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Martin O'Neill: Nottingham Forest will return to the Premier League and if I cannot guide them back then I will walk
Martin O’Neill is one of Nottingham Forest’s original ‘miracle men’ but has given himself a strict 18-month deadline to start creating some history of his own.
O’Neill has completed his emotional return to the club where it all started and is on a mission to be the manager that finally ends Forest’s long exile from the Premier League.
It will be 20 years this summer when Forest last competed at the top level – the season Ron Atkinson famously selected the wrong dug-out to stand in – and O’Neill is the 11th manager at the City Ground since June 2011.
Outside his new office, photographs of Brian Clough and the European Cup winning team adorn the walls and walking to the boardroom to speak to newspaper reporters on Thursday must have felt like a stroll down memory lane.
Yet the 66-year-old has admitted that delivering promotion is the only way his reign will be considered a success, after signing a contract until the end of next season.
“I want to live every single day of it and it’s a short period of time, it’s not long. If it turns out that it doesn’t happen for me, I will hand it over to another man who will,” he said.
“It would be great to get this club back up. It would be fantastic and that’s why I’ve taken it on. I want to really give it everything I’ve got.
“I don’t think there’s any other reason to be here. We have slipped a bit in recent times and we want to rectify that.
“At some stage or another Nottingham Forest are going to get up. Obviously I would love to do it but if I am unable to do it then that’s for someone else.
“Surely that [extending the contract] is something to be looked at if we are promoted. If I make it to 18 months that will mean that we might have had a chance."
O’Neill made 371 appearances during nearly a decade at Forest, winning a First Division title, two European Cups and two League Cups under Clough during a glorious period.
He has been approached at least two times in the past to become manager, but admits on this occasion it was probably his final opportunity to accept.
“It has a great history and that is phenomenal. If someone comes down here from Mars in 300 years, that [history] will be there and that is great,” he said.
“When you go abroad and you talk to ex-players like Juventus players, Inter Milan players, Bayern Munich players and they go ‘ah, Nottingham Forest’ talking about like that because we had success
“But you cannot go on forever and the generations move on. It is two generations now, since the team was in the Premier League.
"I have to do this now. Time is pressing. No one gets any time these days, and the minute you step into a football club, it doesn’t matter, you’re expected to get going immediately. "
Forest will be O’Neill first job at club level since March 2013, when he was dismissed by Sunderland. He has already taken two full training sessions after succeeding Aitor Karanka and is close to making Yohan Benalouane, the Leicester centre-half, his first signing in an 18-month deal.
His first game, against Bristol City, is already sold out and Forest are only four points adrift of the play-off places.
O’Neill is now waiting patiently for Roy Keane, his former assistant with the Republic of Ireland, to agree a deal to join.
The pair left the Ireland set-up in November and Keane is weighing up an offer to join him.
"Roy has a couple of things to really mull over and I would really like him to come to the football club if he could,” he said.
"It's hopefully not a long period of time out of his life. He is a young man, I think that he wants to manage himself and I think that he is very capable of doing that. But I enjoyed working with him and I think that he would be a great help."