Tom Lappin: O'Neill's Villa exit looks like another case of bad timing

Published on Friday 13 August 2010 17:12

Timing is crucial in football. Looking back at his career (some time in the future, or perhaps over this weekend) Martin O'Neill might reflect that it has been among the most important skills to have eluded him.

It wasn't the greatest surprise that O'Neill chose to walk out of Aston Villa this week. It might have been smarter though to have decided that he saw no viable avenue for his ambitions at Villa Park within a few days of Rafael Benitez taking his leave of Liverpool. The Anfield headhunters might still have preferred the emollient calm of Roy Hodgson to the excitable wit of O'Neill, but at least the Irishman would have had a credible chance of one of English football's top jobs.

O'Neill, it might be argued, also stayed a little too long at Celtic, after achieving minor miracles in Glasgow. He has been reluctant to give up on a project, even after it is apparent that the resources aren't available to support it.

At 58 his options now look limited to the sort of mid-ranking missions that have characterised his career. O'Neill's managerial future is now the hostage of others' misfortune. Perhaps Sam Allardyce might explode in a ball of his own fury, Mick McCarthy might resign in frustration at a perceived lack of proper manliness in the modern game, Tony Pulis may give up football to pursue his love of expressionist dance. On such scenarios rest O'Neill's chances of making a meaningful contribution to the Premier League.

The chances are that Aston Villa was O'Neill's last big job, and it was one that fizzled out in acrimonious disappointment, even if most Villa fans from David Cameron down (you suspect the Prime Minister's affiliation stems from the fact that Villa is the only club with an upper middle-class name) generally agree he has done a good job at the club.

That job has involved recognising and acquiring young talent, accentuating their strengths, making them better players. It's a rare talent, but O'Neill's weakness, in recent seasons, has been a failure to recognise the compromises required by a manager dealing with the expensive commodities of a football squad.

The obvious comparison is with Hodgson, who has willingly accepted a far more parlous state of financial affairs at Liverpool than O'Neill endured at Villa. He has done so with a grace and pragmatism that seem beyond the reach of O'Neill's pride.

Randy Lerner's financial caution might be influenced by witnessing the plight of his compatriots at Liverpool, although Tom Hicks and George Gillett's problems don't stem from lavish outlay on players and wages so much as the conditions of the loans that allowed them to buy the club in the first place. Lerner, like the hapless Liverpool duo, and the Glazers at Manchester United, is a businessman trying to compete with the limitless budgets on offer from the Abu Dhabi group at Manchester City, and, previously, Roman Abramovich at Chelsea.Clubs run as vanity projects will always be able to spend more than those still answerable to banks.

From O'Neill's perspective though, the financial limitations imposed on him meant Villa were becoming a feeder club for Manchester City, while O'Neill's own alchemical skills in turning average players into coveted internationals were valued not in terms of building a team but for their worth to the accountants' balance-sheets.

Any rational observer of James Milner's performances for England at the World Cup would have cackled in glee at the thought that someone wanted to pay upwards of 20 million for him. Maybe O'Neill was similarly sanguine until he discovered that Manchester City's oil revenues were being redirected to fuel Villa's debt rather than going into O'Neill's transfer coffers.

If Villa sell both Milner and Ashley Young this month, O'Neill's fears will be realised, but grumbling fans in the Holte End might be advised to take a look at the alternative vistas represented by Leeds United, and, last season, Portsmouth. Aston Villa are not among English football's elite. Their default setting as a club is one that flatters to deceive, starting well then running out of steam. Lerner, contrary to initial hopes, is not the sort of plutocrat who could turn them into contenders, but a canny investor who identified a promising little club that could turn a profit. O'Neill, denied his dream, has been left looking a little naive to believe in it in the first place.

O'Neill's career might yet have a dramatic final act. But, at the moment, the most obvious parallel is with Steve Coppell, another university graduate, once seen as part of a bright new generation of cerebral bosses. He quit Bristol City, and management, frustrated by the nature of modern football. O'Neill's career in England also looks like it has reached the stage of wondering what might have been.