Martin O’Neill returns to Nottingham Forest with the weight of history on his shoulders
Some 26 years after he first had the chance to manage Nottingham Forest, here he finally is, back where it all began
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Your support makes all the difference.Martin O’Neill seems like a man in a hurry. Some 26 years after he first had the chance to manage Nottingham Forest, here he finally is, the 18th man charged with the task of returning this club to the Premier League since they last slipped out of it in 1999.
There have been several attempts to get O’Neill back to the City Ground in the intervening years, but for assorted reasons he always felt the time wasn’t right. Now, their need for a new messiah and his availability have converged.
He’ll have to get working quickly. O’Neill has only signed an 18-month contract, a tacit acknowledgment of not just the shortened timespan that any manager gets in modern football, but also that Evangelos Marinakis, the man who bought Forest 18 months ago, wants promotion yesterday. If O’Neill doesn’t succeed by the time his year-and-a-half is up, he will move on, another manager eaten by the Forest machine.
“I have to do this now,” he said. “Time is pressing. No one gets any time these days, and the minute you step into a football club, it doesn’t matter, you’re expected to get going immediately. At some stage or another Nottingham Forest are going to get up. I want to really give it everything I’ve got. I want to live every single day of it and it’s a short period of time. If it turns out that it doesn’t happen for me, I will hand it over to another man.”
Some of O’Neill’s predecessors have been weighed down, even intimidated by the club’s history: the two European Cups, the First Division title the season after promotion, Brian Clough. One attempted to get the pictures of those glory days that adorn the halls taken down, but if O’Neill tried that he would be removing photos of himself.
O’Neill was one of the original five players who predated Clough at Forest, but went on to win all those implausible trophies under him: when you walk through the reception at the City Ground, there on the left are portraits of Viv Anderson, John Robertson, Tony Woodcock and Ian Bowyer. And, right in the middle, O’Neill.
Clough and O’Neill’s relationship was often fractious: he was left out of the 1979 European Cup final team (although he played in 1980), and as he wryly noted was rather unceremoniously sold straight after scoring twice against Arsenal in 1981.
But O’Neill still talks of Clough as a paternal figure, both in the influence he had on him, and in that way sons often do when they’re trying to win their father’s approval. “I had a tough time with him,” O’Neill said. “I had a tough time trying to prove myself every single week here. It was really tough.
“Every day here was almost like a mission to prove him wrong. Or so I thought. There were times in massive matches, including in the European Cup final, when he gave me praise and it was extraordinary – you felt 10 feet tall.”
Of course, a Clough anecdote is never far away. “I remember when there was a possibility of me managing Bradford City in 1987,” said O’Neill. “I went for an interview and the vice-chairman of Bradford, who seemed to quite like me, asked me to go and get a recommendation from Brian Clough. He said ‘I tell you what, I will give you the recommendation of all time, don’t you worry about that.’
“He did send a recommendation” - at this point O’Neill paused with the skill of a man who has told these tales before - “and I did not get the job. So it was not that good a recommendation, was it?”
A psychologist could have a field day with the notion of a man who has always sought this father figure’s approval eventually taking his job. The ultimate way of subconsciously chasing that praise, even though Clough has been dead for 15 years, perhaps.
But ultimately O’Neill hasn’t taken this job due to some sort of Freudian, generations-old psychodrama. He doesn’t need the hassle, for a start. He’s 66-years-old, is a hero among at least two fanbases: he could sail around the world and enjoy retirement. “Unfortunately, I love it,” he said, the corners of his mouth upturning almost imperceptibly. “I think I can travel in a few years’ time.”
There are plenty of cold, logical reasons to doubt O’Neill at Forest. That his last two jobs, with Ireland and Sunderland, ended badly. That it’s been six change-filled years since he last had a club job. That some believe his methods are no longer relevant and football has left him behind. But listening to him talk it was impossible not to wistfully imagine him succeeding where so many before him have failed. Brian would be proud.
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