Norman Clifford Louis O'Neill OAM (19 February 1937 – 3 March 2008) was a cricketer who played for New South Wales and Australia.

Persistent knee problems, as well as a controversial media attack on the legality of West Indian bowler Charlie Griffith, saw him dropped from the Australian team after 1965.

Moving on to Kogarah Intermediate High School,[3] O'Neill played cricket in defiance of a teacher who recommended that he take up athletics.

Sensing his potential, the club's selectors informed him that regardless of form, he would play the full season, which allowed him to be uninhibited in his batting.

His lack of contribution was highlighted against the backdrop of his team's crushing innings victory: O'Neill failed to score a run or take a wicket.

[9] He ended the season with 567 runs at 43.61,[6] and earned selection for a non-Test tour of New Zealand under Ian Craig, in a team composed mainly of young players.

[4][11] O'Neill responded during the 1957–58 Sheffield Shield season weakened by the absence of the Test players, aggregating 1,005 runs at 83.75 and taking 26 wickets at 20.42 with his leg spinners, thus topping the national bowling and batting averages.

[2][11] However, he stayed after state officials intervened,[4] with Sir Ronald Irish, the Australian chairman of Rothmans, providing him with a job in Sydney.

[2][6] It enlivened a match plagued by time-wasting,[18] and best remembered for a depressingly slow innings by England's Trevor Bailey, who scored 68 from 426 balls in seven and a half hours.

[6] Outside the Tests, O'Neill scored 155 and 128 against Victoria and Western Australia respectively as New South Wales completed their sixth successive Sheffield Shield win.

[6][12] The following season O'Neill was Australia's leading batsman during the 1959–60 tour to Pakistan and India,[5] where he was a part of the last Australian team to win a Test on Pakistani soil for 39 years.

The chase was on schedule with O'Neill partnering Neil Harvey when the Pakistanis began wasting time to prevent an Australian victory.

[22] This was implemented by swapping fielders very slowly when the left and right-handed combination of Harvey and O'Neill took a single, and overs began taking seven minutes instead of three.

[22] This allowed Benaud to come in and bat with O'Neill so that the two right-handed batsmen would give no opportunity to waste time by switching the field.

Benaud then threatened Pakistani captain Imtiaz Ahmed with a formal complaint over the time-wasting, and proceedings returned to their normal pace.

[6] In the lead-up to the 1960–61 home Tests series against the West Indies, O'Neill scored 156 not to set up an innings win for his state over the tourists.

The innings prompted teammate Bob Simpson to say "if God gave me an hour to watch someone I'd seen, I'd request to see Norman O'Neill.

[4][6] He scored 73 against Gloucestershire and made 122 on his first appearance at Lord's, against the Marylebone Cricket Club, in what was effectively a dress rehearsal for the Tests.

On an erratic pitch with a visible ridge that caused uneven bounce,[30] O'Neill made one and a duck as an Australia scraped home by five wickets in a low-scoring match.

[6] After rectifying a technical fault,[4] O'Neill made 67 in the second innings of the Fourth Test at Old Trafford with the series tied at 1–1, helping Australia take a narrow victory to retain the Ashes.

[9] After this tour, his form began to decline, as he became prone to uncertain and fidgety starts to his innings, which earned him the nickname "Nervous Norm".

[7] After an unproductive season last year, O'Neill started the new summer with 15 and 2/30 for a Western Australia Combined XI against Ted Dexter's Englishmen.

[16] With Alan Davidson injured during the match,[33] O'Neill was required to bowl substantially, conceding 49 runs in what was his most expensive performance to date.

[15] At the end of the tour, O'Neill garnered controversy by writing outspoken newspaper columns accusing opposition pace spearhead Charlie Griffith of chucking.

[32][38] He was one of several Australians who took exception to Griffith's bowling action, and he put his name to a series of feature articles in Sydney's Daily Mirror.

[5] He started the season with 117 against Western Australia, before scoring a pair of 78s in the return match, helping his team to a tense 13-run win.

[5][32] He married Gwen Wallace, a track and field athlete who won relay gold for Australia at the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games.

[2][5][32] O'Neill also co-owned a racehorse with Richie Benaud, Barry Jarman and Ray Steele, named Pall Mallan, and it won a race in 1961.

[3][11] At his best, he was a dynamic stroke maker who was a crowd favourite because of his ability to score at a high pace, in particular with his power off the back foot.

[2] O'Neill's style led the British writer EW Swanton to say "the art of batting, he reminded us, was not dead, merely inexplicably dormant".