MARTIN O’NEILL revealed his delight at watching Gareth Barry take part in an Aston Villa v Liverpool fixture – in a claret and blue shirt.
It’s a scenario the Villa manager admitted he couldn’t envisage for most of the summer, during which Liverpool have relentlessly chased the midfielder.
Before yesterday’s stalemate, O’Neill walked over to shake the hand of opposite number Rafael Benitez – who was desperate to push the deal through before being denied the funds to meet Villa’s asking price.
And the Northern Irishman said: “I’m sure everything with Rafa will be absolutely fine – until the next time!
“But no, I don’t think anybody should be surprised I went across and did that.
“It’s gone as far as I’m concerned and I’m just so pleased that Gareth is here.
“I wouldn’t be making any promises about anything but he is here for the foreseeable future and I hope he can now settle down a bit.
“He did very well because he’s had a lot to cope with in recent weeks. But three weeks ago I envisaged he would be playing against us today but that wasn’t to be.
“That’s great for us and our hope now is to get him back to the form that took him close to getting the England captaincy.”
O’Neill also remarked on the close attention Benitez paid to another of his prize assets – Ashley Young.
The left winger, whose manager values at £30million, was stifled in his creativity by Alvaro Arbeloa and O’Neill said: “That is the biggest compliment Ashley could be paid today.
“It was as if the right-back was told to just concentrate on him and not do any covering. The other defenders seemed to be saying, you take care of him and we’ll deal with everything else.
“He should take that as a massive compliment.”
O’Neill added: “It was a really tough game, but we expected to create more chances than we have done.
“We kept a clean sheet, which is unusual for us, but we are normally more fluid than that.
“But having said that we probably carved out the best chance with the best piece of football in the game, when John Carew had a chance cleared off the line. But overall it was tough and I thought they have played to get something out of the game and I thought our effort was terrific. We kept going right to the end.
“We have a habit of scoring goals, but also letting a few in at the other end, so I thought today, if we kept a clean sheet, we would win – but it wasn’t to be. But we'll learn a lot because that's a big, tough game for us, physically it was demanding and we'll have gained from that.”
