“Were you ever in the running?”
Martin O’Neill was the special guest on Monday Night Football, and Jamie Carragher had a barrage of questions for the ex-Celtic man including one longstanding rumour.
The Irishman was in charge of several clubs and often got the better off a Liverpool side that featured Carragher in it, even when O’Neill was at Celtic he managed to upset the Anfield faithful.
It got to the point that the Sky Sports pundit was always fearful of coming up against a side that had the Derry native standing on the sideline.
“Mentioning Celtic and Leicester, I always had a huge fear coming up against your teams”, said Carragher
“And fear in that, you had a great knack of getting results, it felt, at that time. Certainly, with Leicester in the Liverpool team I played in. A lot of times you’d come to Anfield and got decent results.
“I remember Celtic beat us in the UEFA Cup – I think that might have been the season you got to the Final.”
O’Neill replied: “Absolutely, we had drawn the first game at Celtic 1-1 and it meant we had to score in the game (at Anfield). Alan Thompson scores for us just before half time and John Hartson scores a screamer.
“We won 2-0. It was a big result for us to take us into the semi-final but also a big result for Scottish football as well. We were always compared unfavourably with the Engllsh Premier League and Liverpool, as your side were riding so high. This was a big, big result.”
Inevitably, whenever managers left Liverpool and a vacancy opened up, O’Neill was often at the heart of the speculation surrounding the role.
"Sounds like everyone except you" 😆
"That's probably very true" 😂@Carra23 couldn't resist teasing Martin about how Brian Clough praised him 😅 pic.twitter.com/8d3A1irsHh
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) May 8, 2023
There had been several occasions when the two-time European Cup winner had been heavily linked with the job at Anfield, and these rumours obviously found its way to Carragher.
“Can I ask you a question? You may not remember but at that stage when you knocked us out of the competition, you were linked heavily, for about six-12 months, with the Liverpool job when I was a player, were you ever in the running?”
However, O’Neill put the myth to bed by adding: “No, it didn’t materialise or it didn’t happen. But I was extremely happy at Celtic at the time and it would have taken a lot for me to move away.”
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