The relationship between O’Neill and the Irish football media during a five-year international tenure remains a source of fascination. We shall return to that later. It would be unfair, as some have suggested, to depict O’Neill’s memoir as a score-settling exercise. Yes, there is occasionally acerbic comment – one would surely expect no less – but an extraordinary career which scaled playing heights under Brian Clough before touching managerial greatness at Celtic and Leicester is depicted with an entertaining tone. There is self-deprecation throughout. BC: There’s a fascinating passage in the book between you and Billy Bingham where he makes you Northern Ireland captain, the nuances of which weren’t lost on either of you as you were a Catholic from Derry going to lead the team. Billy Bingham said to you: ‘No-one will care if we’re winning matches…’

MO’N: I think I should’ve taken a little bit more time out. You’re being interviewed immediately after a game, either a win or a loss. When you win, it’s not a problem. Of course, when you lose, you accept the criticism – absolutely. But after Denmark it was really disappointing especially having drawn in Copenhagen [in the first leg].These things became magnified because it was Roy. I thought we’d be able to keep them in-house. There are very few football teams that I’ve been involved in that you didn’t have arguments or I didn’t have arguments with somebody. MO’N: I think money has really changed football in many aspects. In my footballing days, players had no power whatsoever – and that was wrong. Now players have all the power – and that’s wrong. So there has to be a happy medium somewhere along the way. I do not begrudge the great players getting any amount of money that they get – Messi and Ronaldo – because they get people to go to the stadium to watch them. If you’re talking about younger players earning money and then feeling a sense of entitlement, I think that kind of thing disturbs people because it’s not really earned. But most of all he should head to Paradise, home of the Scottish Champions and where his work as a football manager is most appreciated.

We sit by the Ukrainians all the time [at draws and meetings] and that’s nice because we’ve become good friends with them. But we would like to sit by the Croatians and the Czechs a bit more.” O’Neill’s memories of a “mesmeric” Clough remain vivid, from the moment of their initial meeting in the winter of 1975. Clough instantly promoted O’Neill to the first team but was not of a mind to fawn. “Hey, you: Stop putting your mate in the shit. You look like a boy who would put your mate in the shit,” was the message in an early training session. For a complicated man, he played a very simple game. He was as good at tactics as anybody but that’s not how he is considered. He is considered a motivator, a shouter or a charmer. He knew the game inside out. He told us things tactically during games that stood the test of time. He would say something to you on a Monday, contradict himself on a Friday and you would believe both.”MO’N: Seamus Coleman might have been the only player playing in the Premier League at the time. There were a lot of Championship players playing in the side and therefore the most important job was to actually motivate players to play as strongly as possible for as long as possible over the 90 minutes to actually overcome obstacles – obstacles of playing better teams. Just qualifying for the Euros in 2016 is something that I cherish. MO’N: That is true. I wanted to do it myself. I’ve been offered a number of times for ghost-written things and then I found out that some ex-players don’t even read their own autobiographies, so to write it myself, at least I achieved that. I suppose there was some sort of cathartic aspect attached to it all as well. To be well beaten in Dublin, it seemed from this distance anyway, that it was a moment they were waiting for. And after that it was kind of downhill. Martin O’Neill is one of the most fascinating and respected figures in football. In On Days Like These, he tells the story of his remarkable career.

Now, for the first time, Martin O’Neill reflects on one of the most varied and interesting football careers in the British Isles. As a manager, his legendary time in charge of Celtic saw them win seven trophies including three Scottish Premier League titles and the UEFA Cup, and he successfully led both Leicester City and Aston Villa to League Cups in England. With Roy Keane as his assistant manager, he oversaw Ireland reaching the Euros for only the third time in their history. Billy Bingham made O’Neill the first Catholic captain of Northern Ireland, which represented a seriously bold move in the early 1980s. “Billy said: ‘We get the results, everything will take care of itself,”” O’Neill recalls. “As it did. MO’N: My 19 games with Nottingham Forest doesn't even get a mention in the book that came after the Republic of Ireland job. I probably didn’t anticipate the Ireland part of the book to be as short, not at all. And I’ll take note of that. But I absolutely loved it. It was a privilege managing the team, it was great and, of course, we had the success in France in 2016…

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MO’N: I owe Billy a great deal. For an easier life, he could have ignored me but my experiences at that time with Nottingham Forest, playing in Europe, he obviously thought I was a decent enough communicator. He knew he would probably take some criticism for it and he went with it. And, that’s right, his words were: ‘It will pass when we’re winning football games’. So it was a brave decision. BC: There was an adversarial nature to your media relations and I'm sure the media weren't blameless. How could you have handled things better? That’s the cost in millions of Euros of the priciest starting XI fielded anywhere this season (Manchester City’s line-up against Brighton last month), according to CIES Football Observatory. Word of Mouth MO’N: Well, Roy is going to be big news one way or the other. His arguments with Walters and Harry Arter, you knew somewhere along the way those things would leak out and they’d become news, particularly with Stephen Ward and the WhatsApp message. But once Roy was involved, they were going to hit the headlines. I never thought them as being major, major incidents. I always thought we could quell them at the end of the day.