As expected, Martin O’Neill will not be in the dugout for Celtic’s trip to Rugby Park. Why wasn’t this in Wednesday’s statement?
The Record states the obvious when it comes to Martin O'Neill, colour me shocked!!
Eric Knott Well, that didn’t take long, did it?
Yesterday I wrote about the club statement on Martin O’Neill’s ‘small procedure’, and the ‘speculation’ it was supposedly responding to.
You’ll remember the bit where I said I’d strongly suspect you wouldn’t see him at Sunday’s game.
You’ll remember the bit where I said it was unlikely he’d face media duties either.
Well, here we are.
Mark Pirie of the Daily Record is reporting this afternoon that Martin has missed the final training session before Kilmarnock, and that Shaun Maloney will be taking the press conference.
Martin O’Neill has missed Celtic’s final training session before Kilmarnock following his stay in hospital earlier this week… As he continues his recovery, he will miss the Premiership clash with Kilmarnock, with Shaun Maloney leading first-team training alongside Mark Fotheringham and Stephen McManus.
Maloney, Fotheringham and McManus taking the session.
Maloney fronting up the media this afternoon.
And our manager nowhere to be seen.
Now, I’m not claiming to be Nostradamus here, because you didn’t need to be
That’s the whole point of this article.
I’m a bloke with a laptop and a strong opinion, and I worked this out on Wednesday night from common sense and my own recent hospital stay.
I don’t have an inside line.
No source at Lennoxtown.
No brown envelope from the Kerrydale Street press office.
Just the blindingly obvious conclusion that a man in his seventies who was in hospital on Wednesday isn’t going to be barking orders in a dugout in Ayrshire on Sunday.
If I could get there on Wednesday night, then the people who actually run our football club got there on Wednesday afternoon.
Of course they did.
They had the medical advice sitting in front of them.
The people in the boardroom writing that statement had the recovery timeline.
They knew fine well he wasn’t taking today’s presser.
They knew fine well who was taking the session in his place.
And they said nothing.
So why wasn’t this in Wednesday’s statement?
That’s the question, and I’ve yet to hear a single answer to it that stands up.
The statement opened by telling us it was addressing ‘speculation’.
There was no speculation.
None.
Zero.
I looked, you looked, we all looked, and there was nothing out there.
So the club went out of its way to respond to a conversation that wasn’t happening, while withholding the one piece of information that actually mattered to supporters.
Let me get this straight.
They’ll volunteer an answer to a question nobody asked.
But they won’t answer the question every single one of us was going to ask within seconds of reading it.
Convenient, isn’t it??
This is the bit the board never seems to grasp
A statement that leaves out the obvious next fact doesn’t kill speculation.
It manufactures it.
Because now we’re all sitting here on a Friday afternoon finding out from a newspaper what our club could have told us on Wednesday.
And when you find something out from the Record instead of from Celtic, you don’t just absorb the fact.
You start asking what else they didn’t tell you.
That is entirely of their own making.
Two days of it could have been avoided by adding one sentence to the bottom of that statement.
One sentence.
Martin will not be in the dugout on Sunday as he recovers, and Shaun Maloney will take the pre-match media duties.
Would that have been so hard?
I bet you if they wanted to make some money off this though, they wouldn’t have been long putting something like the below out, would they?
Communication at this club is not an accident, it’s a policy
We’ve had a Chairman who can’t stop talking and a CEO who has never started.
We’ve had a summer window conducted almost entirely in silence while every other club in the division got their business done.
Silent Mike has form here, and the form book is undefeated.
So no, I don’t accept the idea that this was an oversight, or that nobody thought of it.
Somebody thought of it.
Somebody decided it was better left out.
That’s not incompetence at this point.
That’s a choice, and a f*****g cowardly one at that.
I’ll say this too, and I’m not being funny about it.
The Record have him down as 74 and I had him at 75 yesterday.
Fine, my mistake, and I’ll take that one on the chin.
But whether he’s 74 or 75 barely alters the point, does it?
He’s a man of that vintage who was in a hospital bed 48 hours ago, and the club still couldn’t bring itself to say he wouldn’t be working on Sunday.
The one bit of genuinely good news
Jota joined in with the first team during that session.
After the cruciate injury at Tannadice back in April 2025, and every setback since, seeing his name on a training report is a proper lift.
He’s still only 27.
There’s a player in there yet.
Small mercies, and I’ll take them where I can get them right now.
And still, officially, we’ve heard nothing
Celtic themselves haven’t confirmed a thing about Sunday.
It’s the Record telling us, off the back of a training session and a Sky Sports line about the presser.
Our club, meanwhile, has gone back to doing what it does best.
Nothing.
Get well, Martin.
Genuinely, take whatever time you need, and don’t let that shower rush you back for a photograph in a dugout.
As for the rest of them at Kerrydale Street?
Tell us things.
It really isn’t that difficult…
Key Takeaways
- Martin O’Neill missed final training before Kilmarnock, with Shaun Maloney taking the press conference instead.
- The club’s previous statement failed to mention that O’Neill wouldn’t be present, creating unnecessary speculation.
- The author criticises the club for their lack of communication and clarity regarding O’Neill’s health status.
- Jota returning to training is a positive update amidst the uncertainty surrounding O’Neill.
- The official club has yet to confirm any details about O’Neill’s absence this Sunday.
Choose Read Celtic as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.
Bhoycie 
Aodhán Ó Conchobhair 
Does anyone yet know the extent of Martin O’Neill’s hospital procedure and stay in hospital for at least overnight ? Because virtually all ‘small procedures ‘ whilst in hospital come with a ‘home that same day ‘ message from a Nurse or Doctor or Consultant ..with a smile ? So going by the stay in hospital period I think it was bigger than a ‘small procedure ? ‘ Let’s all wish the great man a healthy successful and speedy recovery from his health issue and with the message that his massive entire Celtic family and friends are thinking about him and praying for a full recovery at this worrying time . Please be well and take good care .
The clue is that the Desmond and offspring are reprehensible examples of mankind ,and a great example of greed selfishness and a condescending attitude to all other human beings expecially Celtic supporters, they regard Martin O’Neil not with gratitude or respect for how he saved the seasonfor the club and fans but as an employee nothing else Martin O’Neil has put his health at risk in saving the club and as a result his health has been compromised, let’s wash our hand of the Desmond and his offspring, stop giving them your money or you are complicit in the destruction of our club
That’s funny, just 2 days ago you chastised one of your readers for calling you out on your obsession with the Daily Record …
You said something like ‘I’m here to tell them how shit they are!’
Yet in every article since you’ve not only quoted the Daily Record but you’re including Live Links, as though any Celtic supporter on earth wants to look at that Hun scum garbage.
No wonder you’re losing readers faster than a rat doon a drainpipe.
We come to these blogs to escape that mainstream rubbish yet all you, Joe & Jamesie lad does is regurgitate their rubbish.
Is the Daily Record and mainstream media you lots’ only source of Celtic news?
For it sure looks that way, matey, and I can’t think of anything more embarrassing for any Tim than to be rehashing the crap from those those dirty Hun trash mags.
Could you tell me where you’re getting your numbers from that you can make such a broad statement as, ‘No wonder you’re losing readers faster than a rat doon a drainpipe’? How can you tell? Because I hate to break it to you Fergus my man, our numbers on Read Celtic are at an all time high at the moment. As for our links to the Record, this is a legal requirement. If you quote a source in any story, you must supply a link to it. Otherwise, that publication can sue you for plagiarism. The same applies to the use of a photograph, the source must be named, otherwise we can be fined thousands for what would be considered illegal use of a copyright image. There are rules here Fergus, we have to adhere to them. We don’t do that to piss off our readers. On a final note, Celtic’s chosen media partners are The Record, The Sun and BBC Scotland. Therefore, Celtic drip feeds them information every now and then, so love them or hate them, they do, at the behest of the media team from Celtic, produce accurate information from the club. Using that as a source is not a crime. Nor is calling them out when they get it completely wrong. Because when they don’t get information from Celtic, guess what they do? They speculate, imagine that?
Incredible to read that you’re begging up yourself again for getting a bit of yer self admitted speculation correct.
So, after happily admitting to all your readers that this blog has nothing to do with any actual journalism far less research you’ve now spent the last few days quoting the Daily Record writers extensively and then, incredibly, claiming their words as gospel because it correlates with your own guesswork!
Hahaha, you don’t do irony, do you, Eric?
Nor self reflection nor reading the room.
So,try reading the room for once …
We despise the Daily Record and you, Joe & Jame should too.
Instead you’ve all the last week publicising them instead of stamping on their throats and it is this that makes us true Celts/non bloggers suspect that you’re all complicit in the scam.
Are you?