Martin O’Neill handled McCoist’s mad fixture list comments brilliantly.

Martin O’Neill spoke to talkSPORT today about the title race, about the games in front of him, and about the conspiracy theories being pushed by clownish individuals like McCoist on that radio station.

Once again, I’m glad that we have a manager like that at Celtic, because he didn’t get into a personal pissing contest with McCoist or anyone else. He simply talked about the football, dealt with the questions that were raised over the fixture list in a way that was sensible, and then moved on.

I always enjoy it when O’Neill is in this kind of form. He could have got the claws out. We know he’s more than capable of that.

He could have exposed McCoist for a cretin, and a fool, but that would have been an indication that he takes McCoist’s words seriously in the first place. The power in not even addressing McCoist and his broader point was in the implication that it’s contemptible rubbish, not worth even remarking upon.

It was obvious that the interviewer was trying to get him to get into a pissing match. But a pissing match like that is completely unimportant to Martin O’Neill at this moment in time. All it does is suck up energy that he has a much better use for; energy he wants focused on the job at hand. McInnes was smart enough yesterday to dodge the same thing and talk about the job at hand too. We’ll see how the Ibrox boss does.

Martin is far too smart to get dragged into a pointless slagging match with these people over such an obvious piece of ill-judged rubbish. I don’t know if McCoist was trying to get a rise out of Martin or someone else at Celtic. He should know better than that because nobody at the club is that stupid. The magisterial silence on it, though, was far more shattering to McCoist’s ego than if O’Neill had turned both barrels on him.

When O’Neill did that to Rohl prior to the two games at Ibrox, there was a good reason to do it.

The Ibrox boss had commented on Celtic without any provocation from our club, and O’Neill understood clearly that if that’s what Rohl was focusing on, he wasn’t focusing on the job. So O’Neill’s response became part of the psychological game.

You watch how he handles that same psychological battle as we get closer to the fixture against the Ibrox club. If their manager is dumb enough to try to reopen the argument, he’ll pay the price for it.

That has a clear strategic value. Turning the guns on Rohl in the way Martin did had an obvious payoff in terms of throwing the other man off his game and getting him to focus on the personality clash rather than on preparing his team properly.

That had an impact. McCoist is just a cretin working in the media, and the media is full of cretins. We covered Leckie again today, and if Martin O’Neill is focused on those individuals, then he’s not really paying attention where it should be.

Ibrox bosses have routinely fallen into this trap when baited by people like Chris Sutton, and they all make the classic error of trying to take on someone who, in the parlance of journalism, buys ink by the barrel. There’s no way to win that battle.

There’s no way they are going to beat Chris Sutton in a debate because they have other things to focus on, and Chris Sutton only has that to focus on. That means he can, if he wants to, devote an inordinate amount of time to the vendetta. Not that he’s ever had to, because by the time an Ibrox boss is in that parlous state it’s usually over already.

Celtic bosses are much smarter than that. There is message discipline at our club. You don’t get people at Celtic going off half-cocked and making big, bold predictions and saying stupid stuff on a regular basis, and the manager certainly does not do it.

Nor does he rise to every poke, prod and provocation from people in the media, because that’s just futile. If he did, he would find himself, as Ibrox bosses have, engaged in a permanent low-level conflict which cannot possibly have a happy ending.

What’s amazing to me is not how deftly O’Neill handled it.

It’s that anyone ever thought he was going to handle it in any other way. That’s why the questions themselves, as loaded as they were, were essentially dumb, because there was no way O’Neill was going to respond to those remarks as if they had significance, as if they carried weight. The mainstream media might have tried to amplify them, but all that did was draw more attention to how absolutely perverse and idiotic those comments were.

O’Neill didn’t have to highlight that; McCoist’s own colleagues in the mainstream press did that for him. Ironically, and this is one of the things McCoist never will understand, comments like that generate headlines, but they also generate scrutiny.

When you put those things out there in the cold light of day, they will be examined in the cold light of day.

That’s why I liked what O’Neill had to say.

He pointed out that all that’s happened here is that we’ve had 19 home fixtures and 19 away fixtures, just as the rule book says we should, just as it says the SPFL should strive to do with every club where possible, within the parameters of the split.

All three title contenders were given the same treatment and there really wasn’t any other alternative to that, no matter what McCoist might have wanted to happen.

Without even mentioning him, without going in too hard, O’Neill just forensically dissected the argument and put it aside. That is far more effective than launching a broadside about McCoist’s lack of basic intelligence or his propensity for hysteria, especially when it looks like Celtic are getting a fair crack.

And yes, there was, of course, a certain amount of contempt in the gesture, because that’s all those remarks are fit for.

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