It was a febrile day at Aston Villa's Bodymoor Heath training ground and you could feel a rift coming. In the aftermath of his team's 7-1 hammering at Chelsea, Martin O'Neill was trying to pull off the hard PR trick of affirming passion for the job while also using a large media gathering to warn the club's owner his fidelity to the claret and blue was finite.
This was no easy mission. Realising his threat to leave was a bit too stark, O'Neill later issued a statement restating his loyalty to Randy Lerner's philanthropic mission. But there was no mistaking the Villa manager's agitation later in a private conversation as he contemplated the possibility that Gareth Barry's sale to Manchester City the previous summer had started a trend that would turn Lerner's parish into a dispenser rather than an acquirer of talent.
James Milner's move to one of the Manchester monsters was already being touted and the talk around Villa Park was of Lerner being spooked by the rise of Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur and how few rungs an £80m investment in players raised a club on the Premier League's greased ladder. The word was that the Quiet American had looked at the financial crash and decided English football was merely a bonfire for his bucks.
O'Neill turned his thoughts to the possibility that Milner, Ashley Young and others might be auctioned off along with Villa's recently restored ambitions. "If that situation did develop that wouldn't necessarily mean I would go and down tools and say, 'Well, listen, we can't go any further,'" he said. "What you would do is see if you can come up with some other ways, maybe through the scheme here with the younger players coming through, maybe with a bit of trading here and there, maybe taking a risk with a major player to be transferred [out] to sort things out. You wouldn't just down tools. It's not been in my nature to do that.
"I couldn't envisage that sort of scene – just throwing the toys out of the pram. I feel maybe I should have a say in my career as much as anyone else – that was the point I was trying to make [in his earlier press conference]. Actually I didn't make it too cleverly, but it doesn't really matter."
Five days before the start of a new Premier League campaign, O'Neill's willingness to compromise expired, with dire implications for Villa and not especially good ones for him. At 58, he has at least one top appointment left in him but in the last few weeks two major boats have sailed without him. Fabio Capello's survival as England manager was one puff of receding smoke and Roy Hodgson's elevation from Fulham to Liverpool shut down another ideal vacancy.
Spend proper time with O'Neill and you see that his main managerial quality is a superhuman talent for motivation, for making journeymen feel like royalty, for unlocking football's spirit in players who may have been more used to making up the numbers. This sounds a good antidote to the malaise of England's low self‑esteem and to the moroseness that settled over Anfield before Hodgson arrived to blow it away. The saddest note in O'Neill's sudden resignation is that none of the elite managerial jobs in Britain look to be heading his way any time soon unless Sir Alex Ferguson stands down and Manchester United turn from Scotland to Northern Ireland for their inspiration.
Mourinho-esque career plotting has never been O'Neill's style. He was employed at Villa on a rolling one-year contract and calls himself a "typical Irishman without a long-term plan". On that tense day at Bodymoor Heath, he was plainly wounded by a surge in hostility from some Villa fans and bloggers in the wake of the collapse at Stamford Bridge on 27 March. He said: "I don't have an agent, I've never had an agent, I might be the only manager in Europe who doesn't have an agent. I've got a lawyer who would look over my contract at the end of the day, but I do the negotiations and therefore in terms of self-promotion I don't think I would have ever done that.
"What I should do, I should really consider my value a wee bit more. That's sounds big-headed, because I said in my time of trying to fight back that I have been a breath of fresh air to these people, because this club was totally disaffected four years ago."
His message was that managers "should not be self-deprecating to the extent that what happens is that people hammer the crap out of you". In retrospect the parting was foreshadowed by that cri de coeur. Each day of summer brought Milner's departure closer. A law graduate, O'Neill's nose for evidence was telling him Villa were becoming dis-investors just at the point where City and Spurs were redoubling their efforts to break up the cartel.
He is not a promoter of youth for its own sake. He welcomes to first-team action only those youngsters who are ready to contribute to points accumulation. The rest can amuse themselves with their studies or at Alton Towers. So he was never likely to agree to an influx of teenagers into the starting XI while a machete was applied to the wage bill.
An autocrat with a winning way – a charming dictator who observed the power of psychology in his playing days under Brian Clough – O'Neill might be accused by some Villa fans of protecting his own reputation by bailing out now. City's huge investments and the Harry Redknapp-authored transformation of Spurs hardly enhanced Villa's chances of improving on three consecutive sixth-place finishes: a respectable return, given the weight of money in front of them.
But self-interest will have played only a small role in the ending of the Villa revival. This looks more old-fashioned: a rupture based on principle. Milner was not Villa's greatest asset, nor Young. That honour belonged to O'Neill and now they have driven him away.
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