Celtic’s potential Champions League opponents don’t scare me. We scare me.

Last night, one of the Celtic sites put up a list of the teams we could conceivably face in the Champions League qualifier, and as everyone knows, we should only have to face one round in the Champions Path.

Looking at the teams currently being mentioned, I have to tell you that under normal circumstances Celtic would have nothing to fear.

The teams we are most likely to be up against, taking into account current seeding and all the rest of it, appear to be Slovenia’s NK Celje, Norway’s Viking FK, Denmark’s AGF Aarhus, Austria’s LASK Linz and the Cypriots of Omonia Nicosia. T

his is still provisional, of course, because qualifying football always has moving parts, but that seems to be the shape of the threat as things stand.

Now, obviously, we are not going to underestimate a single one of those teams. We cannot underestimate anybody. We are not good enough to go around treating other sides as though they are just scenery on the way to the group stage.

But in the normal run of things, none of those teams would keep you up at night. None of them would give you heart palpitations. None of them would make you feel that cold sliver of fear when the draw is made.

And I already know the rejoinder to that.

Didn’t we say the same thing about Kairat?

The straight answer is that some of us did not say that about Kairat.

Some of us were very concerned about that fixture from the moment the draw was made, for reasons which became painfully obvious once the tie was played. It was other people who were far too confident about that for their own good.

They were a team who had already got through rounds by working hard, keeping things tight at the back and making life awkward. We were a side completely denuded of firepower.

The risk that they would eke out a performance good enough to put themselves in a winning position was obvious. The fact they eventually took it to penalties was one of the obvious risks a lot of us were flagging up.

It was not for nothing that some of us said at the time that it was the nightmare draw. The first leg being at Celtic Park only made it worse, because there was no question how they were going to play. They were going to do what every team in Scotland had done to us for years: put a living wall behind the ball, let us huff and puff all night long and dare us to find a way through, with our depleted forward line.

Once they negotiated the away tie successfully, they had a shot at home. That meant a long, awkward journey which no Celtic player was looking forward to, and a Celtic team lacking the firepower to be truly dangerous.

It was a recipe for disaster, and you could see it coming a mile away. Brendan Rodgers certainly saw it coming when he was asking for players.

I agree with everyone who said the result was shameful. Of course it was shameful. But it was not a shock to some of us. Not to those of us who were screaming the warnings along with Rodgers from the start. Kairat were not a team who should have troubled Celtic in a Champions League setting. We were the architects of our own disaster. We blew it ourselves, and that is the simple truth of it.

The trouble with Celtic is that we do not seem to learn.

The teams being discussed this time are all navigable. All of them are beatable. But before we get past any of them, we have to get over ourselves. We have to get past our own complacency and our own arrogance, and over the years that has proven harder than beating plenty of the teams put in front of us.

That is why we have failed in the qualifiers so often. You cannot keep banging your head against the same wall over and over again and expect not to get a headache.

The people running Celtic have allowed us to fall into this trap too many times. If we do not act as though we have learned a lesson, if we are not fully prepared for whichever of those teams we get, or whoever it turns out we get, then we will have nobody else to blame.

Because the danger is not really Celje. It is not really Viking. It is not really Aarhus, LASK or Omonia. The danger is Celtic behaving like Celtic.

There is a very high likelihood that we will go into this tie against a team already in the middle of its campaign. They may be further down the line than we are in terms of preparation. They may have a settled team where every player knows his position and his role.

If we find ourselves still assembling our side, or if players have been signed so late that they do not fully know what they are doing, we are handing our opponents an advantage on a silver platter. It is as simple as that.

A well-put-together Celtic squad, coached by Martin O’Neill, where every player knows what he has to do, is a formidable outfit.

That is a team capable of beating any of those sides. But if we are anything less than that, if we come up even a little short, we are going to get punished.

No big Champions League nights at Celtic Park. No huge jackpot financial bonanza for the accountant nuts to rave about. Yes, we are guaranteed group-stage football of some kind, but everyone knows where we want to be. Everyone knows the top table is what matters. Anything less will be viewed as a serious failure.

Needless to say, it was last season’s European failure which helped usher in an entire campaign of anger directed at the board. They should not think what they saw last year was the pinnacle of fan fury. It was not anywhere near it.

If they do this again, if they do this to Martin O’Neill, the anger will be off the scale.

Because unlike Rodgers, nobody has doubts about Martin. He does not have a reputation for making trouble. He does not have a reputation for looking out for number one. Martin does what Martin does for the club. To let him down would not simply be a failure of preparation. It would feel like a fundamental betrayal of Celtic itself.

So now that we have a rough idea of what the likely threat looks like, we also know what the opportunity looks like.

But with that opportunity comes danger for the board.

Back the manager. Get the work done. Build the squad properly. Make sure Celtic arrive at that qualifier looking like a serious football club, not one still scrambling around trying to find the missing pieces.

Get it right, and we can start this season in a very positive way.

Fail him, fail this club, and one of those teams will write another chapter in our long, ghastly history of avoidable European failure.

Their failure. Not the players’. Not the manager’s. Theirs.

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