Martin O'Neill exclusive: The truth about Brian Clough and me

Martin O’Neill enjoys words. And there is one that the man who has 50 years of trophy-winning experience as both player and manager finds particularly entertaining.

“You know which word always makes me laugh when I hear managers talking these days? Project. I learned very early on there’s no such thing as a project. No five-year plan, either. You have a five-minute plan. Project, five-year plan: please, put them in the bin.”

O’Neill has been thinking about the meaning of management a lot recently: he has just published his autobiography. Nothing unusual in that, many football figures publish an autobiography, some more than one. But what is unusual is that O’Neill has written this himself. No ghostwriter has been required; every word of it is his. And he has been rather surprised by what has emerged.

“I read it back and thought to myself: I was too cantankerous for my own good.”

O’Neill is talking to Telegraph Sport in a London hotel. Looking way younger than his 70 years, as he was on the touchline, he remains a bundle of nervous energy. His book too is full of vim. Not to mention tales of conflict. Like the time he refused to play for Nottingham Forest after being named as substitute by Brian Clough. He does not sugarcoat it: he now believes he behaved like a spoiled brat.

More than that, when asked how he as a manager would have dealt with a player refusing to play, he is unequivocal.

“I would have gone through him, absolutely. I now look at this from the viewpoint of a manager and think: how dare I not turn up? As a manager I’d find it hard to forgive.”

That standoff came about, he explains, because as a player prone to self-doubt, he needed reassurance. Instead from Clough – and his assistant Peter Taylor – he got the opposite: in five glorious years of trophy accumulation at Nottingham Forest, he barely received a positive word. Theirs was the most fractious relationship.

“We were in the dressing room, with all the other players getting changed, when I said something,” he recalls of one confrontation. “Clough said nothing back. But Taylor went round the room pointing at everyone individually, saying to me: ‘you’re no good, you’re only here because of him, him and him.’ Then he got to someone else, paused for a moment and said: ‘well, not so much him’.”

Clough, long considered a master of motivation, remains for O’Neill a mystery.

“To this day, I find him completely baffling. I was searching for the seal of approval from him,” he says. “It was not coming in my direction. It wasn’t great, the way he dealt with me. He may well have felt this was the way I should be treated, that I was a bit of an upstart. 

“Maybe if I knew when he walked in that door that five years later I’d be collecting a second European Cup then, yes, I’d have put up with it all. But he was brutal to me.”

Here, though, is the irony: when he became a manager, O’Neill admits he was far more like Clough than he might ever have imagined when he was suffering under his idiosyncratic ways.

“I guess it was inevitable I’d pick up stuff from Clough, taking the essence of management from someone really successful. Cloughie with all his charisma, it was stuff that stood the test of time. Absolutely, subconsciously I absorbed it all,” he says.

Not least, he admits, in the way in which he could be dismissive of those who crossed him.

“If I had to leave someone out of the team that I had time for as a player, there would be an empathetic approach,” he says. “But if there was someone causing me a few problems, I’d have no issue telling them. Honestly, I’d get perverse enjoyment out of telling them. Yes I had my favourites: they were usually the best players. But I never minded losing players that I thought were of no benefit to the team.”

Of all Clough’s players, it was O’Neill who went on to the most sustained and successful management career. But the great man himself never suggested he should follow him into the dugout. 

It was the Northern Ireland international manager Billy Bingham who sparked the idea. And after short spells with Grantham and Shepshed, O’Neill’s career took off when he steered Wycombe into the league. But from the off, he says, he was alert to the precarious nature of the profession.

“I remember once Cloughie coming into the dressing room after he’d had a rough time in a board meeting and saying to us: 'the only thing you can be certain of in this job is the sack',” he recalls.

“That stuck with me. This idea you start down at the bottom and work your way up is nonsense. If you start down there and fail, that’s it. It’s fraught with difficulty, your first real job could also be your last. 

“I told myself early on that if I was going to fail it would not be through lack of energy. I was out every single night watching football games. I had to make this work.”

And work it did. After five years of upward momentum in Buckinghamshire, he was snapped up by Leicester. Yet still he was aware of the knife edge he trod. And there were always those quick to challenge his decisions.

“I remember we had a young full-back called Neil Lewis, who I put on the bench a few times. Every week there was this voice right behind the dugout at Filbert Street shouting: ‘get Lewis on’. One week because of injuries I had to start a game with Neil. 

“Within 20 minutes, the same voice behind me bellows: ‘get Lewis off’. It really was a lesson. When you feel really vulnerable, you might think: maybe I need to placate that voice. But then you realise the best way to resist that is to win football matches.”

And win he did, taking Leicester into the Premier League, then twice securing the League Cup before heading to Celtic. For a Northern Irish Catholic this was the ultimate job. And he did it brilliantly, winning every domestic trophy and breaking a decade of Rangers dominance.

But in 2005 he resigned because of his wife’s health, before re-emerging at Aston Villa a year later. Here, he encountered a new breed of owner: the American Randy Lerner.

“I think I could have been better managing upwards,” he reckons. “I was never into a placatory thing. I had rows. I felt the results on the field backed me up for whatever I had to say in the boardroom. Maybe I needed to be more diplomatic.”

Instead, he resigned from Villa, and went to Sunderland where, in 2013, for the first time in a 25-year managerial career, he was fired.  

“That was a real shock to the system. Some managers can shove this off as part of life: where’s the next job. Not for me, I very much went into a darkened room. It had a bad effect on me.”

Still, he recovered to take on the Irish team.

“The difference between club and international management is day and night. Play a game in March, you lose and all you can think about for the next three months is defeat. All my life I’d not been able to park defeat easily. Lose in the club game and my weekend would be ruined. With internationals it was three months ruined.”

Nevertheless, abetted in an unexpectedly cordial double act by Roy Keane, he steered Ireland to the knockout stage of the 2016 Euros. The delight in that performance did not insulate him from criticism and he was let go again after failing in the 2018 World Cup play-offs.

“I never had much of a rapport with the Irish press,” he says. “You never see yourself as other people see you, but I think they felt there was an arrogance there. That defeat to Denmark in the play-off became a stick to beat you with.”

A short spell at Nottingham Forest followed, where he was fired once more, this time after just 17 games in charge. He has tried for jobs since, but has found himself outflanked by the new breed of technocrat coaches, with their powerpoint presentations and mastery of expected goals statistics. 

Indeed, when it comes to describing where he now stands as a manager, there is one word this master of the language finds particularly offensive.

“Anybody who seems to speak a different language to the spiel being put out now is considered a dinosaur,” he says. “I’m not a dinosaur. I can easily adapt to any situation. And the fundamentals of the role have not changed since Cloughie’s time: find a way to win matches.”

So will we ever see him again, nervously pacing a technical area?

“Do I believe I could still manage at the top level? Absolutely. But then I think there’s an element in me that even when I’m on my deathbed I’ll leap up and say: ‘I’m ready to go, I can still do it’.”

Days Like These by Martin O’Neill is published by Pan MacMillan (£22).