Source: Telegraph
Martin O'Neill draws line under Gareth Barry's defection to Manchester City
But Martin O’Neill has done his bit to play things down ahead of the Monday night fixture, the Aston Villa manager sounding rather like a man shrugging off a painful break-up by insisting that he is over it.
“If you asked me would we still rather have him around, the answer would be absolutely. But things move on," O'Neill said.
"He’s at Manchester City and we have made a shift ourselves. I’m hoping that when Stewart Downing is fit – incidentally, he is doing really well at the moment - that we will be able to [move on]. As our team starts to take shape in the next couple of months we are hoping that Gareth’s loss will not be as severe as we were certainly expecting early on.”
O’Neill’s last comment is intriguing, as he has not previously admitted the degree to which he was concerned by Barry’s departure.
“If he had chosen to see his contract out here I would have been delighted and even though the club got [good] money for him I think the club was of exactly the same view, which might tell you how we viewed his presence here,” O’Neill said.
Footballers and managers always talk of taking the positives. Is there an advantage to be gained by knowing what Barry finds difficult to deal with and, conversely, what is capable of?
“I don’t think there’s an advantage or disadvantage either way,” O’Neill said. “City are dangerous [regardless]. I had young Craig Bellamy for four or five months at Celtic and he was fantastic for us. He is playing with a lot of confidence.
"Then there’s Carlos Tevez, they have Martin Petrov coming back into the side, and there’s Emmanuel Adebayor. They have got plenty of weapons.”
So O’Neill and Villa have moved on; whether the supporters feel the same way remains to be seen.
It is unlikely that they will have so easily forgotten his “defection” to City in what appeared to be, to the more cynical eye, a move motivated by financial gain – which the fact that the midfielder had spent the whole season talking of his dream of playing in the Champions League did nothing to dispel. O’Neill, however, would not be drawn. “You shouldn’t be asking me that,” he said. “I don’t know.
