Joe O’Cearuill: The ex-Ireland international who says his son JJ Gabriel is the next Messi

Joe O’Cearuill wouldn’t want to be sensitive. Since the news broke last week about his 15-year-old son telling Manchester United that he wants to leave the club, where he’s been since he was nine, his character has been somewhat questioned. Not least by elements of the woebegone United faithful who already had enough to be fretting about.

As an active enough user of social media, O’Cearuill will no doubt be aware by now that he, as his son’s ‘representative’, is being held entirely responsible for a situation that has been likened to Barcelona losing Lionel Messi before he ever played a senior game for them. Which didn’t, of course, happen. But that’s how cataclysmic this development is.

For the uninitiated, O’Cearuill is a 39-year-old retired footballer who played twice for the Republic of Ireland, the Londoner the son of an Irish mother and a Trinidadian father. His career took him on a winding path of largely non-league clubs, having started his professional days with Arsenal.

His son is JJ Gabriel, a young fella so gifted he’s had United fans in a tizzy since they first started seeing clips of him in action for the club’s underage teams. He scores shed-loads of goals and his touch is so exquisite, he makes Messi look as slick on the ball as Harry Maguire.

He is United’s reigning young player of the year, joining a roll of honour that includes the likes of Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes (and Alejandro Garnacho). He’s already on a long-term deal with Nike and has represented England all through the underage ranks. The chances of him switching allegiances to Ireland? Probably much the same as United’s hopes of winning the league this season. Zilch, like.

Since he informed United that he wants to leave, he hasn’t turned up for training, and missed out on the chance of becoming the club’s youngest ever first team player, there having been talk of him being given his debut against Brighton in the League Cup on Wednesday. (A game United, need it be said, lost, having led 2-0).

A note on that name, JJ Gabriel. He was born Joseph Junior Andreou O’Cearuill. But the interweb tells us that his father later changed his name for marketing reasons, reckoning that ‘Joe O’Cearuill Jr’ didn’t have a superstar ring about it. This, said the interweb, was further evidence that Dad is a wrong ‘un.

But the usually ever-reliable Athletic says that the father “changed the family surname in recognition of his and his wife’s religious beliefs [she is Cypriot] and because his given name carried little meaning to him”. So, take your pick.

You will also have to choose from the sundry theories about why Gabriel has asked United to cancel his registration with the club.

1) He (and his Da) have been offered a ton of loot by several major European clubs, including Real Madrid and Barcelona, offers no one in their right mind would turn down. 2) He (and his Da) are peeved that he’s not already in United’s first team, even though, say, Diogo Dalot, is. 3) He (and his Da) have concluded that United are going nowhere, so him staying would be akin to using a Ferrari to plough a field.

All or none of these things could be true, neither father nor son has spoken publicly about the to-do, but that hasn’t stopped Da being cast as a greedy, pushy, brash parent who has lost the run of himself and isn’t acting in his son’s best interests.

No end of “sources” have been quoted about O’Cearuill being a touch difficult to deal with, even worse than your average tennis parent, with multiple anecdotes being related by way of example. The truth of these? God knows.

Now, granted, he hasn’t always acted wisely when sharing his thoughts on his son’s abilities, once likening him to Messi, Neymar and Lamine Yamal on social media. The last United youngster who was subjected to that level of hype was probably Ravel Morrison. His career subsequently took on the shape of a pear, and these days - at the age of 33 - he’s playing in the UAE second division with an outfit by the name of Arabian Falcons. There might be a lesson there.

It was back in 2008, when he was director of football at St Patrick’s Athletic, that Brian Kerr signed O’Cearuill from Barnet. Having read the interweb last week, there was only one question to ask Kerr. “Was he a bit of a mad fella?”

“No - I found him to be a quiet, courteous and decent lad. I checked out about him with the [Irish] staff who were in the US the previous year, when he played his two games for Ireland, and nobody had a bad word to say about him. I couldn’t believe he was at Barnet and available. I think we got him for a few stone of potatoes, or something. They were looking for 10k!”

So, he wasn’t a bad ‘un? “No - Jim Lawler, the kit man from then, got on very well with him. He contacted Jim and invited him to the hotel and the Man U v Leeds pre-season friendly at the Aviva in August, which was very thoughtful.”

Not that this character reference absolves O’Cearuill of the crime of breaking United hearts, but perhaps there’s just a chance that he is acting in his son’s best interests by attempting to extract him from the sh*tshow that is Manchester United, even if he’s been a little, well, brash along the way. If they do lose ‘Kid Messi’, United will, you’d suspect, look for a bit more than a few stone of potatoes by way of compensation.

Click here to read article