FINE RECENT form that has at last allowed Jim O'Brien to cement a place in the Motherwell side prompted Mark McGhee to take the player aside for a motivational chat last week. "He's done brilliantly and I said to him 'there aren't many of your types around and, if you keep improving, it can only be a matter of time before George Burley takes a look at you'. 'But I play for Ireland,' he said. I wish someone had told me."
The Fir Park manager accepts the Glaswegian has, to put it mildly, a "bit to go" before any possibility presents itself to win full honours with the Republic. He chose to play for a country he has represented at under-21 level because of his "strong
connection" with his late Irish "granda" John, whom he lived with for 10 years.
O'Brien's career check list then – 21-years-old, a winger who showed great promise coming through the ranks at Celtic and who now gets stick from Scottish supporters for committing to the Republic of Ireland – marks him out as a sort of Aiden McGeady alter-ego.
As with the man he understudied at Celtic Park for the first half of last season, O'Brien has had struggles to convince the man picking him that his tanner ba' approach isn't a route to flashy risk-taking. "I have had to cut a lot of things out; like doing the wrong things in the wrong areas," says O'Brien. On a run of 10 straight starts, following on from 10 substitute outings in the first four months of the season, McGhee now plays him because he "trusts" him "not to try fancy spins in our own 18-yard box".
The Motherwell manager has hammered that out of O'Brien since he joined from Celtic in the summer – and hammered into him that, as a right-footed player, he should see that as a role he is suited for. It is where the winger is now deployed after previously believing he belonged on the left because he had always played there.
In his "nine great years" at Celtic, O'Brien was given minimal opportunities for the first-team, clocking up only two substitute appearances. Without a trace of bitterness, his response to the question as to whether he received a fair crack of the whip is "in the last year maybe not".
"There were cup games coming up, I was doing well, and had people saying in my ear 'it is coming, it is coming'," he says. "There were a couple of cup games I felt I should maybe have been involved in, got my first start in, which never came. Then Aiden was suspended and I was meant to start against Rangers at Celtic Park in January. Unfortunately Phil O'Donnell passed away and the game got called off. So there are wee things you look back on and think 'what if', but you can't really do that."
O'Brien spent the second half of last season on a short-term deal to Dundee United, but is best remembered for being denied the opportunity to appear for Dunfermline in the 2006 CIS Cup final because he was then on loan to the Fife club from their final opponents. Again, the attitude of an affable young man to a scunner of a situation is one of regret rather than rancour.
"I think Gordon (Strachan] didn't want me to miss out on a cup final, but the more he thought about it the more people said to him 'you can't really let him play'. On the day I might have been the difference, because it was quite a close game. It is just one of those things. There was a bit of doubt cast over it, but he phoned me. At the time I was still a young guy, so I was just quite happy that he phoned me himself to tell me."
