Aiden O’Brien eager to cement his place in Martin O’Neill’s starting plans
In the perennial Robbie Keane succession stakes, you could say that Aiden O’Brien has a head-start on the rest of the current competition.
Which is a nice way of making the pretty sobering point that, with a header on his senior debut away to Poland in September, the Millwall striker did what the five other forward contenders in the latest Irish squad — Scott Hogan, Sean Maguire, Callum Robinson, Ronan Curtis, and Michael Obafemi — have yet to do: score for their country.
“I was buzzing,” says O’Brien of that night Wroclaw. “It was a special moment in my life, something I’ll cherish forever and take with me to the grave. My family were over the moon, as you could imagine. It was a magic moment in my career. It’s already framed and up on the wall.”
And the 25-year old is confident there’s more where that came from.
“I’m the type of player who can sniff a chance,” he says.
“Just say, for instance, I miss one, it’s not going to dwell in my head because I know the next one is going in the net. Before a game, all I ever think about is ‘hit that net, hit that net, hit that net’. That’s all I want do: Score goals.”
And it was ever thus for the boy who grew up on North London’s Holloway Road, hard by the old Highbury, an Arsenal fan who worshipped Henry and Bergkamp but whose own trial with the club, at the age of 15, ended in rejection.
“They were saying, you’ve got everything we want apart from lightning pace,” he remembers. “I was like, ‘fair enough. What does that mean?’ They were looking for something lightning, they didn’t want anything else.”
But O’Brien always knew what he was. And what he was good at. Of his own first steps in football, he says: “I was an out-and-out number nine, running in behind and coming to feet. It comes natural. It’s in my blood, the runs of strikers getting past defenders. You’ve got to hold it up, run in behind, do a few things. Put defenders off their game. You can’t just be standing there. Not give them an easy time. And I think I’ve shown, in one of the games anyway, that I can bring goals to the country and, hopefully, I can bring much more.”
O’Brien needs no telling, of course, that the other five will be thinking exactly the same thing.
“Of course. There’s competition, whatever you do. Whether you’re working in Lidl or whatever you are doing in life, you’re always going to have competition.”
“All of us here want to play and represent our nation. But at the same time there’s no negative energy towards it. On the training ground there’s a lot of competition but when it gets to match-day, whatever team is picked, we all get together and support it.”
As the Irish squad yesterday continued their build-up to tomorrow’s friendly against Northern Ireland in the Aviva, Matt Doherty remained in England to see a specialist after taking an elbow to the face in Wolves’ 1-1 draw with Arsenal.
