The Celtic board do not deign to tell us whether Martin O’Neill is still our manager, but they’ll tell you what will happen to you if you throw a tennis ball at Dermot Desmond…

We play Motherwell at Fir Park on Sunday, and as I write this nobody at Celtic has told us whether Martin O’Neill is still the manager.

Let that sink in for a second.

Not a statement, not a line on the club website, not even a wee leak to a friendly journalist.

Nothing.

And this, in a nutshell, is the way the Celtic board behaves.

Zero communication on the one thing every supporter wants to know

Cast your mind back to the start of the international break.

Three defeats in a row, two of them to the Ibrox side, and O’Neill stood up afterwards and said he would take the time to reflect on his position.

That is a manager telling the support, in public, that he isn’t sure if he wants to carry on.

When a manager says something like that, the fans are entitled to some reassurance about what comes next.

At some point, somebody has to tell us how it ended.

Instead, we got complete radio silence.

The nearest thing to an answer is a message of support from Michael Nicholson, tucked away in the annual results statement.

Not a press conference, not a letter to the support – a vague inference buried in a document about the accounts.

Typical Silent Mike.

Now, I’ll grant you that clubs don’t always rush to confirm these things.

But a wee bit of respect for the people who fund the whole operation isn’t too much to ask, is it?

Even the pundits are scratching their heads, and here is what former Premiership goalkeeper Cammy Bell had to say, as reported by the BBC:

I’m a little bit surprised there’s not been much coming out of Celtic because when you listen to Martin O’Neill’s comments after that defeat at Celtic Park against Rangers, you almost assumed that within a couple of days he was probably going to move on.

So you fully expect O’Neill to now be in the dugout. He has maybe gone away, had a think about it, reset himself and still firmly believes he can take Celtic on to go and win trophies this season.

Notice the wording there.

You almost assumed.

You fully expect.

Maybe he has gone away and had a think.

That’s a former player and a journalist guessing, because the club that pays O’Neill’s wages won’t tell them either.

Mark Atkinson of The Scotsman said it looks likely that O’Neill returns, but then added that Celtic have thrown us some real curveballs over the past year, so you never know what’s coming.

He’s not wrong, is he?

Radio silence on the manager, but an 867 word statement on a few tennis balls

Now, let’s compare that to what happens when some pesky fans throw a few tennis balls at the God King himself, Dermot Desmond.

Last Saturday, it happened.

And within hours the club had cleared its throat and issued a statement of 867 words.

867 words.

That is one of the longest statements I have ever seen in the history of Celtic Football Club.

Longer than anything we got after a failed transfer window.

Longer than anything we got when a European campaign went up in smoke.

And infinitely longer than the nothing we have been given about whether the man in the dugout on Sunday is going to be there at all.

So the board can find the time, the energy and the vocabulary to defend a very thin-skinned billionaire from a handful of tennis balls.

But they can’t spare a sentence for the supporters about the football manager.

The priorities of this board are completely out of whack

Let me be clear about something.

Nobody I know cares what the board plans to do about an incident involving a few tennis balls and a man who is, to put it kindly, sensitive.

We care about who is going to manage our club.

We care about the direction it is heading in, and whether anyone in that boardroom has the faintest idea.

Make no mistake, the tennis ball business might matter in time.

If it ends up causing a civil war at our club, then yes, we will all care about what happened last Saturday.

But that is a problem for another day.

For the immediate future, it would be nice to know what is actually going on in the footballing operation.

Is O’Neill staying or going?

If he’s staying, say so, and let him walk out at Fir Park with the support knowing where it stands.

If he’s going, tell us that too, and spare us the guessing game.

Either way, it takes one sentence.

Maybe two if they’re feeling generous.

It certainly doesn’t take 867 words.

The board found those for Dermot Desmond.

You know what that tells you about their priorities, don’t you?

End of.

We’re still waiting on the other kind of statement… and this time, SAY SOMETHING!

Choose Read Celtic as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.