Martin O’Neill is the ace up our sleeve tonight. He’s the last man to win Celtic a European knockout tie, and that was 2004

Tonight, we go again.

Champions League play-off, first leg, Celtic Park, and a midfield held together with tape and good intentions.

Arne Engels is a West Ham player.

No replacement is coming before Tuesday’s deadline, and Martin has as good as told us so himself.

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is suspended for both legs, Alistair Johnston isn’t in the squad, and Daizen Maeda is away as well.

So we walk into the biggest night of our season with less in the engine room than we finished last season with.

Sound familiar?

It should.

You know my views on how we got here, and I’m not going over that ground again tonight.

Because for once, I want to talk about the one thing that’s still in our favour.

The board have sold the midfield out from under us, but they cannot sell what’s standing in the dugout

Martin O’Neill.

Now, I know how that sounds.

The man is in his seventies and he hasn’t taken charge of a Champions League tie in more than twenty years.

Twenty years.

And here he is, being asked to drag a gutted squad past the Austrian champions.

But here’s the bit nobody in the mainstream press seems willing to say out loud.

When it comes to European nights at this football club, he’s the only one of us with a track record worth a damn.

He won the European Cup twice as a player at Nottingham Forest. Not watched it, won it.

He took us to a UEFA Cup final in 2003 with a squad the rest of Europe laughed at.

And then he went on to take us to a Uefa Cup quarter-final following year.

He is the last man to win Celtic a European knockout tie, and you have to go all the way back to 2004 to find it

Let that one sit with you.

Twenty-two years.

We have not won a knockout tie in Europe since Martin’s Celtic put out Barcelona and reached the quarter-finals of the UEFA Cup.

Every manager since has had a go at it.

Every single one of them has come up short.

We’ve had group stages, we’ve had a last 16, we’ve had all the noise about being back at Europe’s top table.

But how many knockout wins in all that time?

None.

So is it not almost karmic that the man who last did it is the man standing there tonight?

The last one to take us beyond the last 16 is being asked to take us beyond the last 16 again.

You couldn’t write it.

The Champions League is the one that got away from him, and he’ll know that better than anybody in the building

This is the part I think people are missing.

For all his European pedigree, Martin had three tilts at the Champions League in his first spell here.

Not one of them took him beyond the group stage.

His managerial record in the competition sits at six wins from eighteen games.

That’s a fair return for a Scottish side, and I’m not knocking it.

But it’s the one line on his CV that doesn’t shine like the rest of it.

And does a man come back to a job at his age to leave it exactly as he found it?

Here’s what he had to say this week about where the bar sits at Celtic:

I’ve said all along, I think the bar was set here way back in 1967. And from then on, I believe that Celtic should be aspiring to that. We may never, ever, ever get there. But that aside, you should still be aspiring to it.

Read that again.

He isn’t talking about scraping through a play-off.

He’s talking about 1967.

Now, is that realistic in a game where we’re outspent ten times over by clubs we used to knock over?

Of course it isn’t.

But I’d rather have a manager reaching for something than a board reaching for the calculator.

LASK are no Kairat Almaty, and pretending otherwise is exactly how we ended up on penalties in Kazakhstan

Let’s not kid ourselves on about the size of this.

LASK ended a 61-year wait to win their league last season.

They finished above Sturm Graz – the same Sturm Graz who put six past Hearts over two legs this summer.

They haven’t lost a game since March.

Unbeaten in twelve, ten of them won, sixteen goals in four games to start this campaign.

Christoph Lang and Samuel Adeniran have eleven of those between them.

They’ve even got a former St Mirren defender in Miguel Freckleton who knows fine well what a Celtic Park European night sounds like.

So is this a side we can afford to take lightly?

Not a chance.

Having said that, we’re not without a punch of our own.

Kasper Høgh and Camilo Duran scored ten Champions League goals between them last season – and not one of those came in a qualifier.

They did it in the competition proper, against the real thing.

Haissem Hassan is in the building too.

So we go again, with five fit midfielders and a deadline this board won’t beat.

Fine.

He’s had less and done more.

Because whatever else this summer has taken off us, it hasn’t touched the one advantage that money can’t buy and Michael Nicholson can’t sell.

We’ve still got the ace up our sleeve.

And unlike the men upstairs, he has never once needed reminding of what the bar is…

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