When the manager tells you Celtic’s main focus is domestic rather than European, you know how high the ambition bar has been set

Over the period of time since Celtic’s chronic failure in Linz, we have been getting it from every angle that domestic dominance comes first and and foremost.

I think at this point, for any of us who have ambition for the club, the constant dumbing down of our European ambitions is designed to try and make us accept that we are just not good enough to compete in Europe.

It won’t work.

Most Celtic supporters with a brain know what this club is capable of.

We know how far Celtic could go under the right stewardship.

But when it gets to the point where the manager is telling us that Europe is not a priority, then you know that even he has been compromised by the lack of ambition in the Celtic boardroom.

Look, I understand that the domestic game is our bread and butter

In order to even be able to compete in Europe, we need to win the league at a bare minimum now.

This is because the path to the Champions League has now become more difficult than ever for Celtic.

This season’s Champions League qualifier was the last chance we had to qualify with just one round of playoffs.

Our path to that competition has becomes three times harder than it was.

And with our pathetic record in qualification, who’s to say we’d even get past the first round of three qualifiers?

Since that disastrous capitulation to LASK, there has been radio silence from the boardroom.

No apology, no admitting they got it wrong, nothing.

Because how can they front up and admit that while they told us they would learn from previous mistakes, they learned absolutely nothing at all?

It’s actually embarrassing from that perspective, and maybe we’d be better off not hearing their pathetic excuses.

I think even they know that at this point.

There is no excuse for what happened.

But our board’s attitude is just the same as it is with everything else that goes wrong at Celtic.

Ignore it, and hopefully it will go away.

Instead, they let our 74 year old manager do all the heavy lifting for them.

And now, they even have him admitting we can’t compete in Europe.

Which is a far cry from the attitude he presented before we were eliminated so from the CL so disastrously in Linz.

His comments on Europe were once again highlighted in yesterday’s Record:

It’s a difficult list and (picking the Europa League squad), for me, the most important thing is our domestic football. Of course, we’re disappointed about the Champions League but the Europa League is still very strong, and we want to try to do as well as we possibly can in that. But we want the players we signed to make a mark initially on the domestic scene, which is the most important thing for us at this stage.

So Martin O’Neill has made it clear that the League is the priority.

This is understandable, as I said earlier, if we are to show any European ambition.

But didn’t we really want the players we signed to help get us into the Champions League?

Or more to the point, should we not have signed the players required to get us into the Champions League before the qualifier?

This would have guaranteed a strong team for the League regardless, and therefore, the domestic scene would have looked after itself.

In reality, the next fortnight or so is going to tell us exactly how good we are on the domestic scene.

We have St. Johnstone away coming up on Wednesday night, who have not had a bad start to life back in the Scottish top flight.

That is followed by a Glasgow derby double header, and a Europa League game against Ferencváros sandwiched in between, all of our ambitions for this season will certainly be tested.

We also have to navigate all four games without in form Hyun-Jun Yang, who is away on international duty with Korea.

Which means we have to rely heavily on Sebastian Tounekti, who hasn’t exactly been in flying form lately.

So, this domestic scene the manager is focusing on?

Well, we’ll see just how cut out we are for that over the next two weeks.

Four wins from all four fixtures is what is expected.

An early exit from the League Cup at the hands of our arch rivals certainly won’t go down well.

So let’s hope Martin O’Neill can back up just how much the domestic scene matters.

Since it now seems to be all that matters…

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