Keevins has one of his ‘a stopped clock is right twice a day’ moments with his latest Celtic prediction…

Yesterday morning, Hugh Keevins wrote Martin O’Neill off.

Not ‘under pressure’.

Not ‘needs a result at the weekend’.

Written off.

And here is the part that should bother you far more than anything Keevins has ever put his name to.

He isn’t too far wide of the mark.

I’ve read that Record column three times now and I still can’t find the bit where I get to laugh at him.

Believe me, I looked.

Here is how he opened it:

Last Sunday’s league defeat from Rangers was the day Martin O’Neill, regrettably, ceased to be taken seriously in my eyes.

It gives me no pleasure to say so but, by the time the final whistle blew at Celtic Park, there was only one thought in my mind.

The home team, losing emphatically to their greatest rivals, looked like a side chosen and coached by a fan who had won a competition to be Celtic manager for a day.

A fan who had won a competition to be Celtic manager for a day.

Where exactly is the lie in that?

As much as it pains me to hand Keevins anything at all, that is a decent line.

It is also a line that about forty thousand people inside Celtic Park arrived at on their own last Sunday, without needing a Record column to explain it to them.

When Keevins is the one telling you the emperor has no clothes, he has been naked a long time

Let’s be clear about what has actually happened here.

This is not insight.

This is a man reading the room.

Keevins has spent the week doing what Keevins always does, which is scrolling through fan media, listening to the podcasts, and then selling it all back to us on a Sunday morning as his own considered opinion.

Every single beat of that column was already out there.

The press conference about being two years away from 110 – done to death by Tuesday.

The Mick Jagger answer – same.

Two of ten summer signings starting a derby – fan media had that one written before the players were off the pitch.

Silent Mike’s vote of confidence landing in the same week as accounts showing a loss – well, he handed us that one himself.

None of it is new.

Where is the original thought in any of it?

Keevins didn’t predict the storm, he waited until the roof was in the garden and called it windy

Because let’s not pretend this is a man with a record.

This is the same Hugh Keevins who gave Celtic a zero per cent chance of winning the league last season.

The same one who has spent years assuring us that the Ibrox side are about to turn a corner.

His predictions are, more often than not, utterly stupid and reliably wrong.

So what has changed?

Nothing has changed.

He has simply picked the one prediction available this season that didn’t require him to think.

Nearly every Celtic fan I know, to a man and a woman, has been saying the same thing since the Ferencváros night.

That Martin O’Neill’s time at our club is heading for a disaster.

And that Dermot Desmond and the board are the ones marching him into it.

Predicting that is shooting fish in a barrel.

It’s not much of a prediction when the whole ground has already read the last page

Now, in fairness to him – and this hurts – there is one part he gets properly right.

Keevins reckons that when this finally ends there will be no succession strategy in place, and that whatever the board decide to do next they will get it horribly wrong.

He isn’t wrong about that either.

These are the same people who appointed Wilfried Nancy and binned him a month later.

These are the same people who have let Martin walk into press conference after press conference to carry the can for a recruitment policy he clearly doesn’t believe in himself.

Ten signings in the summer.

Two of them trusted when it actually mattered.

What do you think that tells you?

That is not a manager problem, that is a boardroom problem wearing a manager’s coat.

And that is the bit Keevins skates straight past, because the absent meddling golfer is never really the villain of the piece in a Record column.

The story isn’t that Keevins turned on Martin O’Neill, it’s that our board left him out there to be turned on

I’ll say what I’ve said all along.

I don’t blame Martin for the state we are in.

I blame the people who sold him a squad, banked their net profit, and then left him in front of a microphone on his own.

Warnock and the talkSPORT crowd throwing a protective cordon around him does him no favours either.

Neither does Keevins kicking lumps out of him while he’s down.

But one of those two is at least pointing at the right scoreboard.

You know the old saying, don’t you?

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Hugh got one of his two in yesterday.

The tragedy of it is that it took the worst week we’ve had in years for him to manage it.

He’ll be back to being wrong by next Sunday…

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