As our former manager David O’Leary continues to go down in the world, there are reports tonight that he is now the favourite to take over as manager of South Humberside giants Scunthorpe United.
There must be a few stories going round in the area that the Irishman is about to get the job, because The Grimsby Telegraph are reporting that the odds of him taking over as boss of the Iron have dropped during the day from 25/1 to 6/4. Danny Wilson started as favourite but is now out to 8/1, while Martin Allen is at 14/1. They need a new manager at Glandford Park after Brian Laws was sacked yesterday.
So how did it all come to this, after O’Leary was once being hailed as one of the brightest young managers in the game? For a few glorious years at the turn of the century we all thought he was the messiah was leading us all back to the glory of the Revie days, and if anyone had told me he would be leaving the club in ignominy only a few years later I would never have believed them.
After the impressive start to his managerial career a fan of another club told me that it was all down to the strong foundations which had been built by George Graham, but I replied that he should be given credit for two changes he’d made immediately after taking the job. One was to change to a more attractive style of football and the other was to give first team opportunities to several of the talented youngsters who were just emerging from the club’s youth system.
But even during the good times I started to wonder where the money was coming from to pay for the big money signings he was starting to accumulate. The answer was that Peter Ridsdale has such faith in O’Leary’s managerial ability that he was borrowing it all on the assumption that success on the field would lead to hugely increased revenues which would pay off the loans with plenty left over.
But it was all a high wire act with no safety net and no plan B if it all went wrong. And even while O’Leary and his young team were drawing praise from all directions, the manager’s abrasive personality was becoming apparent, with a needlessly aggressive performance in a couple of interviews on TV. But of course it was the Bowyer/Woodgate trial and his unwise decision to write a book about the players he was still managing which led to the real tensions that were to tear the dressing room apart.
Though we began 2002 on top of the Premiership, the team stopped playing for O’Leary, with a 4-0 defeat by Liverpool being particularly grim, and our final position of 5th meant the financial disaster of missing out on the Champions League for the second season running. Ridsdale was going to give him until October in the next season to turn things around, but several players went behind the manager’s back to tell chairman what they thought of O’Leary’s managerial style, and he was sacked before 2002/3 had even begun.
A few years earlier he had been suggested as the next Man United manager, as Fergie’s retirement had been rumoured for the first time. At the time I was horrified at the thought of our manager being poached by our biggest rivals, in retrospect it would have been a huge blessing in disguise. Man U would have been paying Leeds compensation (instead of Leeds eventually having to pay O’Leary £4 million to go away) and the limitations of his ability would have been wonderfully exposed at Old Trafford.
A year later O’Leary was appointed as manager of Aston Villa, a job which would show once and for all whether he could manage in the Premier League, with no distractions like the trial to disrupt his progress. In some respect his time at Villa Park followed the pattern laid down at Leeds, with a reasonable start (6th in his first season) before things began to unravel. Two years later Villa were flirting with relegation, but the final straw was O’Leary’s unwise decision to get the players to write to Deadly Doug Ellis to demand further investment in the squad. When the letter was leaked to the press and the Villa chairman discovered his role in the affair, O’Leary was never going to survive.
The next stop was a club called Al-Ahil Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and this time he lasted less than a year. He was sacked after a 5-1 defeat by Al Jazira, which I thought was a TV station, though once again he was handsomely rewarded for failure. After a protracted legal battle he eventually won over £3 million in compensation for the early termination of his contract.
These days he’s clearly out of the running for the leading jobs in football. Having played 68 times for the Republic of Ireland during his playing he days he might have expected to have been a contender when that job became vacant recently, but although half a dozen names were mentioned in the press his name didn’t crop up even once before Martin O’Neill got the gig.
Instead it looks like he’s washed up at a club struggling at the wrong end of League One. So how is he likely to get on? There won’t be much point in him demanding ever increasing transfer funds from the chairman as he did at Leeds and Villa, but has he learned to curb the more aggressive side of his personality? For the sake of Scunthorpe fans we’ll have to hope so, but somehow I doubt it.