Martin’s return doesn’t fix everything, so the hard work at Celtic starts now.

Martin O’Neill has saved Celtic once already.

He walked back through the door at a moment when the club looked dead on its feet, when the atmosphere around the place was poisoned, when the team had been drained of belief and when the season looked like it was slipping through our fingers. He steadied it. He simplified it. He restored something close to order. He got seven wins from seven. He delivered the double.

That was the emergency job. That was the rescue mission.

Now comes the hard part.

Because the truth is that winning the double did not solve Celtic’s problems. It prevented them from becoming catastrophic. It bought the club time. It stopped the whole structure from collapsing in on itself. It gave supporters something to celebrate in the middle of one of the most poisonous seasons many of us can remember.

But the work that has to be done now is enormous.

And Martin O’Neill knows it.

That is why I do not believe for a second that he has spent the last few weeks sitting with his feet up, waiting to see whether Dermot Desmond and the board would come back to him. O’Neill is not built that way. He is not a passive man.

He is not someone who drifts along and waits for other people to decide his future before he starts thinking about the job.

He will have been working. Of course he will.

He will have been watching players. He will have been talking to people. He will have been looking at the squad, the balance of it, the weaknesses in it, the holes in it, the character of it and the sheer scale of what has to change before the Champions League qualifier arrives.

Because that qualifier is the fuse for the whole summer.

I wrote that the other day, and nothing has changed. Celtic cannot go into those games underprepared again. We cannot drift into another European tie with half a squad, a half-formed plan and a bunch of excuses already warming up in the tunnel.

O’Neill knows that. He knows what Europe means. He knows what Champions League money means. He knows what the mood around Celtic Park will look like if this club botches another qualifying campaign through delay, drift and boardroom inertia.

He also knows that this rebuild is not cosmetic.

This is not a case of adding one winger, one striker and pretending the rest will take care of itself. We do not even know who will be here by the time the serious football starts. We do not know which players are staying. We do not know which players will be sold. We do not know whether the club will finally show some ambition or whether it will lapse back into its usual habit of shopping late, shopping cheap and then asking the manager to make sense of it all. That cannot happen this time.

Not with O’Neill.

If he has agreed to stay, then he must have done so with conditions. I cannot believe otherwise. He will know exactly how badly he was hung out to dry in January. He will know that the board gave him almost nothing when he needed help most. He will know that the double was delivered in spite of the club’s conduct, not because of it.

So, this time, he has to use the power he has.

He has more goodwill than any Celtic manager in the modern era. I said that before, and I believe it. Rodgers had that kind of power briefly after the Invincible Treble, but he never fully used it. O’Neill has it now because he is seen as the man who saved the season. The man who dragged a beaten club off its knees. The man who stopped Celtic from disintegrating completely.

That gives him leverage. He has to use it.

He has to demand players early. He has to demand clarity. He has to demand that the club stops treating recruitment like a late-night supermarket sweep where we grab whatever is left on the shelf and hope the manager can cook a meal out of it.

He has to demand that the football department functions like an actual football department.

Because that is the real issue.

The managerial question may now be settled, but the structure beneath him remains a mess. We still need a proper sporting director. We still need a coherent recruitment strategy. We still need a chairman. We still need to know who is making decisions and on what basis they are being made. We still need a plan that goes beyond “Martin will sort it.”

That cannot be the plan.

O’Neill is brilliant, but he is not magic. He can organise. He can motivate. He can see the game. He can build belief. He can walk into a dressing room and command it in a way very few people can. But he cannot rebuild Celtic alone while the same people who created the mess sit around waiting for him to perform miracles.

That is not fair on him. It is not fair on the team. It is not fair on the support.

The squad needs serious work. The forward areas need assessed properly. The midfield may yet be affected by movement around players like Arne Engels, whose value and profile continue to rise. The defence needs strengthened. The goalkeeper situation needs absolute certainty. The bench needs quality. Not bodies. Quality.

There is a difference, and Celtic have spent far too long pretending otherwise.

The lesson of Engels should be burned into the walls of the football department. Higher-quality players from stronger leagues, with pedigree, resale value and the mentality to handle Celtic, are not reckless purchases if you know what you are doing. What is reckless is buying five cheap punts, watching three of them disappear into the shadows, then acting surprised when the manager does not trust them in major games.

O’Neill will not tolerate that nonsense.

He is not here to develop someone else’s spreadsheet vanity project. He is not here to be handed players who do not fit what he wants to do. He is not here to repeat the same mistakes that got us into this mess in the first place.

The hard work starts now because this is the point where the club either proves it has learned something or proves, once again, that the lesson has sailed clean over its head.

O’Neill has talked about what he could do with a summer.

He has talked about being able to implement more than tweaks around the edges. Good. Now he has to be given the tools to do that.

Because the football last season worked in the end, but it was not always pretty. It was not always fluent. It was not always convincing. It was survival football at times, and survival football was enough because survival was the first requirement.

Next season cannot be survival.

Next season has to be progression.

The standards have to rise. The intensity has to rise. The squad has to be sharper, stronger, deeper and better prepared. The club cannot wait until late August to decide what kind of team Martin O’Neill is supposed to put on the pitch in early August.

That would be madness.

But with Celtic, madness often arrives dressed as prudence.

That is why O’Neill has to be ruthless now. Not with the players, although some of them will have to go. Not with the support, which is already largely behind him. He has to be ruthless with the people above him.

He has to make demands. He has to set deadlines. He has to insist that the club acts like a serious organisation for once.

Because he has saved these people twice now. The first time he came back, like Cincinnatus from the farm, it was to save the republic.

This time, as I said before, he has also protected those who summoned him. He has saved the board from the consequences of its own idiocy, from the Robbie Keane catastrophe, from another civil war and from the complete collapse of trust.

But he cannot keep saving them from themselves.

At some point, they have to do their jobs.

That is where we are now.

The fans have done their part. They made it clear Keane was unacceptable. They forced the club away from the cliff edge. They gave O’Neill a stronger negotiating position whether anyone inside Celtic Park wants to admit it or not.

O’Neill has done his part. He rescued the season and has now, apparently, agreed to stay.

Now the board has to do its part.

And that is where the fear begins, because these people have not earned the benefit of the doubt. Not after last summer. Not after January. Not after the managerial shambles. Not after the Green Brigade decision. Not after the silence, the drift, the arrogance and the total absence of anything resembling a modern football plan.

The hard work starts now, yes.

But it does not only start for Martin O’Neill.

It starts for everyone above him.

If they back him properly, Celtic can go into next season with stability, purpose and a fighting chance of doing something meaningful in Europe. If they fail him again, then nobody should pretend the consequences were unforeseeable.

O’Neill knows how to win. He has proved that again.

Now Celtic have to prove they know how to support a winner.

Because if they waste this final great act of service from Martin O’Neill, if they take his goodwill, his credibility and his connection with the supporters and use it as cover for another summer of incompetence, then the anger that follows will make everything we have seen so far look mild.

The boss has done the rescue job. Now he needs the tools for the rebuild.

And this club had better give them to him.

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