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SCOTTISH football may not have earned a place in France next summer.

But at least one graduate of its school of hard knocks will be on a flight out of Edinburgh to get there.

Michael O’Neill’s journey to the Euros with Northern Ireland has been remarkable, a fairytale of faith over fickleness, of self-belief over short-termism.

One win in his first 18 games anywhere else would have seen the black bag on his desk and the P45 stapled to the top.

One defeat in the entire qualifying campaign which followed has seen him hoisted shoulder-high, the courage of his and his Association’s convictions vindicated and validated by their first Finals in 30 years.

But he admits that the foundations for his philosophy, the only one he’s ever known, were laid in the part-time Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday darkness of Cowdenbeath and Brechin, the bottom two divisions of the Scottish League teaching him everything he knows about building a team brick by agonising brick.

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Without them, he wouldn’t be on that plane. Or the one he’s just come off, for that matter.

It’s hard not to be jealous of the affable 46-year-old as he arrives back to his home in the capital, the first of his logistics trips to France to find base camp for their campaign bringing a grin to his face as the enormity of their achievement sinks in a little deeper with every day.

“I suppose it makes it feel a little bit more real,” he confessed. “And it was interesting. They’re playing your three group games in three separate stadiums in these finals and you’ll just fly into each one from your camp.

“So you can be anywhere, and you’ll have a charter to fly in and out. The draw’s irrelevant to where you’re based – the only thing relevant is what we can spend!

“We won’t compete with England or Germany for the best chateaus, let me put it that way – they’re coming in and building their own pitches and what have you.

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“But we’ll be as well prepared as we can be, the players know that – because keeping them happy is the ONE thing that I have to do as an international manager.”

That camaraderie O’Neill has established is their single biggest weapon. Especially when he only has 40 players to choose from.

That’s not 40 of an initial squad, to be thinned down, by the way. That’s 40, as in the sum total of Northern Irish senior pros he has, playing in the four divisions in England and the top two in Scotland.

But a glance at the top of Group F tells you it’s the not the size of the resource that matters ... it’s what you do with it that counts.

O’Neill said: “We’re not blessed like other countries by so many players playing at the highest level of the game. Even others with limited resources, like Wales, the majority of players are in the Premier League.

(Image: PA/Joe Giddens)

“We overcome that by building strong unity and having the players understand exactly what our game is.

“A good example of that was Greece – the side that started against us, seven had played in the Champions League the week before. Jonny Evans was our one player who’d played regularly in the Champions League and now he’s at West Brom.

“So we work on our togetherness, that’s our strength. We only have between 35 and 40 professional players in the UK, including half a dozen in Scotland. That’s our pool. Total. I’ve done an awful lot of work, as Scotland have, at under-age level, with Jim Magilton as performance director and Stephen Craigan in with the Under-19 side.

“We’ve tried to put good people in the right areas to move the game along because we have no professional league.”

O’Neill’s vast experience at all levels in England, Ireland Scotland and America has taught him most of what he knows in dealing with that.

And he’s proud to be an adopted Scot for the summer, considering he and his family have lived here most of his adult life and he played for six clubs in all but the bottom tier.

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Most remember his best years with Dundee United and Hibs, a few more his spells with Aberdeen on loan and at St Johnstone, but he also has games with Ayr and even pre-liquidation Clydebank on his CV.

He laughed: “What a season that was. It was a star-studded dad’s army in the Second Division, the year before the Bankies went out of business.

“Derek Ferguson was the boss, Rab McKinnon, Billy McKinlay, Darren Jackson and myself all played.

“Some of the greatest and worst comebacks in sport! I’m still so close to the Scottish game, though. I live in Edinburgh, we’ve always kept our place here because it was where we loved living the most.

“And it’s perfect for the job I’m doing, although Vauxhall have to give me a new car every three months because of the miles I’m doing watching players from Dingwall to Southampton!”

O’Neill took his time moving into football management.

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Working in financial services at heavyweights like Ernst and Young, he was building a steady career away from the game a decade ago.

He said: “I’d done my coaching badges and got my A Licence with the SFA but had done nothing with it. Then in the summer of 2005 I’d read Mixu Paatelainen had gone in at Cowdenbeath but didn’t have any assistant. There was no budget but we’d played together and done our badges together so I phoned him and asked if he wanted a hand.

“That season was their first league win in 67 years – but it was hard. The training facilities made Central Park something to look forward to!

“But there are friendships I made there and lessons I learned which stick for life. I ended up leaving with five weeks to go to take the Brechin job. They were 15 points adrift at the bottom of the First Division but what a learning experience it was.

“I inherited a team where Dick Campbell had signed older players and given them a few quid and I had to get rid of them all when we went down. A lot of them I had played with and against and it was a challenging time but I knew what I wanted to do.

“We were always around the play-offs but were unlucky in that there was always a full-time team in the division as well, Ross County, Raith Rovers, Morton, every year we had one or two to contend with so the play-offs were our best shot.

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“But we were top of the league when I left and the club was in good shape financially after a hard time trying to stay in the first division.”

O’Neill’s name was already high on the radar in Scotland and, despite advice to stay and wait for a job, he couldn’t resist the lure of reviving Shamrock Rovers when it came.

He said: “It appealed. They had the history but been in the doldrums for so long. It was a challenge.

“They were a full time club but the players only had 42-week contracts to save money and that never changed. It was a strange league.

“A lot of the clubs in Ireland had borrowed on the strength of their asset – their stadium – when the property prices where through the roof. But it didn’t look so smart when the whole thing fell apart.

“Shamrock had gone through their hard time and they didn’t even have a ground to borrow against, so our budget was 650,000 euros – a third of what Bohemians and Cork had to spend.

“I kept the same ethos. I brought in guys like Gary Twigg from Brechin, Craig Sives who was going out of the game because of injury at Hearts, Ross Chisholm, and slowly built a team.”

Not that slowly. Losing the 2009 title in the final few weeks to Pat Fenlon’s Bohemians, O’Neill then led the Dublin men to back-to-back titles.

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But it turned out to be the European experience he gained with his ragtag bunch of misfits and cast-offs that set the lightbulb off in the offices of the FA in Belfast.

O’Neill said: “The only thing I don’t have real experience of is buying and selling players. The most I’ve ever spent was £22,000!

“But the management of players, how you deal with people, set up your team, the way you approach football, it’s no different.

“I played 16 European ties in 18 months or so. I’d been preparing a team punching miles above its weight to play Spurs, Ruben Kazan, Copenhagen, Partizan Belgrade, Juventus – Champions League standard teams – with players who had failed to make it in the UK.

“But I learned about setting up a team and we got great results.

“We won in Israel to earn a tie with Juventus and the only reason we lost in Turin was a 35-yard wonder goal from Alessandro Del Piero.

“We also won in Belgrade to reach for the Europa League group stage

“That was great experience. The same principles have taken us to where we’re going next summer.”

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