McInnes’ black hatred of Celtic helps him in delivering his team talks when he faces us, the same cannot be said of Martin O’Neill, and it showed…

Yesterday, Dan Neil lifted the lid on what goes on in the Ibrox dressing room before they play us.

He was speaking on Premier Sports’ Scottish Football Social Club, and the Daily Record ran with it.

Here is what the stand-in captain had to say about his manager’s team talks, as reported by the Daily Record. Read it twice.

“Yeah, I think that was definitely part of the team talk. He is brilliant at them.

“Every single one has been a real kind of war cry. It’s been really, really good.

“But I think a lot of it was, ‘Forget last week. Last week’s done. It’s a completely new game.’

“And all the lads bought into it.”

A war cry.

That’s the phrase that jumped straight off the page at me when I read it.

Not a team talk, not a set of instructions, not a tactical briefing.

A war cry.

The difference between Martin O’Neill and Derek McInnes is that McInnes is driven by an absolute hatred of us

And that hatred is not a theory of mine, it’s a matter of public record.

You’ve watched him for the guts of two decades now.

At Aberdeen, at Kilmarnock, at Hearts, and now at Ibrox.

The man cannot stand us.

He cannot stand our support, he cannot stand our club, and he has never once bothered hiding it.

Remember the “disgusting” penalty at Fir Park in May?

That was not a manager assessing a refereeing decision.

That was a man who knew he had pretty much lost the title to Celtic, and could not process it.

So picture him in that dressing room on Sunday morning.

The language would have been normal enough, I’d imagine.

He’s not standing there frothing at the mouth and calling us names in front of twenty professional footballers.

But the tone underneath it?

The tone underneath it is a lifetime of undiluted loathing for our club compressed into five minutes.

And players can hear that.

They can hear it in the voice, and they can feel it in the room.

Whether you want to accept it or not, hatred is a serious motivator in this game, and he knows exactly how to use it.

That’s not me giving him credit as a coach.

It’s me giving him credit as an operator.

He knows what buttons to press in that dressing room because he’s been pressing them his entire career.

Six wins on the bounce now.

Three-nil at Ibrox in the cup, then one-nil at Celtic Park, and the gap down to two points.

And Neil admitted the Penrice move surprised even the players when they saw it on the training pitch.

Tucking a left back inside to man-mark Benjamin Nygren.

That’s a manager who has sat down and thought about us properly.

Which is a hell of a lot more than can be said for anybody in our own dugout that afternoon.

Martin O’Neill might not like the Ibrox side, but it doesn’t come close to McInnes’ hatred of us

And let me be fair to the man here.

In 2000, Martin O’Neill could do impassioned.

He could do it better than almost anybody in the British game.

Six-two, and the touchline, and the arms going, and a manager who looked ready to run through the wall himself.

Do you remember what that man sounded like?

But that was twenty-six years ago.

That was a 48 year old man in his absolute prime.

The man in our dressing room on Sunday morning is 74 years of age.

He’s a man who has already told us he’ll be gone by the end of this season.

He’s a man who was on the after dinner circuit and on Talksport a year ago.

And I’m sorry, but a sedate 74 year old with one foot out the door is not delivering a war cry.

He is delivering a team talk.

There’s a difference, and forty-five minutes into Sunday you could see the difference on the grass.

One dressing room came out of that tunnel to fight, the other came out to play a fixture

We were second to everything again.

No intensity, no aggression, no snarl.

Nobody looked remotely like running through a brick wall for anybody beside them.

Neil used that exact phrase about his own lot, by the way – running through a brick wall for each other.

When was the last time you watched a Celtic side and thought that?

Of course, the tactics matter, and the board’s refusal to sign a midfielder matters more than any of it.

I’ve written that often enough, and I’ll keep writing it.

But you can’t ignore what happens in the ten minutes before eleven men walk out into that noise.

One of those rooms was lit up.

Ours was not.

This is just another reason why Martin O’Neill is not the man to take our club forward

It’s not disrespect, and it’s not a lack of gratitude.

The man gave us a League and a Cup last season when nobody sane expected it.

His legend at Celtic was secure long before any of this.

But management in 2026 is a young man’s job.

It’s an energy job, it’s a confrontation job, and it’s a job that eats men twenty years younger than him alive.

Derek McInnes is 55 and he arrives at Celtic Park with a plan and a grudge.

We arrive with a pensioner the board hid behind because they didn’t fancy the alternative.

And then we sit and wonder why we’re getting beaten twice in eight days.

Do we really need it spelled out any plainer than that?

Hatred won that dressing room battle on Sunday morning, hours before a ball was kicked.

Sad, but true…

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