Martin O’Neill should not have any role in Celtic’s summer rebuild.

Yesterday, Martin O’Neill confronted me with a dilemma.

One of the great pleasures I’ve had writing about Celtic over the years has come when arrogant, egotistical people hand you the words to use against them.

People who are so sure of their own opinions that they shout them through a megaphone, only for you to come along later and pin those same words back on them.

But that sword cuts both ways.

It is an occupational hazard that sooner or later someone will do the same to you. I have deserved it more than most, because I am very forthright in my views. While I don’t think I’m particularly arrogant or egotistical, I know I can come across that way. There are more than a few things I have read back and had to laugh at myself.

I’ve always said there is only one article I truly regret writing for this site. I have made a mess of things a few times. I have made mistakes a few times. But there is only one piece I wish I had never written. That was the article I wrote on the day Brendan Rodgers left this club the first time.

Even at the time, I knew I was only telling half the story. Looking back on it now fills me with deep shame. I excoriated the guy. I branded Rodgers a traitor and a rat, even though I knew his hand had been forced in some ways. That article should have focused entirely on the board of directors and their conduct. Instead, I helped that perception take hold, and I have never regretted anything on this site more.

This article is an attempt to avoid a second enormous regret.

A few weeks ago, I said something that seemed sensible at the time. In hindsight, it wasn’t sensible in the slightest, and it now needs to be dramatically overturned.

I hope that by correcting the record before circumstances catch up with it, I can present a better argument. I have more evidence in front of me now.

Now it feels as if I have a clearer understanding of the situation.

The article in question was about Martin O’Neill. My view was that if he won the title, there was an argument for giving him the job for another 12 months.

Before I annihilate my own case, I’m going to restate why I wrote that at the time and why it seemed like a sensible solution.

The way I saw it was simple.

If O’Neill could squeeze enough out of this squad to win the championship, then there was a case for giving him one more year. This club needs to repair its credibility before almost anything else. Without that, we are asking managers to come here and inherit a shambles.

We are asking them to walk into a shitstorm of epic proportions.

At the time, I thought O’Neill could steady the ship. I thought he could give Celtic some sense of itself again. I thought he could help restructure the squad just enough that the next manager would walk into a more stable environment. A club that looked, at least from the outside, as though rational people were running it again.

It would also give us time to continue campaigning for change. It would give us stability on the pitch while we kept the pressure on the current directors and tried to knock over as many of them as possible.

O’Neill knows that campaign is not going away. He knows winning the title will not fix what is broken. Only someone who grabs this club by the scruff of the neck and proves that it has changed, or is at least changing, can restore any order here.

That was my argument. At the time, it seemed positive. It was never going to fix everything, but it might give us room to start repairing the worst of the damage we have done to ourselves this year.

O’Neill had proved he could put a winning team on the pitch but he also seems to offer a stabilising force. Give him another year, get the club back on its feet, make it look less messy and self-destructive, move some directors on in the interim and give us at least the appearance of a club with its act together.

That was the rationale. Today, that rationale lies in utter ruins.

We would not be getting a stabilising force to take us into the future. We would be getting a holding pattern at best and at worst a more serious regression. The contract renewals, and his comments at yesterday’s press conference, were astonishing, troubling and upsetting.

I want to think good things about this guy. But all I could think while listening to him was that I want this to be over the second the season ends. There is no way to sugarcoat that. It was what I thought then, and it is what I think now.

I thought the whole thing was embarrassing.

His attempt to suggest that what McGregor had said in his interview this week had been misrepresented or misunderstood in some way was especially poor. McGregor could not have been clearer. His criticisms had force. Yesterday, O’Neill tried to blunt them. It was shocking.

His comment that the next manager will look forward to working with players like Luke McCowan, Liam Scales and James Forrest was abysmal. If that’s the case that manager has no business in a job this big.

The dearth of talent that got us into this mess cannot be presented as the solution for getting us out of it.

It was even worse, of course, when you consider how seldom O’Neill himself has started two of the players in question.

I also cannot abide any more of the jokes about how old he is.

We heard him the first time. We got the joke. Now it sounds like a politician talking so he does not have to answer the questions in front of him. It sounds like a deflection tactic, designed to avoid saying anything that might upset people.

I also wonder whether he is involved in a giant deception against the supporters.

He talks an awful lot like a guy who will be here next season and already knows it. Maybe they will dress it up as him being the wise old head guiding Shaun Maloney. But O’Neill sounds like someone who expects to have influence over the development of the squad.

If that is true, then the club should come out and say it.

Stop with the bullshit.

Fans have had enough bullshit from out of Celtic. If this is the plan, tell us it is the plan. Then let the supporters who are being asked to renew their season tickets decide whether this is what they want to pay for.

Liam Scales, Luke McCowan and James Forrest.

That is the calibre of player he apparently wants at this club.

If O’Neill has the job already, and he is going along with a deception against the support, that would be bad enough. If he does not have the job, and he thinks he is entitled to make decisions for the next manager, that is perhaps just as bad.

It is also proof that he does not grasp how stupid, destructive and limiting this policy has already proved to be.

Handing the next manager players who he might not want near the building, is an atrocity on top of all the others we have already seen.

O’Neill should not be making that decision for the next boss. The presumption in it is astonishing. It is beyond reckless. It damages our chances of appointing someone with modern thinking and a fresh perspective on what this team should look like.

Under these circumstances, you can forget hiring anybody like that.

There is a reason clubs have not spent the past decade breaking Martin O’Neill’s door down to get him back into management. There is a reason Shaun Maloney is at Celtic as pathway manager rather than sitting in a dugout somewhere as a head coach.

Anyone who thinks the next Celtic manager should look forward to working with Liam Scales and Luke McCowan has a very poor sense of what Celtic’s standards should be.

Martin O’Neill is the guy who once had a midfield of Lambert, Petrov, Lennon and Thompson. He had a strike force of Larsson, Sutton and Hartson.

That man is now willing to accept this?

I want to wish him well, no matter how this season ends. I want to be able to say that he remains an iconic figure at this club.

None of us wants to hold a negative view of Martin O’Neill.

But if he is involved in a deception against the supporters, if he is constructing his own idea of Celtic behind the scenes, then he is lashing himself to the mast of the Good Ship Desmond and all of its motley crew. He is betting his legacy on Michael Nicholson, Chris McKay and all the rest of them.

Because if that ship runs aground, he will go down with it.

There will be no legacy left to speak of.

What I want, more than anything else right now, is for Martin O’Neill to get us through this campaign successfully and then go and bask in the reflected glory of it for the rest of his natural life. But the idea of him being at Celtic Park next season in any capacity, having heard that yesterday, is so depressing to me that I don’t even want to properly contemplate it sober.

I had suggested him as manager for next season if he got us over the line. I also said that the logical thing might be to make him head of football operations.

His comments yesterday, and his apparent support for renewing the contracts of those three players, cast such grievous doubt on his judgement that I don’t want him in either job. I don’t want him in any job at this club.

Celtic needs to grab the future instead of clinging desperately to the past by its fingernails. That is all he represents now.

I want Martin O’Neill to depart Celtic as a towering Cincinnatus. The man we called in an emergency and to whom we gave absolute power in a crisis. The man who dragged a crushed and defeated squad off its knees and turned it into champions again.

If he does that, he will be honoured for it forever. But beyond that, I hope that he has no further role to play. He does not, he cannot, he must not, represent the necessary evolution of this club, because it has to be a future. It cannot be a rerun of the past.

We have already hired Lennon twice. We have already hired Rodgers twice. When does this club start to look forward? When does it start to build something new? We cannot stay stuck in this mud. We cannot remain mired in this mediocre way of running the institution.

This feels like a third-rate bowling club run by tired old men, for the benefit of those same tired old men and their buddies.

Keeping O’Neill beyond this campaign would only reinforce that impression. Not only to our supporters, but to the whole watching world. Far from restoring Celtic’s credibility, it would flush another piece of it down the toilet.

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