Best to wait for O'Neill's own account

BIOGRAPHY: Martin O'Neill: The BiographyBy Simon Moss John Blake Publishing, 265pp. £17.99

IF MARTIN O'NEILL, the Aston Villa manager, ever gets around to writing his autobiography it would probably be of War and Peaceproportions, partly because his life has been such an eventful one, partly because he's a man of diverse interests who tends to be a touch loquacious when a subject stirs his passions. Football, then, might be the theme of only a third of the pages.

Having earned a place at Queen’s University Belfast to study law, O’Neill, against the advice of his mother, opted instead to pursue a career in football, but his fascination with the legal process never abated. Famously, in 1981, it prompted him to queue overnight with his heavily pregnant wife for a seat at the trial of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. Little wonder his then Norwich City team-mates thought he was “different”.

“The Ripper trial would provide a rare highlight in the year for O’Neill,” writes Simon Moss in his biography of the 58-year-old, leaving you to take it that the lowlights must have been exceptionally rough.

It’s not the first unauthorised biography of O’Neill – Alex Montgomery wrote another six years ago – and it’s unlikely to be the last, especially if his managerial journey, as anticipated, takes him some day to one of the game’s highest-profile jobs.

Moss’s book has received some attention because of what are actually old quotes from O’Neill about the difficulty of life as an Irishman in Britain during the IRA’s bombing campaign in the 1970s, when “there were a couple of comments made in the dressing room that suggested you would have an empathy, if not a downright collusion, in events”.

As anyone who heard O’Neill’s memorable contribution to the Ireland of Tomorrow: A Presidential Lecture series at Áras an Uachtaráin in 2008 would attest, his thoughts on that time are absorbing. They are not, though, explored in this book, the issue dealt with in just one and half pages, before the author returns to a largely analysis-free chronology of O’Neill’s career.

And anyone familiar with that career is unlikely to learn anything new about the man, Moss simply assembling a diary of football seasons, including some details from match reports, and drawing on quotes from old interviews with O’Neill and his acquaintances.

“Childhood friends of O’Neill have said it was obvious he was destined to become a star,” he writes, but other than a short line from his old geography teacher about his footballing abilities, no childhood friend is quoted to expand on the notion that stardom was inevitable.

And that’s how it goes through the book’s 265 pages.

Other compelling and presumably momentous periods in O’Neill’s life are similarly glossed over, his appointment, for example, by manager Billy Bingham as the first Roman Catholic captain of Northern Ireland covered in one paragraph.

Bingham received letters of complaint from “bigots, cranks and idiots”, but O’Neill insisted he never suffered any sectarian abuse, as his captain when he managed Celtic, Neil Lennon, later did.

“I only got booed because I was crap,” he said. Again, that’s it.

The book is, too, riddled with errors, most hardly critical – the GAA is the “Gaelic Athletics Establishment”, a hurley is a “short stick”, the Republic of Ireland reached the quarter-finals of the 1994 World Cup (they didn’t – that was 1990) – but enough to suggest a certain lack of care.

For Celtic supporters in particular the chronicle of the club's success under O'Neill will make for pleasant reading, at a time when they need all the pleasant reading they can muster, but for more substance and insight on a captivating character it might be best to wait for his very own War and Peace.

Mary Hannigan is an Irish Timessports writer