MARTIN O’NEILL’S stint as Celtic manager may have ended almost two decades ago but the former Parkhead boss admits that he still looks forward to returning to Glasgow whenever the opportunity arises.
The 70-year-old enjoyed a fruitful five-year stint in the city’s east end at the turn of the century and is still held in high regard by supporters following his successes at Celtic.
O’Neill’s career took him and his family to Aston Villa, Sunderland, the Republic of Ireland and Nottingham Forest in his years after leaving Scotland but the Northern Irishman insists there is nowhere else quite like Glasgow.
“I’ve honestly missed it so much,” he said. “Seriously. My wife, who hated every place she’d been to in her life, absolutely loved it in Scotland.
“If she ever goes to heaven – which she won’t – she’d complain about that as well! But she loved it here and I was the same. It was great.
“You’d wake up and look out the window and not know if it was June or October. But that didn’t matter to us coming from Northern Ireland.”
The occasional trip to watch Celtic has lifted O’Neill’s spirits and reminded him of his glory days as the man at the helm of the Parkhead club – although his children appear to be more enthralled with the team’s current manager, Ange Postecoglou, than their dad.
“I came up to do the Motherwell game with Stillyan Petrov and the atmosphere and the singing, it brings it all back to you,” O’Neill said.
“I had great days, the torch is passed, the manger is going great and it all looks rosy. I did five years – it was like five minutes. I do miss it, absolutely.
“You will always do that. I think the dying breath will be, was there a game on Saturday?
“I have two daughters and one of them is now a bigger Celtic fan now than when I was manager, which is a major disappointment to me!
“She’s running around – ‘Ange, Ange, Ange’. She’s got a three-year-old who is in front of the TV shouting, ‘come on Celtic!’.”
