FourFourTwo is walking through London with Martin O’Neill, trying to remember the name of John Cleese’s third wife.
“It wasn’t Connie Booth, the one he co-wrote Fawlty Towers with – I think he’s on good terms with her,” O’Neill muses. This wasn’t the conversation we expected with a double European Cup winner, but he seems happy to talk about pretty much anything.
The former Nottingham Forest player and Celtic manager had suggested meeting FFT outside Sloane Square tube station before wandering to a café – a pleasing throwback in itself, as few interviews in this modern era start so informally. Now 70, he has been living in central London since just before the pandemic. “We got here, then everyone started moving out,” the Northern Irishman rues. Since normal life returned, he’s been taking advantage of the nearby theatres and recently saw Cleese’s one-man show, based around a memoir that isn’t entirely complimentary of that third wife (Alyce Eichelberger, it turns out).
O’Neill has also been busy writing his autobiography, On Days Like These, deciding to pen it himself rather than use a ghostwriter in the way of most former footballers. We reach the café and sit in the autumn sunshine, and he’s ready to talk through his career – a career that may not be finished yet…
At St Malachy’s College in Belfast, you were involved in both GAA and football. Why did you pick football?
Natasha, via Instagram
While I enjoyed GAA, it was amateur and I wanted to become a professional footballer in England. I was smitten with Ferenc Puskas, then George Best came onto the scene. Unfortunately GAA had a rule that anyone playing soccer couldn’t play Gaelic football – ridiculous for schoolboys. St Malachy’s had a big game that should’ve been at Casement Park, the big GAA stadium in Belfast, but I wasn’t allowed to play there, so they had to move it 60 miles.
Do you value your time at Distillery?
Ronald Carruthers, via Facebook
Immensely. The manager, Jimmy McAlinden, had won the FA Cup with Portsmouth, and he was incredibly encouraging. We won the Irish Cup [in 1971], then played Barcelona in the Cup Winners’ Cup, which was amazing. Because I scored against them in the first leg at Windsor Park, it drew more attention from the English scouts, and a couple of weeks later I was playing for Nottingham Forest. [FFT: You gave up your Law studies to make that move in 1971, yes?] I didn’t think I’d have the energy to do both. Playing in the First Division had to be all-consuming.
Brian Clough became Nottingham Forest manager in 1975, with Forest in the second tier – how did he start?
Douglas Perry, Retford
He brought me back into the team. I’d had a few] In my defence, he was also arguing with John Robertson, so I wasn’t the only one! When Cloughie came in, we won a couple of games, then didn’t win for about 16 games. Because it was Brian Clough, though – a major figure being interviewed by Parkinson – and with what he’d done at Derby, we were delighted to have him and we felt that he would change things. It really happened when Peter Taylor came in 18 months later. Clough had his partner back, and suddenly we started to get results.
