Martin O'Neill: The Biography

by Alex Montgomery (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2003

  $3.25

  Martin O'Neill is the most successful and intriguing of the new manager/coaches to emerge from British football. This biography deals with every aspect of O'Neill's life and career from the early days as a player in Northern Ireland to joining the tyrannical Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest. It chronicles O'Neill's managerial triumphs from non-league Grantham Town, Shepshed Dynamo and Wycombe Wanderers, to Norwich City and Leicester City, then on to Celtic where he broke Rangers monopoly on Scottish football. The author offers an insight into the beliefs, the lifestyle, the ambitions, the hopes and the fears of a private and complex football man. He examines the effect sectarianism had on O'Neill's formative years and how the prosperity he has brought to all his clubs as player and manager was only to be expected by those who knew his intensity of purpose from the moment he quit law studies and left his Kilrea home in 1971. O'Neill was the first Roman Catholic captain of Northern Ireland, under manager Billy Bingham - it was a partnership that was to produce unprecedented success for the Northern Irish in the 1982 World Cup finals in Spain. But his defining career moment came before Nottingham Forest's first European Cup final when he was dropped by Clough. The impact that had on the young Martin O'Neill formed his philosophy in dealing with players in years to come.