Martin O’Neill is a very busy man.
He popped up on our TV screens on Saturday on BT ahead of Aston Villa and Wycombe, and on Sunday he was part of the BBC coverage of the Tottenham-Leicester game at White Hart Lane.
The Derryman of course may as well enjoy life and a few handy TV gigs ahead of getting down to the serious business of winning us the European Championships this summer.
Ok, we’ll take a spot in the final if we have to, but O’Neill and his assistant Roy Keane will be surely getting focused shortly on plotting how we’ll get results against Sweden, Belgium and Italy.
O’Neill looks like a man who may still be eager to get back into Premier League football management, and his achievement of getting Ireland to Euro 2016 would look very well on any CV that may drop into a chairman’s inbox over the coming months.
His contract and that of Keane is up after the summer’s activities in France, but according to reports this morning, the Irishman is set to discuss a contract extension with FAI CEO John Delaney in the coming weeks.
O’Neill has indicated that he would like some more time with the current squad and a new deal could be on the table soon,
“I saw John Delaney on Friday and he said that we would sit down over the next couple of weeks which we intend to do.”
O’Neill has also indicated that Alan Judge is a player that he will be closely looking at to try and cap in our two upcoming friendlies with Switzerland and Slovakia in March.
“If there is a chance of anybody trying to come through, then maybe the March games are the ones. . . I don’t want to close it off, but it might be very difficult, very difficult, if someone after March came through.”.
“There’s a couple of players that have been on the periphery that have not had a chance, and could maybe have thought they should have had a chance – players like Alan Judge, for instance, who is doing very, very well – so I’d like to include them.”
O’Neill is also believed to be looking at basing Ireland in the UK in the weeks before the tournament in order for players to be closer to their families ahead of our first game against Sweden on June 13th.
