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After spending a period last summer on the soccer scrapheap having been released by Bolton following three knee operations, it’s no surprise Joey O’Brien is grateful to West Ham manager Sam Allardyce for giving him a chance to resurrect his career.
Tonight at Upton Park, when sixth-place West Ham meet Stoke in a battle of two resolute, uncompromising defences, O’Brien hopes to be given another chance to prove his worth.
Last year, things were much more uncertain for Dubliner O’Brien. After surgery to cure a knee problem, he had been released by Bolton, where he had been since a youngster, and no one was interested in signing him.
“I owe a lot to the manager at West Ham,” said O’Brien. “There had been no offers but he gave me the chance to come down and train. I had been at Bolton since I was a kid but hadn’t played a competitive game for two-and -a-half years because of the knee injury, apart from a month on loan at Sheffield Wednesday.
“When you’ve been out for as long as I was, there are times when you think: ‘What if?’ I thought that, if the worst happened, I would maybe go into coaching but I owe a lot also to Gary Megson, who was Sheffield Wednesday manager then, because he gave me the chance to play for him and that spell gave me the self-confidence that I could still do it on the pitch.
“He also mentioned the possibility of coaching but at the time I didn’t want to go down that route because I felt that, if I started taking my badges, I would slip into the mindset that I wasn’t going to get back to playing again. Coming to West Ham was great timing for me because the manager had also just come to the club. He knew me from our time together at Bolton and I suppose he considered I could maybe do a job for him.”
O’Brien, 26, has become an integral member of Allardyce’s squad, so much so that the full-back has been described by some Hammers fans as the team’s “unsung hero”.
This season, in the 594 minutes the Irishman has been on the pitch, West Ham have conceded just one goal.
O’Brien said: “Full-backs such as George McCartney and myself can get that ‘unsung’ tag because we don’t take the eye as much as strikers or exciting midfield players.
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“We just go in and do a job and because the team are winning, the supporters acknowledge that the back four are doing well.
“It’s good that the fans reckon I’m doing okay. It means a lot to me and it’s much better than having bad stuff said about you, that’s for sure.”
O’Brien claims he is over his knee problems. “It’s spot-on now,” he said. “I make sure I do my prevention work — every morning before training I go in the gym and do some exercises to switch on the muscles and afterwards I make sure I have a good massage.”
West Ham’s buoyant start under Allardyce (above) has been a surprise to many but O’Brien was confident that, if the club could escape from the Championship, they would not be out of their depth. He said: “I could see last season we had players who could hold their heads up high in the Premier League and, as for me, I just wanted the opportunity to play against the best teams in the biggest stadiums.
“The Championship is a hard League. You’re playing Saturday and Tuesday and everyone wanted to beat West Ham. In the end, though, we got the job done. This season we hit the ground running. We’ve had a couple of poor performances but we’ve always bounced back.”
Five clean sheets from 11 games is also obviously a source of pride for defender O’Brien. “We work really hard on defending,” he said. “A couple of days before a game, the manager works with the defenders, one v one, two v two, defending crosses, that sort of thing. It’s no fluke we’ve managed five clean sheets.
“You can see the benefit of that when we play. Even the strikers don’t let the central defenders have an easy time when they have the ball.
“It will be tough tonight. Stoke haven’t got the best away record but if they can beat us, that will get them rolling. And it doesn’t get any easier with our next three games being Spurs, Manchester United and Chelsea. But who’s complaining? This is where we wanted to be, back in the Premier League.”