If Martin O’Neill selects Sam Johnstone over Viljami Sinisalo for Celtic tonight, it sends out a very negative message to the rest of the team – play poorly, and you still get selected…

This morning the Daily Record ran their predicted Celtic XI for tonight’s visit of Ferencváros.

They have Viljami Sinisalo restored between the sticks.

Let’s hope they’ve got that one right.

Because if Martin O’Neill names Sam Johnstone in that goal this evening, he sends a message to the dressing room that he cannot take back.

Play poorly, and you still get selected.

That is the message.

And it is the wrong one.

Let’s go back to Sunday for a minute.

Sam Johnstone endured a nightmare debut in a Glasgow derby.

Jittery was the word the Record used, and jittery is being kind.

His nerves spread to the men in front of him inside twenty minutes.

You could see it from the stand, and you could see it from your sofa.

An England international, brought here for his experience, and he could not keep a cool head when it mattered most.

We have now seen what Sam Johnstone can do, or rather, what he cannot do

Now, contrast that with the boy he replaced.

Viljami Sinisalo was rock solid in the run up to us winning the double last season.

He has done very little wrong in a Celtic jersey.

ONE poor night against LASK, and that is about the size of it.

One poor night, and he found himself dropped for the biggest domestic fixture of the season so far.

How do you think the lad feels this week?

I’ll tell you how he feels.

He feels hard done by, and he is perfectly entitled to.

And I’d bet the house he sat through Sunday’s 3-0 humbling thinking he could have done a whole lot better than that.

Because he could have.

Dropping a keeper after one bad night isn’t management, it’s panic dressed up as a decision

Martin O’Neill told us he wanted to see what Sam Johnstone could do.

Fair enough – every manager is entitled to have a look at his own squad.

But we have seen it now.

So what exactly is the argument for going back to him tonight?

There isn’t one.

If the reasoning was curiosity, then the curiosity has been satisfied, and it was satisfied in the worst way imaginable.

Of course, you could argue that a keeper of Johnstone’s standing deserves more than ninety minutes to settle.

And in normal circumstances I’d agree with that.

But these are not normal circumstances.

We have lost to LASK, we have been dismantled by the Ibrox side, and we face the same Ibrox side again on Sunday.

This is not the week for finding things out.

Tonight is a European tie we badly need something from, and Sunday is the game that will define how this season feels for the rest of us.

You don’t go experimenting your way through a week like that one.

What this really does is tell an in-form goalkeeper that his form counts for nothing at Celtic

Here is the part that bothers me more than tonight’s result will.

What does another night on the bench do to Viljami Sinisalo’s confidence?

A young keeper does the business for this club for the best part of a season.

He has one shocker in Austria and loses his jersey.

He then watches the man who took it from him have a far bigger shocker in a derby.

And what happens to the pair of them if Johnstone has another one of those tonight?

And he still doesn’t get it back.

Tell me how that lad is supposed to keep his head right.

Then tell me how the rest of them are supposed to read it.

Dressing rooms notice these things, and they notice them a lot faster than boardrooms do

They notice when a player is punished for one mistake.

They notice a whole lot more when another player makes several and keeps his place.

Kieran Tierney, Cameron Carter-Vickers, Callum McGregor, Benjamin Nygren – these are men who have watched managers come and go at our club.

They will have formed their own view on Sunday long before any of us got round to writing about it.

That is how you lose a group of players.

Not with a bad result, but with a decision they cannot make any sense of.

Look, I’m not sitting here telling Martin O’Neill how to do his job.

The man has forgotten more about football than I will ever know, and his record at our club speaks for itself.

And who am I to judge him?

But this one isn’t complicated.

You have an error prone keeper and you have a keeper who was rock solid when it counted.

We all know which one should be starting tonight.

Writing Sinisalo off after one bad performance isn’t fair on the boy, and it isn’t good enough for the rest of us either.

And if wanting to see what Sam Johnstone could do is the best reason we are getting, then what happens to the next man who has a bad night in Austria?

Because fairness is the thing that keeps a dressing room together when results go against it

Take that away and you are left with a group of players who stop believing that anything they do on a Saturday actually matters.

We have been down that road before at Celtic.

It does not end well.

So put Viljami Sinisalo back in that goal tonight.

Reward the right thing for once.

Because the alternative tells every single player in that dressing room that a bad performance costs them absolutely nothing…

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