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 6^th to 9^th 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