Martin O’Neill must change or be changed

A couple of months after Martin O’Neill took a sabbatical from football management to help look after his then ill wife Geraldine, this writer interviewed someone who had played minor inter-county Gaelic football with one of O’Neill’s great foot soldiers at Parkhead, Neil Lennon.

Kieran McGeeney was in a particularly expansive mood ahead of the 2005 Ulster final, talking about everything from the benefits of taking up yoga to Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins to why he liked Any Given Sunday so much.

What resonated most with him about Oliver Stone’s film wasn’t the renowned Inches speech which his team famously adopted and popularised before it would become so clichéd: it was that by the end of the film its central figure, Al Pacino’s Tony D’Amoto, had changed. The cent had dropped with him: what had won and worked for him in the past was no longer winning and working.