Martin O'Neill

Same here mate, i hope we can match or better the Seville achievement again.

 

https://thesmmediaent.wordpress.com...ls-celtic-signings-from-worst-to-best-part-2/

 

It was on this day 22 years ago, June 1, 2000 that Martin O’Neill became manager of Celtic Football Club.

And so began a period of success as the club’s first Treble since 1969 heralded a run of silverware, scorelines and performances that made the first part of the new Millennium so enjoyable and memorable.

Here we take a look at the background to that success.

THE ARRIVAL
Celtic got their man, eventually, after a lot of negotiations, and the deal was signed, sealed and delivered on June 1, 2000. The Irishman admitted that while it was difficult to leave Leicester City, the decision to sign for Celtic only “took two seconds”. Thousands of fans gathered outside the front doors to welcome their new leader and after he was paraded to the media, they greeted him with a rapturous reception. "It's an absolute honour for me to be the manager here, an absolute honour," he told the adoring fans but it was his following sentence that went down in Celtic history. "I will do everything I possibly can to bring some success to this club”, he said – and they were right to brace themselves for the return of the glory days.




TREBLE TREAT FIRST TIME OUT
It could be argued that the season started when new manager Martin O’Neill stood on the front stairs of Celtic Park in front of a packed crowd and proclaimed the aforementioned: "I will do everything I possibly can to bring some success to this football club." Prophetic words indeed, however, the competitive fight kicked-off on July 30 when the Hoops visited Tannadice for a tough league opener against Dundee United. That was taster for things to come with the season being typified with the 6-2 win over Rangers. With six SPL games left, Celtic met St Mirren at Celtic Park and a 60,440 crowd saw a fluffed shot from Tommy Johnson being enough to clinch a 1-0 win and the title Celtic beat Stranraer, Dunfermline and Hearts in the Scottish Cup and a week after beating the Tynecastle side, they beat Kilmarnock 3-0 in the League Cup final. Dundee United were next in the Scottish Cup semi and that left the final on May 26, Celtic and Hibernian lined up at Hampden for the final. A double from Larsson and another from Jackie McNamara delivered another 3-0 final win and the treble.




THE LEAGUE
That was the first of three league title at Celtic for Martin O’Neill and the August 27, 2000 6-2 thrashing of Rangers really stamped the Irishman’s arrival at the club and paved the way of that all-important first title. His second title came the very next season and it was a thumping 5-0 home win over Livingston on April 6, 2002, featuring a seemingly obligatory Henrik Larsson hat-trick that sealed the ‘2-Good’ title while John Hartson also chipped in with a couple of goals. There was annoying heartbreak the following term when just days after Seville, the Celtic were pipped at the post by one goal in the title race. However, the following year the trophy was back in Paradise as a 1-0 win over Kilmarnock at Rugby Park thanks to a Stiliyan Petrov goal on April 18, 2004 sealed Martin O’Neill’s third Celtic title with six games still to go.



THE LEAGUE CUP
There was only one League Cup win for Martin O’Neill but it was a major win that proved to be a springboard to a trophy treble in his first season as Celtic manager. The road there started with a 4-0 win over Raith Rovers on Alan Thompson’s debut and that was followed up with a 5-2 win after extra-time over Hearts at Tynecastle. Next up were Rangers in the semi-final with the Celts wining 3-1 and three red cards being produced in the final minute at Hampden. Returning to the National Stadium on March 18 to face Kilmarnock in the final, it was a second-half hat-trick from Henrik Larsson that delivered Martin O’Neill’s first trophy as Hoops manager


THE SCOTTISH CUP
The third part of the treble, the Scottish Cup win on May 26, 2000 was the first of three Scottish Cup wins for Martin O’Neill and on May 22, 2004, the Irishman delivered the second of those wins. Dunfermline provide the opposition and again, all of the Celtic goals came in the second half but the difference this time was that the Fife side were 1-0 ahead at half-time. However, Henrik Larsson equalised and then put the Hoops ahead before Stiliyan Petrov settled things with the third goal in the 3-1 win. The following season, in what was his last competitive game as Celtic manager, Martin O’Neill collected his seventh trophy with the club as Alan Thompson scored the only goal of the game against Dundee United at Hampden



EUROPE
Martin O’Neill was in charge of Celtic for 53 European ties and that fact that this is an odd rather than an even number is a major clue that there’s a final in there. And, without doubt, despite the heartbreak of losing to Porto after extra-time in the final, the UEFA Cup road to Seville was the highlight of the Irishman’s European games in charge. The first seed of the return to challenging in Europe, however, were sown in 2000 when progressing past Ajax took Celtic into the group stages of the UEFA Champions League for the first time. Just two seasons later, the likes of Blackburn Rovers, Celta Vigo, Stuttgart, Liverpool and Boavista were all defeated on the road to Seville before the Hoops met Porto. By the time of his departure, in the summer of 2005, Martin O’Neill had lifted the league title three times, Scottish Cup three times and the League Cup once, not forgetting four Manager of the Year awards and that remarkable run to the UEFA Cup final in 2002/03. A living legend and a Celtic great – he has rightly taken his place in the club’s history books.





CELTIC UNDER MARTIN O'NEILL


P W D L F A GD

League 190 156 19 15 472 133 339

League Cup 15 10 1 4 47 15 32

Scottish Cup 24 21 1 2 62 13 49

Europe 53 26 8 19 85 55 30

Domestic 229 187 21 21 581 161 420

Total 282 213 29 40 666 216 450

487 league points amassed

 

MARTIN O’NEILL’S stint as Celtic manager may have ended almost two decades ago but the former Parkhead boss admits that he still looks forward to returning to Glasgow whenever the opportunity arises.

The 70-year-old enjoyed a fruitful five-year stint in the city’s east end at the turn of the century and is still held in high regard by supporters following his successes at Celtic.

O’Neill’s career took him and his family to Aston Villa, Sunderland, the Republic of Ireland and Nottingham Forest in his years after leaving Scotland but the Northern Irishman insists there is nowhere else quite like Glasgow.




I’ve honestly missed it so much,” he said. “Seriously. My wife, who hated every place she’d been to in her life, absolutely loved it in Scotland.

“If she ever goes to heaven – which she won’t – she’d complain about that as well! But she loved it here and I was the same. It was great.

“You’d wake up and look out the window and not know if it was June or October. But that didn’t matter to us coming from Northern Ireland.”


The occasional trip to watch Celtic has lifted O’Neill’s spirits and reminded him of his glory days as the man at the helm of the Parkhead club – although his children appear to be more enthralled with the team’s current manager, Ange Postecoglou, than their dad.


I came up to do the Motherwell game with Stillyan Petrov and the atmosphere and the singing, it brings it all back to you,” O’Neill said.

“I had great days, the torch is passed, the manger is going great and it all looks rosy. I did five years – it was like five minutes. I do miss it, absolutely.

“You will always do that. I think the dying breath will be, was there a game on Saturday?

“I have two daughters and one of them is now a bigger Celtic fan now than when I was manager, which is a major disappointment to me!

“She’s running around – ‘Ange, Ange, Ange’. She’s got a three-year-old who is in front of the TV shouting, ‘come on Celtic!’.”

 

For anyone who fancy O'Neill's Autobiography here's a link



Enjoy bhoys and Ghirls.

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Nothing there mate

 

Hopefully works this time?

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Hope the link's working this time mate.

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Got it now my man

 

Awesome

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Top man

 

Martin O'Neill has revealed how he would actively encourage his assistants John Robertson and Steve Walford to form bonds with the Celtic players to foster dressing-room trust.

The Northern Irishman insists that while he wasn't quite stand-offish during his successful five-year stint at Parkhead between 2000 and 2005, he still kept his distance at times to let Robertson and Walford deal with the daily grind.

O'Neill, now 70, concedes that he had complete faith in his former Nottingham Forest team-mate Robertson as well as ex-West Ham and Arsenal player Walford.


He reckons the trio's managerial relationship was akin to that of Brian Clough and Peter Taylor, who guided O'Neill and Robertson's Nottingham Forest side to back-to-back European Cup wins in 1979 and 1980.

So in tune were the three that star players such as Henrik Larsson would virtually have free reign to look after themselves - short of committing larceny, that is.


"I had absolute trust in John Robertson and Steve Walford," O'Neill told The Celtic Way. "I could trust them with anything. We were a strong unit and trio. We were a three-man unit.



We could have our own decisions and conversations about things and once we had made our minds up about things I would trust them implicitly. They would not be going behind my back and saying 'I wouldn't have picked that team' even if we had been beaten in a game. They wouldn't do that.

"Steve was a brilliant coach. He was so laid back - and he was a hypochondriac but when you got him out on that training field he was a new man. He was absolutely terrific.

"John was just about as perfect an assistant manager as you could get. I wasn't totally aloof from the players but I kind of stayed a step back from them at times. I did interact with them and we had strong interactions but I stepped back and allowed John and Steve to enjoy the players' trust and company.

"I told John 'unless Henrik Larsson has committed robbery or something more serious than that then don't bother me or tell me about trivial things'. We would discuss serious things like family issues but the little things I wasn't concerned with.

"After a while, the players had the trust of the two assistant coaches and it was very strong. It was exactly what I wanted as John and Steve were great with the players. They were well-loved because they were good characters but they were also top-notch at their jobs and the players knew exactly what roles these boys would have.

"When Nottingham Forest had the Brian Clough/Peter Taylor management relationship and dynamic there were many members of the board who did not understand what Taylor's role at the club was.

"I thought it was incredibly disrespectful to Peter Taylor. Peter was brilliant for Brian Clough and incredible for Nottingham Forest. That never ever occurred at Celtic as the board knew what John Robertson and Steve Walford brought to the party. John and Steve's roles were really important to me as well as to the Celtic players at that time."








Former Celtic boss Martin O'Neill has revealed that there was no way on earth that John Hartson was ever going to fail a medical in Paradise.

The Welshman famously saw a deal to city rivals Rangers collapse in 2000 after he failed a medical at Ibrox due to a knee problem.

The Hoops went on to have the last laugh as Hartson bagged 110 goals for the club in a five-and-a-half-year spell after signing for O'Neill a year later.

The Nothern Irishman concedes that he initially brought Hartson in to challenge the prolific goalscoring duo of Henrik Larsson and Chris Sutton - but insists the Wales international would have passed his Celtic medical no matter what.




"I had a number of thoughts about it as Henrik Larsson and Chris Sutton had been terrific in the first season for me," he said. "Sometimes you get a little bit lucky in the injury sense and two of my main players were not out for any real length of time.


"I did think 'if anything happens to either of those two where is our goal power coming from?' If we were going to try and make inroads in European football and remain competitive and retain the league then I needed to do something about it.




So John Hartson came along and he had failed a medical at Rangers. That didn't bother me as he had played 20 consecutive games for Coventry City. At the end of the day if you want a player to pass a medical - he will. If you want them to fail it then they will fail it.

"I just felt that John could come in, he was very strong and I thought he could do a good job. I told John when he first come in that it was his task to break the Larsson-Sutton partnership up. John was going to have to try to do that and initially he was concerned about that as Henrik had a wonderful reputation and Chris was a fine player.

"What I didn't know was that Chris could play in a number of positions like centre-half and midfield - although not as well as Chris says he did!

"He could give you that extra goal power from defence and midfield. If anything happened to any one of them then I could swap things around.

"As it happened Hartson came in and did really well and scored the goals and was very, very strong. Between the three of them I knew Celtic had goals in them if all three could play in the same side.

"I thought they could do it but if Chris hadn't been so versatile then we might be talking about something else entirely."

 

Martin O'Neill readily admits that Jackie McNamara was the most underrated player in his successful Celtic side.

O'Neill believes that the former captain did not get the credit he fully deserved when he played for the Hoops and that he really was an unsung hero of his team.

The Northern Irishman won three league titles, three Scottish Cups and a Scottish League Cup during five years at the managerial helm in Glasgow's east end

O'Neill revealed that McNamara was a ferocious competitor and that some two decades later he is only just beginning to realise how good a player McNamara actually was.


When asked if there were any players during his five-year managerial stint at Parkhead that did not receive enough credit, O'Neill said: "Jackie McNamara for a start. The reason he doesn't is essentially down to me. It took me a while to realise how good a player Jackie Mac was. He could play in a number of positions. He may have been a baby-faced fella but he was fiercely competitive.


"He would have put the shoe into you - no question. That's an old Gaelic (GAA football) term from back home when the boys back home were having a Sunday kickabout we'd say 'let's stick the shoe into them' rather than stick the boot into them. It is an old Irish phrase from my Gaelic days that comes out now and again.

"Jackie Mac did a great job for Celtic and he was terrific. Looking back on things now I probably did not really give Jackie the credit he was due as a player but I did give him the credit he deserved in the dressing room. I am now making that up to him some 20 years later."

O'Neill also conceded that 'Gift from *' Lubomir Moravcik was the most gifted player he played with in terms of technical ability with either foot - even though he initially harboured doubts about the mercurial midfielder being able to hack it in Scottish football.

"Lubomir Moravcik was the best two-footed player I ever worked with," said O'Neill. "I will tell you what is an absolute certainty if he had been 27 or 33 when he signed for Celtic we would have won the UEFA Cup.

"He would have made a blinding difference. I know Henrik Larsson was a magnificent player for us and he was superb in the UEFA cup final but Moravcik could do stuff in and around the penalty area turning people inside out and you only have to go back to see what the great Zinedine Zidane said about him. Zidane said he was one of the game's terrific players. Moravcik was a brilliant player.

"To my eternal discredit, we had been hopeless against Leipzig in a pre-season friendly after I had been in charge for a couple of weeks. Leipzig was not in the Bundesliga then but they were a struggling Third Division team and I had to say something to the players and it was not good news.

"I said to Lubo: 'You need to run around a bit more or else you will not play for this team.' Lubo looked at me and said 'Running? That's not in my contract, just give me the ball. I'll deal with the ball.' My goodness, Lubo could deal with the ball.

"Neil Lennon was also brilliant for me and Paul Lambert sometimes gets overlooked as he was a brilliant character in the dressing room. He wanted to play all the time and if you dropped him for a match then he'd moan like *. He actually reminded me of me when I was a player as nobody likes to get left out of the team.

"Then there was Didier Agathe who we signed for £50,000 as well as Joos Valgaeren and Alan Thompson. All of these players coming into the team and the club, when they did, was good for Celtic.

"Henrik profited most from the likes of Agathe and Thompson as their runs and deliveries were on point for him most of the time and he has admitted that himself many times."



















I will do everything I possibly can to bring some success to this football club."

The words of Martin O'Neill when he greeted the Hoops faithful on the steps outside the famous glass doors at Celtic Park on June 1 2000.

The Northern Irishman would take Celtic on a magic carpet ride for the next five years where he would win three SPL titles, three Scottish Cups, one Scottish League cup and of course lead them into their first European final for 33 years where the Hoops succumbed to Jose Mourinho's Porto.




From the outset, though O'Neill was up against a rampant Rangers under * Advocaat and after experiencing success with Wycombe Wanderers and Leicester City, the Celtic supporters expected.

All O'Neill had back then was his words - he had to make sure they quickly became his bond.

"Whatever words I said to the Celtic supporters the day I was unveiled as the manager, the only promise I could give them was that I was going to do my utmost give my very best," O'Neill, who has just released a book about his life in football called On Days Like These told The Celtic Way.


"Up until I managed Celtic I had managed at Wycombe Wanderers and had a bit of success there which gave me confidence then I went to Norwich City and then to Leicester City. I didn't win early on at Leicester and the crowd became very restless and they become more than restless they became downright unaccommodating in many aspects. I finally won the fans over there and the last thing I wanted at Celtic was to get off to the kind of start I did at Leicester or else I knew it might be a long way back.




What Leicester taught me was that if you put your heart and soul into the job and prepare yourself as much as possible and get to know the players as quickly as possible then those things stand you in decent stead. Nothing ever prepares you for going to Celtic, I mean that.

"I assume the same can be said if you were the Rangers manager. I felt at that time that I was equipped as best as I possibly could be for the Celtic job but if I had realised just how strong Rangers were I might have turned the car back around again and headed back to East Midlands."

Having inherited a pretty shambolic regime following the disastrous reign of the Hoops supposed dream team of John Barnes and Kenny Dalglish, O'Neill set about his task with gusto.

His first-ever signing for the club was to prove crucial for the fortunes of Celtic for years to come as the £6million he shelled out on Chelsea striker Chris Sutton turned out to be, in O'Neill's own words 'a landscape-changer'.

"As an Old Firm manager, I knew I was not going to get a lot of time," said O'Neill. "There had been tough times at Celtic in the previous months notwithstanding the League Cup win of 2000. I felt if nothing else I might get a couple of months to try and build the team and I felt I might earn a bit of grace if I at least stayed competitive with Rangers.

"I think that was a semi-consolation in the back of my head. In pre-season, Henrik Larsson was playing at the Euros with Sweden and wasn't really fit. Mark Viduka left the club and then I spent the money on bringing in Chris Sutton.




I didn't mention this in the book as he would have got a massively big head but the signing of Chris Sutton was an absolute landscape changer for us in every aspect. We attracted a big game player to Celtic. Mark Viduka was a good player and he went on to prove himself at Leeds United but he did not want to stay at the club.

"Chris wanted to come up to Celtic. He wanted to get out of London. After being successful with Blackburn Rovers and winning the English Premier League title he was having a tough old time at Chelsea hence that's why we got him at a cut price fee of £6million. His relationship with Henrik on and off the field was absolutely crucial particularly in the early months when it was important that we won football games."

Celtic had lost the title to Advocaat's Rangers by a massive 21 points the preceding season. That prompted O'Neill to famously label the Light Blues as 'the benchmark' in Scottish football.

He wasn't joking either. The then 48-year-old manager felt that Rangers were truly the real deal and just five games into the new season Celtic would find it all out for themselves when they faced the Govan outfit at Parkhead.

Things couldn't have turned out any better as the Hoops swept their bitter rivals aside 6-2 with Henrik Larsson and new signing Sutton both notching doubles. However, in the corresponding fixture at Ibrox in November they slumped to a 5-1 hammering.

"Rangers absolutely were the benchmark. This was not a false call," O'Neill added. "They were a strong team. If you look at the players they had and my own view is that this Rangers side was as strong as they've had in the last 30 years and I include Water Smith's team who reached the 2008 UEFA cup final in that. They had a European pedigree goalkeeper and players all over the pitch who were big and strong and led by a young Barry Ferguson.

"When we beat them 6-2 not only was it fantastically exciting and genuinely great it gave us the confidence to go on and take on the rest of the season and even though they turned us over at Ibrox in the next game when we couldn't defend one set-piece we had enough confidence to withstand that loss and fight on.

"I thought Chris coming into the football club as early as he did was a catalyst for now that season panned out. If we had waited a couple of months and we had no replacement lined up for Viduka then that 6-2 game against Rangers which people viewed as a big turning point may never have happened if he had not come to the football club when he did.

"I enjoyed every accolade that came my way after the 6-2 match. In actual fact, I thought that I must be a really good manager! Then I got a real wake-up call in November at Ibrox and that was as an intimidating atmosphere for us as it must have been for Rangers in August.

"We were physically smashed. We were not able to compete properly. It was a genuine concern as Rangers were just too powerful for us on the day. I thought 'is this going to be a common occurrence for us, especially at Ibrox?' Those sorts of things worry you, they really do.




A couple of days later we drew against Hibs at Easter Road and that was five points dropped in two games and I started to think 'are the wheels starting to come off here?' I had all sorts of negative thoughts running through my head and I had to banish them.

"We came roaring back and were able to take the title in the end. What was wonderful about that league win was that every week when Rangers got a result we seemed to respond well to that pressure. Suddenly I felt that they lost the desire to chase us and we almost serenely won it at the end - but it never felt like that until we were nine or 10 points clear."

Celtic not only lifted to the Scottish Premiership title but they completed the clean sweep of domestic trophies to clinch the club's first treble since 1969. All of a sudden, O'Neill was being hailed in the same breath as the legendary Jock Stein.

The man himself was having none of that, though.

"It was a terrific season for Celtic but for anyone to be compared with Jock Stein in any aspect then you need your head examined," O'Neill said. "The 1967 team, the first British team to win the European Cup, is a phenomenal achievement considering what was happening in European football at that time. The Italians and the English leagues were so strong, England had just won the World Cup in 1966 and Manchester United would win it the following year after Celtic did. What an achievement that was. Jock Stein is rightfully immortalised and so is that 1967 team.

"For us to win a treble for the first time since 1969 was great. I hadn't realised the possibility of it being on after we won the League Cup against Kilmarnock and we pulled clear in the league race. Not until that final whistle goes and you win the Scottish Cup and you achieve it, then it sinks in."

The title win gave Celtic access to the Champions League qualifiers where Ajax were swatted aside 3-1 in the Amsterdam ArenA in one of European football's finest away performances by a Scottish club to date.

O'Neill's men would book their place in the group stages proper but - despite amassing an incredible nine points courtesy of three home wins against Rosenborg, Porto and Juventus - they incredibly still bowed out of the tournament.

The Hoops were robbed of a crucial away point during a 3-2 defeat against the Old Lady in the Stadio Delle Alpi in Turin on matchday one which led to the manager giving a famous TV interview when he repeatedly branded the last-gasp penalty decision for the Italians as "shocking".

So incredulous was O'Neill at the award that he uttered the word many times over in a classic clip and although Celtic would gain ample revenge on Juventus when they defeated them 4-3 in a Champions League classic at Parkhead on matchday six it was not enough to see the Hoops through to the knockout phase.

"Celtic played to an exceptionally high standard in European football back then," said O'Neill. "The Juventus game was really hurtful because that was our first foray into the Champions League. The penalty in that game really was shocking as we had brought it back to 2-2 from 2-0 down. The point we should have gained that night turned out to be the one that stopped us from going into the group stages - you never know what might have happened after that.


We played a team in the UEFA Cup final in 2003 in FC Porto that went on to win the Champions League the following year with more or less the same team. That is the sort of standard you are talking about.

"The game against Juventus at home was terrific. To accrue nine points and not being good enough to qualify still astounds me to this day. I never used the excuse that it was Celtic's first time in the Champions League. I wanted to go in and compete because I knew I had a group of players who were capable of winning these big games. We competed well against most European heavyweights back then."

Triumph and then heartache on the European stage was to follow in 2003 as O'Neill led Celtic to their first European final in 33 years.

The UEFA Cup run and journey to the final in Seville was a series of stunning highs as Celtic knocked out the likes of Blackburn Rovers, Celta Vigo, VfB Stuttgart and Liverpool en route to Jose Mourinho's Porto in Seville.

That 2003 showpiece is one of two games, alongside Helicopter Sunday in 2004-05, that still haunts the great man.

"Winning the treble in my first season at Celtic was wonderful but the two things that keep me awake at night are the UEFA Cup final and Motherwell," he confirmed. "Those two are standout moments and Celtic should have had two more trophies on the board."



In Seville, Porto would administer the crushing low blow despite a super-human performance from Henrik Larsson who notched a brace on the night Celtic agonisingly lost a classic final by the odd goal in five.

"I have never watched the game back in its entirety," O'Neill said. "I have seen clips here and there and I cannot abide it as I know what's coming next. It is the same now as it was 20 years later on that particular day.

"It certainly doesn't get any better over time. It is really hard to take considering the importance of the game and how it was played out. Every single football club can use tactics to gain an advantage but the playacting was pitiful at times.

"Every time they scored a goal they ran to Porto to celebrate! The referee was too young and inexperienced to cope and handle a game of that magnitude. He couldn't deal with the occasion. They were allowed to over-indulge and they didn't need to as they had a squad full of talented players.

"What makes it worse is that the Celtic fans talk about the journey to Seville and the UEFA cup run, in general, being the journey of a lifetime then you would have loved to have clinched it for them and finished it off by winning the trophy."

Despite those regrets, what cannot be argued by any Celtic supporter is that Martin O'Neill did everything in his power to bring some success to the football club.

He did that - and then some.

 

What a fantastic read that is. Brings back so so many happy life memories spent with friends and family during them years watching us during O'Neils spell, either at the matches or out watching it. Some amazing times that team brought for all of us. Funnily enough, me and the mate was out last week before a concert here in Mayo and into the local Celtic pub before it for a few. A large picture of that team with the treble and both of us just laughed and said what a * team that was!

 

He just seemed to build us the complete team that could take on the best in Europe for a relatively small budget.

 

Martin O'Neill, Martin O'Neill.
Martin O'Neill, Martin O'Neill.
Martin O'Neill, Martin O'Neill.
Martin O'Neill, Martin O'Neill.

Some tune.