There are some things you just can’t control.
That was the message that former Nottingham Forest boss Martin O’Neill wanted to get across when reflecting on his time at the City Ground.
Speaking in an interview with Chris Sutton in The Daily Mail, O’Neill spoke about his time at Nottingham Forest, and compared it to the other clubs that he has worked at in the past, and one thing that was different about the City Ground and the others was about the amount of control that he had:
“I was in charge at Leicester, at Celtic, at Aston Villa, where the chairman of the club was Randy Lerner, whose father had owned the Cleveland Browns. He wanted to make his own mark on football and thought there were parallels between Cleveland and Birmingham. He felt Villa was a club he could do something with, and he put me in charge. But at Sunderland and Forest, I was absolutely not in charge because other people wanted to run the clubs.”
Should O'Neill have been given more time with us?
Yes
No
I think that might go some way to explaining why he didn’t last quite as long at the club as perhaps he could have. We’ve seen what he is capable of when he is given control of teams, but with Forest that just wasn’t the case.
And whilst a ‘players revolt’ might have paved the way for his departure last summer, if the team was looking a lot more positive and up the table, as he’s shown in his previous jobs, then would the players have been willing to put the club in such a position? It’s hard to tell.
What about you? What do you make of O’Neill’s comments? Do you think he should have been allowed more control at Forest?
