If the board don’t support Martin O’Neill with the transfers he needs, they run the risk of destroying his reputation at Celtic. That would be unforgiveable

You get the feeling that at points throughout Celtic’s humiliating 5-1 loss to LASK, our 74 year old veteran manager may have felt that he should have called it a day after last season’s Scottish Cup final.

In reality, he owed us nothing.

He came to our rescue not once, but twice.

He delivered a League and Cup double against all odds, and for that, his name was forever etched in Celtic folklore.

O’Neill could have walked off into the sunset, oozing pride, with his head held high.

And he would have had the best wishes of every last one of us.

This summer, it would appear he came to the Celtic’s rescue a third time.

Or more to the point, Dermot Desmond’s rescue.

As we know, Desmond was hell bent on appointing Robbie Keane as Celtic manager, regardless of the backlash from the fanbase due to Keane’s Israeli connections.

Ultimately, Desmond would fail to shoehorn Keane into the manager’s position because somebody shockingly talked sense into him when it came to the pitfalls of appointing Keane.

To the surprise of nobody, after a world class managerial recruitment drive, the board managed to come up with just one name.

Martin O’Neill.

Or more to the point, Desmond called O’Neill to demand he come back to Celtic for a third time.

O’Neill, strangely enough, obliged despite knowing that Robbie Keane would have landed the role over him if the fans hadn’t created murder over the very idea of it.

That would have been slightly insulting, to put it mildly.

Which brings me back to last Tuesday night.

As much as I love Martin O’Neill, he looked totally out of his depth in Linz.

I can’t sugar coat it in any way.

His tactics were inexplicable, his substitutions even more inexplicable – and in the end – he looked forlorn on the touchline as the game entered its final stages.

He looked like a 74 year old man who had been asleep while the modern game passed him by.

And if I’m being honest, that scared me.

It scared me that we could see this happening again in the coming weeks and months.

Because if Tuesday night revealed one thing, it’s that we were woefully underprepared for a game of that magnitude.

16 players had departed the building during the summer.

4 came in.

Tuesday night cruelly showed how woefully inadequate our recruitment has been this summer.

That is down to the Celtic board.

It has nothing to do with Martin O’Neill.

Now it would seem that failure to qualify for the Champions League will result in the men who failed to do their job adequately when it came to recruitment, using that failure to punish the manager by withdrawing their commitment to supply him with the quality he needs to negotiate the season ahead.

The likelihood of any of the targets earmarked before our Champions League failure arriving now looks slim.

Apparently most of them wanted to come on the basis we would qualify for Europe’s premier competition.

Or so we’re told anyway.

So will it be a case of a raft of last minute loans on deadline day to help us limp through the season like we did all throughout last season?

My concern is that Martin O’Neill’s tactical inflexibility could be the hill he dies on.

If Tuesday night showed us anything, it’s that 4-3-3 is a failed formation for Celtic.

We do not have the players to facilitate it.

It is cruelly exposed when we do not have a midfield hardman, something we’ve been missing since Scott Brown’s departure in 2021.

Five years ago.

Martin O’Neill either needs to ditch it, or he runs the risk of it being his downfall.

All of these issues have been forced on him by the Celtic board.

Because the board has failed to supply him with the players to suit the 4-3-3 formation, or the players required to change it for that matter.

If that doesn’t change in the next 4 days, we are going to be in big trouble this season.

Our squad is also so light right now, that an extended run of injuries would decimate it.

That’s just another thing to worry about.

The board has put Martin O’Neill in this position.

Nobody else.

If his reputation is destroyed because of it, they can never be forgiven.

The clock is ticking to deadline day.

Tick tock, tick tock.

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