Keevins is right about Martin O’Neill, and the reason he is right sits in the Celtic boardroom

There are mornings where you read something in the Record and have to check the byline twice, just to be sure it isn’t a wind-up.

Yesterday was one of them.

Hugh Keevins has written a column about Martin O’Neill, and I cannot find a single line in it to argue with.

Believe me, I tried.

Anybody who reads my stuff knows exactly what I think of the man, week in and week out.

I’ve spent the best part of a year taking his Sunday offerings apart, and I’ll be doing it again next week.

But credit where credit is due.

Keevins has reached a conclusion the rest of us got to weeks ago, just by opening his eyes.

That is the part that sticks in my throat.

Not that he’s wrong.

That it took this long, and that it took a 5-1 humiliation in Linz before anybody in that building would say it out loud.

Here is the passage that stopped me dead:

Given all that he has done for the club over the course of the last 11 months, Celtic have a duty of care where Martin O’Neill is concerned.

Not in the form of absolution from blame, no matter what happens to the team on the park. That would be an artificial working relationship which would not even be to his liking.

But a need to be aware of what’s best for all concerned after the season-altering, ignominious implosion against LASK in Tuesday night’s Champions League qualifier.

He is right.

A duty of care is exactly what our 74 year old manager is owed.

It is also exactly what he has not been given, not once in eleven months.

Then Keevins goes further.

He points out that there is no such thing as a legacy when it comes to Celtic managers.

Jock Stein won the European Cup and Celtic got rid of him.

Billy McNeill won us the Double in our centenary year, and they got rid of him too.

Tommy Burns has a plaque at the front door of Celtic Park and was sacked without ceremony.

Iconic status has a shelf life at this club.

That thought has kept me up since Tuesday.

This board is gambling with the reputation of the one man who saved them.

Martin O’Neill walked back in here at 74 years of age and won a league and a Scottish Cup.

He did it with a squad that was being picked apart around him as he worked.

He handed this board a season of domestic bliss they had done absolutely nothing to earn.

And how have they repaid him?

I wrote about it late last night, before I’d read a word of Keevins.

Sixteen players out over the course of the summer, and four in.

Tierney and Høgh looking at four months on the treatment table.

Callum Osmand limping out of Celtic Park with his leg in a boot.

Two days left in the window, and a CEO who has achieved nothing of note since June.

That is the squad Martin O’Neill is being asked to carry into two Glasgow derbies in eight days.

Keevins calls the schedule punishing and says resources are low, and he is not wrong about either.

He is being polite.

Where exactly is the duty of care in that?

Celtic finished a Champions League play off with Ralston, Scales, McCowan and Dane Murray, and somebody signed that off.

Which one of those names was supposed to rescue our season in Austria?

Keevins noticed that too.

He also noticed that O’Neill didn’t create this mess, and that the principal shareholder could be accused of starting it when he jettisoned Brendan Rodgers.

Now where have you heard that one before?

Fan media has been saying exactly that since last summer, and nobody in the mainstream wanted to hear it.

We were bitter conspiracy theorists then.

Apparently we’re all analysts now that the Record has caught up with us.

And that is my problem with the whole thing.

Not the argument – the argument is sound.

It’s the timing, and it’s the relish.

Keevins is enjoying this a lot more than a man with his prediction record ought to be.

You can feel it coming off the page, in every line of that column.

This is the same man who gave Celtic a zero per cent chance of winning the title back in April.

His line about turning the Lisbon Lions’ photographs towards the wall is a good one.

It is also a line written by somebody who knew precisely how much it would hurt, and wrote it anyway.

But here’s the thing.

Any journalist worth his salt could have seen this coming a mile off.

It did not require a collapse of monumental proportions to work out that a squad stripped of sixteen players might come up short.

It required somebody to say so while there was still time to do something about it.

Did any of them?

Not one.

We did, and we were told we were negative for our trouble.

So no, Keevins doesn’t get a medal for turning up after the fire brigade.

But he does get an acknowledgement from me, because on this he is right.

The worst result in our 138 year history happened on Tuesday night.

The men who assembled that squad will be sat at their desks as normal on Tuesday morning.

Do you think a single one of them will lose a night’s sleep over it?

Martin O’Neill will be the one asked to answer for it in Lisbon.

When Hugh Keevins is the man standing up for our manager against our own board, we are further down this road than even I thought.

Let that one sink in…

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