Tom English: Martin O’Neill losing his Midas touch

Clearly there is the elite, the championship-chasers, the monied ones, of which there are three, Manchester United, Manchester City and although they don’t look much like contenders these days, you’d still have to bracket Chelsea in the triumvirate. Underneath those, Arsenal still have plenty of money to spend but a manager who seems unwilling to spend it for some reason.

There is a tier below Arsenal, another tier below that tier and, if you keep slicing up the division, you will eventually find where Sunderland are at right now. They are in a group of clubs that probably won’t go down but might if things continue to go horribly for them. I don’t know what sub-tier of the Premier League Sunderland are in but I know that, whatever it is called, it’s pretty grim.

Martin O’Neill looks like a diminished man these days, the effervescence shaken out of him, the cheers greeting the Midas touch he once possessed now replaced with the boos of the crowd as his Sunderland team made their way off at the weekend having failed to beat Norwich despite having a one-man advantage for an hour.

These are wretched times for the former Celtic manager. If Neil Lennon is ever offered a Premier League gig at a club like Sunderland he might think of O’Neill’s plight, wonder where the glory is and then stay put.

Sunderland are four points outside of the relegation zone with little prospect of their situation improving in their next two games, which happen to be against Manchester United and Chelsea. They have not won in seven league games – four defeats and three draws. Three points from a possible 21 has the fans in growing state of anxiety, fans who used to think that O’Neill walked on water. When he was appointed as successor to Steve Bruce, Sunderland couldn’t buy a win. Literally. Bruce had spent fortunes and his money was no good.

O’Neill lifted the crisis in the blink of an eye, winning seven of his first ten Premier League matches. This was the kind of thing that made him great, this ability to move in and galvanise things through the sheer force of his personality. Now that’s not working anymore. In the last few weeks he has bemoaned the fact that the money has dried up at Sunderland and that his squad lacks “true ability”.

What O’Neill didn’t mention was that the money may be in shorter supply at Sunderland but that the four players he paid money for since last summer came at a combined cost of more than £30 million, a considerable wedge that outweighed the transfer budgets of plenty of clubs sitting well above Sunderland in the table.

He spent £12m on Steven Fletcher, money well spent. He spent another £10m on Adam Johnson, which seemed like it might have been money well spent given that Johnson is a terrific talent. But he hasn’t played like a £10m player. He took Danny Graham away from Swansea for £5m. Graham has been awful so far. And then there is whatever he spent – undisclosed – on Alfred N’Diaye, a French midfielder who he brought in from Bursaspor. N’Diaye has had little impact.

What is getting to the Sunderland fans now – and what they are giving back to O’Neill with an increasing frustration – is a perceived lack of fight on the pitch, as illustrated, they feel, by the weak-willed performance against a highly- vulnerable Norwich last weekend. These jibes must hurt O’Neill for it can’t be often that one of his teams has been accused of lacking the stomach for a battle. It’s certainly not something you would level at O’Neill. He looks beleaguered and seems to be talking in almost a moping way when dealing with the local media in Sunderland, but there must be fight within him. There has to be.

After the initial surge of optimism under O’Neill, they have won only nine out of 44 league games. They might be in a glamorous league, but there is nothing sexy about it for Sunderland. There is not a lot left to play for in the Premier League, but O’Neill and his drive to get his team out of the mire is going to be a fascinating part of the season’s end.

No wins in seven and a continuing slide towards trouble. He will get out of it, won’t he?

Rowntree should quit whining and learn lesson

Just when you thought that England’s mortification post-Cardiff couldn’t get any worse, they go and whine to the IRB about a referee.

Their forwards coach, Graham Rowntree, says he has had a forensic look at the DVD of Wales’ systematic dismantling of the English on Saturday evening and is annoyed about a lot of the decisions made by New Zealand’s Steve Walsh. Quite where the RFU forensics department were the week England beat France with the benefit of a try that should never been allowed is a question that Rowntree has yet to answer. He says England were frustrated by the referee at the weekend as if his team are the only one to have similar issues during the Six Nations. The whining, frankly, is feeble and probably self-defeating.

A story from 2001. Back then, just like Saturday, England were going for a Grand Slam, in Dublin as opposed to Cardiff. They lost. The pivotal moment was a piece of Irish chicanery at a lineout involving an England player being illegally tugged to allow Keith Wood to blast through a gap that wouldn’t otherwise have been there. Wood scored and Ireland won by six points.

England still won the championship but they were utterly devastated at once again missing out on a Grand Slam at the final hurdle. As they waited to be presented with the Six Nations trophy Neil Back said that never in the history of rugby had a team felt so low at being declared the best. Back, and the rest, could have made much of the incident leading up to Wood’s crucial score, but didn’t. In fact, they were incredibly generous in defeat, praising Ireland for doing a job on them. They said they would learn the lessons. And they did.

Rowntree was in the England squad that day, coming on as a substitute. It was a squad destined for greatness, a squad that had a no-excuses mentality that eventually saw them conquer the world. Rowntree should try to remember the mental fortitude of that England group and stop his whingeing. He just sounds so… soft.

Celtic’s Green Brigade far from innocent victims

It is hard to know what is the most keenly fought dimension to the spat between Celtic’s Green Brigade supporters’ group and Strathclyde Police – the type of face-to-face aggravation that we saw on the streets over the weekend or the PR battle that followed it.

Without question, both sides are attempting to climb atop the moral high ground in this grubby saga. Allegations have been made against the police for excessive force and they must be looked into, but the sanctimony of the Green Brigade is a little hard to stomach in all of this. They called an illegal protest march and then refused to back down when the police told them to. That’s the beginning, the end and the in-between of this affair. They wanted to break the law. When the police turned up to make sure they didn’t, the fans ploughed on regardless and then whipped out their camera phones and cried conspiracy.

There is a serious debate to be had about the police’s treatment of football fans in Scotland, particularly Celtic and Rangers fans, in light of the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act. There are weighty and troubling issues that should be tackled. But what happened on Saturday had the look of an irresponsible stage-managed situation, an orchestrated ruse to draw the police out, a continuation of an increasingly bitter relationship and an escalation of the PR scrap. It may have worked, too. Prominent legal people and representatives at Holyrood have all spoken up in support of the fans like they were a set of innocents disgracefully picked on while staging an authorised protest. They were not.

So let’s discover if the police over-stepped the mark and let’s deal with that forcefully. But in the meantime let’s not fall for the fantasy of the ‘guiltless’ fans on the Gallowgate.