This post is sponsored by Victor Chandler. Click below to claim your free £25 bet!
I know for a fact that many fans in our support, even now, see Martin O’Neill as a messiah who was crudely kicked out the door by our board. Here, in their eyes, was the salvation of the club, and he was got rid of in acrimonious circumstances.
Or so they would lead you to believe. On Thursday, Martin O’Neill began court proceedings against Aston Villa as part of a tribunal. The ongoing resolution of this tribunal will be shrouded in secrecy, however the fact that the litigious Martin O’Neill is in court is hardly a surprise.
Why I hear you ask? As I mentioned many times in comments for a blog I used to write for, Martin O’Neill is very quick to sue. He was very quick to sue some good friends of mine at Sky for pieces that they wrote regarding his behaviour, and it was hardly the first time that he has issues court orders against organisations, people, and anyone who dare question him.
The real Martin?
You see, for many years, many of the fans were blinded by the “successes” we had. I put the word “successes” in quotation marks for several reasons. The first is that we didn’t actually win anything. The second is that whilst we finished sixth, we treated the Europa League with contempt. How a man can strive so hard to get to Europe, then totally fall apart when playing in it, is beyond me. I say it is beyond me, but the reason we only got sixth was because we didn’t bother with squad rotation. Not one bit.
Every year, O’Neill would be questioned by journalists who would, on many occasions and across multiple seasons, say that he had used the fewest players in the Premier League. Each time, the question would be answered with a surprised “I didn’t realise” as though Martin was somehow oblivious to the fact he was only using a small numbers of players.
Let me take time to just say that Martin O’Neill is far from a fool. Oh no, he is a very intelligent and calculating man. Anyone who has a desire to study forensics, crime cases, and the like is far from an idiot. On the contrary, the man is very calculating. He left Villa at a calculated time to cause the most damage to our club.
After all, you don’t leave a club on a whim. You leave a club because you’ve thought about it. If you have a rolling contract, you say at the end of the season that you want to leave and then you go. You do it that way because it gives the club a chance to find a successor.
Walked out? Pushed? The reality is a lot more dark
When Martin left, there was silence. There was a statement where O’Neill professed his love for the club, and then there was nothing.
Some might have said it was because the board were keeping things quiet, others might have said it was because O’Neill had nothing more to say. The facts of the matter were far worse than that.
As I said for months on the other blog I used to write for, Martin O’Neill walked out on Villa not because he couldn’t get the transfer money from James Milner’s swap deal (although that was part of his justification), but because the next season would have meant facing up to failure.
It would have meant agreeing with Lerner’s damning view of the financial state of the club when it came to wages. A wage bill which caused the appointment of Paul Faulkner to start cost cutting. Wages, I hasten to add, that were furnished on average players at his behest before Randy said enough is enough.
It would have meant selling a number of high cost players to other clubs, effectively admitting that the purchases he made were wrong.
It would have meant, above anything else, that Martin O’Neill the brand would be called into question.
That could never happen. After all, if the brand was called into question, how else would this man get another job in football, let alone a club anywhere near the size of ours? Not long after he left the club, people touted him for Liverpool, for England, for any top job that became available. It didn’t happen. The closest was a failed bid by West Ham.
Even now, many journalists question why Houllier was given the money to buy Bent but O’Neill wasn’t. The act as though O’Neill was on the brink. On the brink of making Villa a very successful club. These people know nothing.
They make the statements because they don’t know the club. They haven’t got a clue. They don’t realise (or rather didn’t realise) that players like Steve Sidwell were on £50k a week. They don’t know the man beyond a few brief words at a press conference. They don’t know the tension that started after Paul Faulkner was brought in. In short, they don’t see the inside story. They don’t see the truth.
Well, finally, it appears the truth will become more than a few comments I whisper on fan pages. The truth is about to come out, and it may not work out too well for our former messiah.
The Author
