Martin O’Neill hopes ‘tough to handle’ Roy Keane will join him at Nottingham Forest

Martin O’Neill wants to bring the “tough to handle” Roy Keane with him to Nottingham Forest, and claimed that Ireland would never have qualified for the 2016 European Championships without his former assistant.

O’Neill, speaking to the media for the first time since his appointment as manager of the club he won two European Cups with as a player, expressed his desire to reunite the coaching team that took charge of the Republic of Ireland team for four-and-a-half years, despite the friction between Keane and a number of Irish players that coloured the latter days of his reign.

“I would dearly like him to join us,” O’Neill said. “He has a couple of things to really mull over and I would really like him to come to the football club if he could. We’ve had discussions. There is a spot open for him. I hope that will happen, it may not.

“He was a great asset to me at Ireland, we had some really great days. He was tough to handle, no doubt at all, but you know that with him. It’s what makes him special.”

O’Neill said the two men hadn’t spoken much about working together again, since their time with the national team ended in November.

“We had a cup of tea together but never really discussed these things,” he said. “He had things [a family holiday] planned and other things.

“So he has had genuinely very little time to consider anything coming his way.”

Keane clashed with several Ireland players towards the end of his time as O’Neill’s assistant there, most notably Harry Arter and Jon Walters, clashes that were revealed through a leaked WhatsApp recording from Stephen Ward.

However, when asked about the manner in which Keane dealt with the Ireland players in that time, O’Neill defended his man stoutly, though admitting that despite working together for nearly five years, he was unsure “if I knew him at all.”

O’Neill said: “He was great for the players. The genuine truth is that I don’t think that we would have qualified for the Euros (in 2016) without his presence. Overall, he was great for me. I have been unflinching in that support.”

Steve Guppy and goalkeeping coach Seamus McDonagh have already joined O’Neill’s backroom staff at the City Ground, with discussions ongoing as to whether Keane will join them. O’Neill said that he would not be putting any pressure on Keane to make a decision either way.

O’Neill was more cagey about broader questions on his spell with Ireland, particularly when asked if he thought the criticism of his last year in charge was too harsh.

“I would not even answer that,” he began. “We qualified for the Euros and had a really good spell, and we were a game away from World Cup qualification. In the last year we did not have very good results. Five of the nine games were friendly matches. As I told you before, one was away to France a couple of days before the World Cup and we played away in Poland and we played away in Turkey with a side that we were experimenting with. Mick [McCarthy] now has taken over and Mick will know not to take on those type of friendly matches.”

O’Neill has only signed an 18-month contract at Forest, which might seem like a short-term option but is probably realistic at a club who are already on the third manager in the last 18 months, since owner Evangelos Marinakis took over in the summer of 2017. However, O’Neill was clear that if they won promotion back to the Premier League for the first time since 1999, he would look to extend his stay.

“This is it, this is what I want to do,” O’Neill, whose first Forest match will be against Bristol City tomorrow, said.

“I’m here for 18 months and if we can’t get up then I’ll hand it over to somebody else to see if they can. If we made it up I think yes [I would stay for longer] if I retain that enthusiasm for it. I feel very young, I’ve always done that because I think that’s from working with young players. If I make it to 18 months that will mean that we might have had a chance.”

It was interesting that O’Neill essentially set himself a deadline of this season or next to win promotion, an acknowledgment of the short-termism of modern football.

“I have to do this [win promotion] now,” he said. “Time is pressing. No-one gets any time these days, and the minute you step into a football club, it doesn’t matter, you’re expected to get going immediately. People take your stats from the minute you walk in the door, it doesn’t matter whether you know the players or not, and no one cares really, from the outside. You have to go and do it.”

This is not the first chance O’Neill has had at managing Forest. The most notable occasion was in 1993, when Brian Clough retired — that time he opted to stay with Wycombe Wanderers and eventually went to Norwich, then Leicester City, Celtic, Aston Villa and Sunderland, but there have been a number of other approaches in the intervening 26 years.

“I had opportunities to manage the team and I didn’t take them at the time,” he said. “I think there was always the part that you had a great old playing time, it was fantastic, and maybe it just didn’t feel like the timing was right.

“It would be great to get this club back up. It would be fantastic and that’s why I’ve taken it on. I want to really give it everything I’ve got. I want to live every single day of it. At some stage or another Nottingham Forest are going to get up. Obviously, I would love to do it.”