Last month, Gary O’Neil was watching videos of Leicester City, in preparation for playing Brendan Rodgers’s struggling side in a few weeks’ time, when a thought struck him. Leicester hadn’t actually been playing too badly, contrary to popular opinion.
Sure, the heavy defeats to Tottenham and Brighton reflected poorly on them, but they were playing some decent football and though finishing was letting them down they weren’t lacking in chances. O’Neil told people around him that Leicester were due a big result and, sure enough, a few days later they thumped Nottingham Forest 4-0.
That O’Neil is even in the position of preparing Bournemouth for upcoming Premier League games has come about by a fortune of circumstance and an opportunity that could barely have gone better.
Tasked with taking the reins on an interim basis when Scott Parker was sacked after the 9-0 thrashing by Liverpool, O’Neil has overseen an extraordinary resurrection that has steered Bournemouth into eighth, two points ahead of the architects of their destruction seven weeks ago (albeit having played a game more).
And these would be testing times to manage any club: a poor start to a season which they began as relegation favourites, an early managerial exit, a takeover that has rumbled on for a month now and added an element of uncertainty to the atmosphere.
Those close to O’Neil who i spoke to this week talk of a veteran of more than 200 top-flight games who has long held ambitions to remain in the game after retiring from playing, preferably as a manager. A father-of-three who has soaked up the experience and knowledge of those around him in the various junctures of his playing and coaching career to date.
O’Neil was a teenager emerging at Portsmouth when his career overlapped with Eddie Howe, who spent two years at the club mainly dealing with the knee injuries that would eventually curtail his playing days. Howe, instead, focused on coaching, and O’Neil followed his former team-mate’s career closely as he rose to become one of England’s leading managers. When the pair have crossed paths since, O’Neil never misses an opportunity to pick Howe’s brains.
And it was another Portsmouth connection that helped land him a big break in coaching. Michael Edwards was in the early stages of crunching numbers and championing the benefits of digging into data as head of performance at Fratton Park when the pair met.
Within two decades, Edwards worked his way to the top with Liverpool. As arguably the most sought-after sporting director in football he has had Real Madrid and Chelsea attempt to coax him out of a recent decision to take a break from football.
Edwards is certainly not a bad person to know, and not long after retiring from playing in 2019, O’Neil was appointed as assistant to Liverpool Under-23 manager Barry Lewtas, before a first-team coaching role at Bournemouth under then-manager Jonathan Woodgate was too good to turn down eight months later. And that was where he remained, when Woodgate left and Scott Parker arrived, earned promotion and then got sacked four Premier League games into the season.
There remains an endearing understatement to O’Neil – or @gazoneil as he chose as his Twitter handle – a refreshing lack of ego that weighs heavy on many in football. Players have been impressed by his tactical flexibility relayed via simple messages, a laser focus, and his attention to opponents’ detail. And the rather mystical – and priceless -tendency to be completely spot-on about what the opposite team are going to do.
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It was noted, also, that he didn’t panic when they were trailing Nottingham Forest by two goals at half-time, and O’Neil switched approach to inspire three second-half goals that won the game.
Defender Ryan Fredericks believes O’Neil’s tactical nouse is “his best quality”. “He’s pretty in-depth with what he says and he’s not just giving us information for no reason,” Fredericks said. “Everything he says carries a lot of weight and seems to carry out on a pitch.
“When the first few games he says his bit, and it’s gone exactly to the plan, you’re going to believe that.”
Fredericks added: “He sets us up differently for every game and every game it seems to just fall into place. Everything he’s saying to us in meetings and in training is exactly probably like for like what’s exactly happening in the game.”
Following their goalless draw, the Brentford manager Thomas Frank described O’Neil’s team as “very difficult to break down, difficult to create chances against. They work unbelievably hard”. The Danish coach added: “I watched the three games they played. In many ways, very impressive performances and in football, sometimes you get an opportunity that you didn’t see coming.
“It could be one of them. We all, of course I, myself only got better with more and more experience. Gary maybe doesn’t have the most experience as a head coach, but if you have a skillset as a coach and tried a lot, and he had a good playing career as well, then why not?”
Parker was known to push the players extraordinarily hard in training, but O’Neil is conscious of balancing that with making sessions fun and engaging. Indeed, Parker didn’t endear himself to the players when he claimed the group weren’t good enough to compete in the Premier League when the season started badly.
“We love Gaz,” defender Jordan Zemura told Bournemouth’s Daily Echo recently. “He has been here for a while now, two seasons. He’s just a great person, great manager, great guy.
“You can see as players, he just gives us the freedom to embrace ourselves on the pitch and not think too much of it. He is always giving us opportunities to play freely and not put too much on us. Just reminding us about the quality we have in the room.”
Fredericks added: “We don’t just see him as a stand-in manager, we see him as the gaffer and everyone treats him with respect, and he treats the lads with respect. He’s a good man-manager, a great coach, and hopefully he can stay for as long as possible.”
When the man from Las Vegas does take over there would be worse bets than giving O’Neil a chance until the end of the season.
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