed FAI could offer little more than nickels and dimes for a new manager. Their position highlights the flaw in their strategy for the past decade.
From the moment the accepted the money of a rich benefactor, they conceded the right to exercise complete authority over whom they hire and fire as international manager.
There is a board meeting of the FAI next Thursday, where O’Neill’s behaviour of the past week will be discussed, and what should be done.
The directors, or at least some of them, will have noted the views of Ireland supporters, former players and media commentators, many of whom believe O’Neill should be sent on his merry way for displaying such a lack of respect to the title he holds.
But the prospects of FAI chief executive John Delaney demanding his head on a plate are slim, and none.
More likely, O’Neill will be offered a new deal, to be signed smartly – maybe even in front of the TV cameras – and the FAI will seek to move on quickly.
Except, the damage has already been done and to help repair them, O’Neill must give a full account of his motives, and movements of the past week. He has long regarded the Irish media as the enemy and has done just one interview with an Irish newspaper in four years and two months as manager.
Instead, his preferred mouthpiece is the ‘Daily Telegraph’, whose readers don’t give a fig about the fortunes of the Boys In Green.
Through his press liaison, O’Neill issued a message last night that one of the ‘key reasons’ he rejected Stoke was his reluctance to break his verbal agreement with the FAI to continue as manager.
Such tosh. That ‘agreement’ didn’t prevent him from speaking to Everton in November and to Stoke this weekend, so it’s clearly not worth the paper it’s not written on. It is an expression of convenience.
Just as the plot in the Potteries thickens, so too does life on the working farm in Dublin 15 where some employees are clearly more equal than others.