Mostly football farewell to the best player i ever marked as oneill retires from county football

Marking Stephen O’Neill his prime was a horrible experience - the Tyrone man may not have had pace but he had skill and brains like no-one else, writes Michael Hannon.

This week saw the retirement of a genuine GAA football legend with Tyrone’s Stephen O’Neill deciding to hang up his inter-county boots. He did so at the age of 34 with three All-Ireland medals, five Ulster titles, two All-Ireland U21 titles, two National football leagues, and a minor All-Ireland title to his name.

In addition to those team awards he collected three All-Star awards and capped it all off with a Player of the Year award in 2005. His exhibition in the 2005 Ulster final was simply sublime, putting in a performance that saw him kick 10 points from play in the drawn game before kicking another five the next day out in the replay. 

That year he also added the Texaco Player of the Year as well as the GPA Player’s Player of the Year award along with the Vodafone Player of the Year to his growing list of individual accolades. Those were the days prior to the amalgamation of the various Player of the Year awards and it was not uncommon for one footballer to win one award while someone different could win one of the other variations.

In 2005 there was no such ambiguity when he made a clean sweep of everything on offer. He really was quite exceptional that year. During that 2005 Ulster final I laughed ruefully as I watched Francie Bellew, a man who was at the height of his powers and indeed Chuck Norris-esque notoriety, huff and puff as he struggled to contain the relentless machine that was O’Neill.

I’ll admit I had a little sympathy for him as I had been given the thankless task of marking O’Neill in the second half of our semi-final replay against Tyrone just one game earlier. He had already scored 1-1 in the first half but still, I felt confident at half-time when Marty McElkennon had announced I was going to move over on to him.

The reason for such confidence was the fact that I had marked him earlier in the year, in the first game either county had played, a McKenna cup tie between Cavan and Tyrone which saw the Red Hands win comfortably. I had managed to keep O’Neill scoreless and in fact had done the unthinkable, performed a series of one-twos up the pitch to score a rare point from corner-back.

Realising I was faster than O’Neill, I quickly figured out how to mark him and nullified him. Little did I know he was only getting warmed up. Six months later and seven minutes into the second half of that Ulster semi-final, he had kicked four ridiculous points from play off me using both feet. I was practically hanging out of him for two of them and he still managed to stroke the ball over the bar from some exceptionally tight angles.

The picture in the next days Sunday Independent was a full width shot of me, practically piggy backing my way across St Tiarnach’s Park as I tried to stop him from getting a shot off. I stood and stared at that photo for a half hour the next day knowing and yet questioning that three seconds after it was taken had the ball really sailed over the bar. It had.

It was his work ethic that day to get on the ball that utterly shocked me. No player I had marked before, or since, moved as hard, as often, or more importantly, in as unorthodox a manner, as he did to receive the ball. I’d never experienced a full-forward move the way he did.

Normally if I had the edge in speed on a player I could very comfortably deal with their play and movement, but O’Neill was the exception. To me it seemed like he was making six or seven hard runs just to receive one pass. I was all over him for the first four or five runs, but by the time the sixth run was being made, my legs were heavy, burning with lactic acid, and my mind was working a tad slower than normal.

Things you wouldn’t normally do, you were doing, such as falling for dummy soloes. It remains to this day one of the most vivid memories I have of playing Gaelic football.

Everything moving in slow motion, including your brain, and feeling helpless to stop myself from making rash decisions, such as thinking I can reach a ball and then missing it by feet, not inches when I dived in. I have since described it to a sports scientist who explained to me afterwards that I more than likely in a state of hypoxia, or severe oxygen deficit.

With my legs screaming out for oxygen to help produce more energy, every part of me was working a little below optimum - like a boxer barely able to throw a punch, or hold his guard up in round 12 of a title fight.

O’Neill, though, wasn’t suffering at all. A few days later I spoke with McElkennon about the experience and he gave me an insight into O’Neill, who he informed me went to the same leisure centre in Tyrone that he attended.

Every morning at 7am O’Neill would walk through the door and hit the rowing machine, going as hard as he could for 15 minutes. Then he popped up on to a bike and pedalled flat out for 10 minutes. Sweat dripping off him, he would lift weights for another 20 minutes and leave.

But there was more to it than that; his movement was unusual for a player playing in a full-forward line. He didn’t seem to be interested in the ball like a full-forward is. He was moving in directions and at angles that suggested his focus was somewhere else.

Puppet on a string
It stayed with me for years afterwards that I since met a member of that Tyrone team and felt compelled to bring it up. Laughing at my perplexed description of what was going on, he told me that O’Neill was, what the Tyrone coaches had described to the team as, playing on a string.

Instantly I knew what had happened because “playing on a string” is a term straight out of the lexicon of a basketball coaching playbook. The two shooting guards on a team, for example, keep the same distance away from each other.

Typically one player moves and the other follows so that they maintain a certain distance between each other. Who was on the other end of O’Neills string then? None other than Brian McGuigan, who was operating at centre forward for Mickey Harte’s side.

Wherever he went, O’Neill maintained 35 metres between himself and Tyrone’s number 11. This meant that whenever McGuigan got the ball he always had the option of turning and releasing O’Neill, moving the ball very quickly, knowing, what seemed like to GAA commentators to be instinctively, where O’Neill was going to be without having to look for him.

It obviously takes two very special players to make something like that work on a Gaelic football pitch. In O’Neills case he had to know when to break away from McGuigan’s string if someone else was looking to kick the ball to him - in effect stay tuned into both McGuigan’s intentions and the ball. Not the easiest thing in the world to do.

It’s why when people ask me who the best player I ever marked was, the answer is an easy one. For a player who was not blessed with speed to be able to thrive in the full-forward line, and not be dependent on winning high or breaking ball, gives you a sense for how clever he was.

Of course, the injuries took their toll on him and after his All-Star award in 2009, we only saw sporadically what he was capable of. Like that performance against Dublin in Croke Park in the National Football League where he kicked a superb point from out near the sideline.

That was the type of score you would say was lucky, only you have seen him do it against you, not once, not twice but four times in a matter of minutes. Or in Francie Bellew’s case, 10 times in an Ulster final...

 

Follow Michael Hannon on Twitter - @mickeyhannon