The King is Dead, Long Live the Villa! - Martin O'Neill's Cult of Personality
The King is Dead, Long Live the Villa!
Martin O’Neill’s Cult of Personality
“The words on the paper
were stained with tears of frustration. If they knew what he’d been through,
what emotions he had wrestled with...blinking back the anger he felt, he looked
his enemies in the eye. They couldn’t look at him. They were cowards, every
last one of them. How could they do this to him? After he’d presented them with
one, two, three top six finishes. He had twice dragged them kicking and
screaming to the national stadium, that concrete bowl with its enigmatic arch,
and now it had come to this. For a moment, he thought of the boy McGeady. In a
way, he was glad he hadn’t been bought here, to wallow in the mediocrity they
were happy to sit in like the pigs they were. Now he could play with the
freedom that only he saw. He raised the paper until it was level with the brow
bar of his chic spectacles, cleared his throat, and began...”
Apologies for anybody who’s
a fan of decent prose, but you can’t help myth-making where Martin O’Neill is
concerned. As with all O’Neill moments, there’s always a drama that seems to
rise to the surface and for the more sarcastically-minded of us, his
resignation was a chance to make merry. Where most managers who resign or get
fired give a dry statement via their agent to Sky Sports News, the O’Neill
departure was shrouded in mystery. Why did he do it? Did he really just read a
statement, turn on his heels and leave? Were there tears? Was there shouting?
Were John Robertson and Steve Walford outside smoking like a couple of Mafia
underlings?
Who knows? I for one prefer
not to know, because it’s more entertaining that way. Much as I liked the man,
and the limited success he bought to the club, his time is over. Now there’s
space for a little perspective, we can see him for what he is: a cartoon, a
media construction. That’s not a swipe made through bitterness, but an
acknowledgment that he was probably more popular outside the environs of Villa
Park than he ever was inside it.
When we hear the term ‘cult
of personality’, we immediately think of despotic rulers and egotistical rock
stars. It means something negative, like anyone who falls for the line is a
sheep, with no brain of their own. They’re destined to sublimate their own
personality to the larger-than-life figurehead because it makes life easier to
bear.
Yet O’Neill was well into
establishing his own cult of personality at the club by the time of his
resignation. Oh yes, to us Villa have always been Villa, but outside of our own
bubble, O’Neill was the shorthand. In media circles, because he was so popular
(and a sometime colleague), it was hard to find a negative reaction to
O’Neill’s shock resignation. The general consensus was that O’Neill was well
within his rights to leave, because he would get no further financial backing,
and when the chairman cuts the funding, it’s an admission that the ambitions
have become too disparate.
Even now, in the first few
days of Gerard Houllier’s tenure, there are still dissenting newspaper views
that Houllier is onto a loser because he will face the same problems that
caused O’Neill to leave: player discontent, a small squad, lack of transfer
funding. You can almost picture O’Neill laughing to himself as the newspapers
struggle to keep alive a conflict that has long since burnt out, not because
they know it’s true but because the facts are now enshrined as O’Neill allowed
them to be seen. By maintaining a silence while the club picked up the pieces
and were forced to issue ambiguous statements, it told them all they needed to
know to make a headline.
In truth, none of us knew
the real O’Neill, which is the way the man seems to have wanted it. Before the
last issue of H&V, I wrote an article which unfortunately had to be spiked
due to O’Neill doing his Road Runner impression (bitter, moi?) but which was
kindly published online by the editorial team. In it, I touched on how O’Neill
and his supposed mentor Brian Clough used the press to stage manage their
public image. Clough used a player strike to try and force the hand of the
Derby board into giving him his job back, and it’s the kind of thing you might
expect O’Neill to try.
But what exactly did the
man want from Lerner and Paul Faulkner? The man already ran the club like a
personal fiefdom. Nothing emerged from Villa Park without the express say-so of
O’Neill and his press chiefs. It was as if the stadium was the football equivalent
of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory; loads of people running around behind
frosted glass, but the doors didn’t open until the main man was ready.
The legend has it that
O’Neill ran because he wanted to sign Aiden McGeady and Robbie Keane and the
board thought either the fees or the wages, or both, were excessive. They had
seen the large contracts given to players who were not getting anywhere near
the first eleven and they baulked. The party line is that the board should have
acquiesced because O’Neill is a managerial legend, and Villa will forever be
doomed to wander the corridor of 6th to 9th because of
short-sighted parsimony.
But as with all cults of
personality, the image only stays in place if the central character is still
around. Within days of O’Neill’s departure, players who had seen their
opportunities limited broke ranks to denounce his methods. In the cold light of
day, his psychology began to seem cruel rather than necessary. One player told
how on the summer tour to Portugal, O’Neill barely raised himself off his seat,
not because he was stewing over transfer funds but because he assumed he was a
shoo-in for the Liverpool job.
Now that O’Neill’s gone,
the steady job of dismantling his cult of personality has to begin. It’s
already been mostly achieved – many fans who marvelled at the way West Ham were
eviscerated mentioned how they hadn’t seen Villa play with such freedom for a
long time, but now we have a new boss, it’s important that he puts his own
stamp onto the job. He has to set the boundaries between what is his job and
what is everybody else’s – he picks the team, decides which transfers to
target, and the other tough decisions for which he earns his bread. But in the
weeks following O’Neill’s departure, we have seen Randy Lerner and his team
reclaim their club and act with good grace and trust for the people that
decided to tough it out. For that they must be commended to the full extent
that we allow.
To me, Martin O’Neill
wasn’t a monster, a failure, a marvel or a pioneer. He had just reached a point
where the hype had overtaken the ability. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever know
the truth behind what went wrong with him and the club, but one thing is
certain – no matter what the legend, we were never Martin O’Neill’s Aston
Villa, and always Aston Villa Football Club.
Chris Stanley
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