Winning the league title in such dramatic fashion on the final day of last season, Martin O’Neill should have recognised the moment for what it was. The End.
In a chaotic season where he had rescued Celtic from oblivion not once but twice, that was the moment when the credits should have rolled.
The blockbuster Hollywood finale. The perfect opportunity to go out in a blaze of glory and sail off into the sunset, his legacy not only secure but further enhanced.
His decision to stay on as manager this season has proven to be a mistake. In his heart of hearts, O’Neill must realise this. The whole thing is done. Finished. Finito. Terminado, as one of his predecessors would have said.
On the back of the 2-0 defeat to Falkirk last weekend, it has now reached the point where O’Neill’s continued presence at the club is damaging his legacy.
The fans are turning on him. They don’t care what he did for the club 20-odd years ago. They aren’t interested in his wisecracks. They don’t want to hear nostalgic tales of old about how things used to be.
They care only about the here and now and about what they are watching on the pitch. Now mired in a run of three wins in their last ten matches, O’Neill’s side are, if anything, actually getting worse.
O’Neill’s argument about still being top of the league is one of deflection, denial and delusion. Complete and utter claptrap. It is an insult to the intelligence of Celtic supporters.
Martin O’Neill’s Celtic team lead the table but have struggled to convince
This is the problem. If there is solid evidence to support the claims that he has lost the faith of the players, then he is also rapidly losing the faith of the fans.
In a way, it is sad that it should come to this. The man is 74 years old. He didn’t ask to be thrust back into the spotlight. At least, not initially.
On two occasions, he answered an SOS call from Dermot Desmond last season. He came back and he did exactly what was asked of him.
If Celtic had any sort of competent succession plan in place, there wouldn’t even have been a conversation around O’Neill’s future towards the end of last season.
It would have been a case of shaking his hand, thanking him enormously for a heroic contribution, before being serenaded by supporters one last time after winning a league and cup double.
Yet, going back to those final few weeks of last season, it was clear O’Neill had the bug for it once again. He was never going to walk away, and nor were the board ever going to turn him down.
In the end, the situation needed one of two things to happen. It either needed O’Neill to save himself from his own desires, and have some sense and foresight about how the club was being run, or it needed Celtic to show some vision and make a proper long-term appointment.
In the absence of both, it was the blind leading the blind. O’Neill hung around primarily to have another crack at Europe, the Celtic board thought they had a bulletproof shield by retaining the services of a club icon.
The argument that kept on being trotted out at the time centred on how winning the league title meant that O’Neill had earned the right to stay on.
But that fundamentally missed the point. Of course he had earned the right. He’s Martin O’Neill. Only Jock Stein stands above him in the pantheon of the club’s all-time greatest managers.
Fans adored him (yes, past tense). But just because he had earned the right doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do. That’s the key difference.
Celtic manager Martin O’Neill lifts the league trophy back in May
Whenever Manchester United inevitably sack Michael Carrick, let’s suppose for a second that Sir Alex Ferguson comes in and takes charge for a few games.
Everything goes well, the team start winning games again, everyone starts getting those old feelings coming back.
But would it mean that the right thing to do is to hand Sir Alex the job for another season? Of course it wouldn’t.
The failure to separate that nostalgia and love for O’Neill from what was required moving into this season was a catastrophic error of judgment on Celtic’s part.
The club had absolutely no idea how to move forward in the summer – just like they would have absolutely no idea who to appoint now if O’Neill was to be relieved of his duties.
In the past, Celtic sacked Tommy Burns. They sacked Billy McNeill. The belief that O’Neill could not suffer a similar fate is hugely naive.
Right now, a growing section of the fanbase view him as little more than an extension of Desmond. His status as a club icon is fading.
Over the weekend, a couple of articles surfaced from a few years ago when O’Neill was sacked as Nottingham Forest manager in 2019.
They spoke of how O’Neill eventually lost the dressing room and of how the players were left bemused by his lack of detail on the tactical side of the game.
Some Celtic fans view O’Neill as little more than an extension of major shareholder Dermot Desmond
The parallels with this current Celtic side are obvious. Just look at the comments from Callum McGregor and Cameron Carter-Vickers over recent weeks.
They are a team with absolutely no tactical identity – and it’s difficult to see how this gets any better for as long as O’Neill, along with coaches Shaun Maloney and Mark Fotheringham, remain at the helm.
O’Neill attended a Q&A session at a supporter’s club in Greenock on Monday night, along with chief executive Michael Nicholson and chairman Brian Wilson.
A bizarre announcement from Celtic yesterday claimed that the questioning had been ‘hard but fair’ as supporters voiced their concerns about the current malaise.
The one man who continues to dodge the Paxman treatment is, of course, Desmond himself, the club’s largest shareholder who operates as the commander-in-chief.
And the one question which is now becoming painfully unavoidable is this: what grounds are there for Martin O’Neill to continue as Celtic manager?
