Bill Leckie’s attack on the Celtic boss is uncalled for. Martin O’Neill responded to the Ibrox side’s paltry allocation in the only language he knew how to, he called it out for what it is…

Yesterday, Bill Leckie sat down at his laptop and decided that the real villain of this whole sorry mess is a 74-year-old man.

Not the 300 tickets, and not the people who sat in a room somewhere and decided that 300 was a reasonable number.

No, the problem here is Martin O’Neill.

In his column for the Scottish Sun, Leckie called our manager childish, pitiful, and accused him of being sucked into what he termed the old playground whataboutery.

Here is the line that set him off:

‘And next thing, he’s writing every Sunday paper’s back-page headline after not only declaring that his club should tell them to shove their measly allocation, but that “we’ll only give them one” for the league fixture at Parkhead the following week.’

‘Hoops punters will love that. Course they will. It’s the Blessed Martin sticking up for them and sticking it up the other lot.’

‘It’s not big, though, Martin. It’s not clever. In fact, it’s pitiful.’

Well, this Hoops punter did love it, and I’ll not be apologising for that.

He was asked a direct question about an insult aimed at our support, and he answered it directly

That is all that happened here.

He was asked what he made of 300 tickets for a League Cup quarter final at Ibrox.

Three hundred, for a national cup tie between the two biggest clubs in the country.

What exactly was the man supposed to say?

Was he meant to nod along and describe it as a fair and proportionate allocation?

Because that, apparently, is statesmanship.

Statesmanship is a lovely word, and in practice it usually means keeping the head down while somebody takes the mickey out of you.

And we’ve had about thirty years of that at Celtic, thanks all the same.

The Ibrox side started this pettiness, but somehow it’s our manager who is expected to rise above it

Let’s be clear about the running order.

The Ibrox side made their decision on the allocation first, and O’Neill responded to it second, and one of those things is the provocation while the other is the reaction.

Leckie knows fine well the difference between the two, he just chose not to apply it.

In fairness to him – and I’ll be fairer to him than he was to Martin – he did have a swipe at the Ibrox club as well.

He pointed out that their statement pinned March squarely on our support, while never once mentioning their own fans.

You know, the ones in the balaclavas who came over the barriers.

Not a single word about them in the press release.

Funny, that, isn’t it?

So he can see the imbalance perfectly well.

He just can’t bring himself to say the obvious thing that follows on from it.

Which is that when a club behaves like that, somebody is entitled to call it out.

300 tickets is not an allocation, it’s a message – and O’Neill read it exactly as it was written

That is the bit the SMSM will never put down on paper.

That number wasn’t arrived at by a safety officer with a calculator, it was arrived at by people who wanted us to know precisely what they think of us.

And it worked, because here we all are, still talking about it.

So when the manager says fine, you can have one back, he isn’t starting a playground fight.

He’s holding a mirror up: if 300 is acceptable, then one is acceptable, and if one is ridiculous, then so is 300.

Where exactly is the lie in that?

It really isn’t complicated, and it only becomes complicated when you need it to be complicated to fill a column.

We all know where Bill Leckie’s sympathies lie, and that column changed nobody’s mind on it

Now, I’m not going to sit here and pretend to be shocked.

Leckie’s allegiances are hardly a state secret in this country.

And to be fair to the man, he has never once claimed to be one of us.

He finished the piece by branding both clubs a World-Class Embarrassment, borrowing the Green Brigade’s own banner to do it.

Very neat.

Except that banner was the support holding our own board to account – the very thing we get told we never do.

When we finally do it, it gets recycled as a stick to beat us with.

That’s how this works, and it has always worked that way.

Or are we all imagining it?

Meanwhile the club that handed over 300 tickets gets described as far more measured.

Measured, aye.

Can you imagine the reception if we’d offered them 300 for a Parkhead cup tie?

The presses would still be running.

There is plenty to have a go at Martin O’Neill about at the minute, but this isn’t one of them.

I’ve done my share of it, and I’ll do it again before this season is out.

The Champions League exit, the transfer window, the hopefuls and the maybes – all of it is fair game.

But not this.

On this one he did the thing nobody upstairs at Celtic Park has had the stomach to do in years.

He told the truth in plain language, and he didn’t run it past the PR department first.

Silent Mike could learn something there.

Bill Leckie can call that childish if he likes.

The rest of us call it a manager sticking up for his support.

And if that’s the worst thing Martin O’Neill does this season, we’ll have got off very lightly indeed…

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