O’Neill’s credibility has taken a massive hit. He must protect what’s left of it.

Every person who manages Celtic needs to maintain their credibility, and they need to fight to protect it at all times. Credibility, like reputation, can take years to build and a single night to demolish. Tuesday night was one of the most staggering capitulations in the history of this club, because protecting a four-goal aggregate lead with less than an hour remaining should have been a cakewalk.

It wasn’t, and what followed was the most abject kind of humiliation.

The credibility of the coaching team has already taken a major hit as a consequence. You can spend years establishing yourself as a top-class manager, but a performance of that level of ineptitude will undo a lot of good work, and I am not making excuses for anybody at Celtic today. Ineptitude is exactly what that was.

Our opponents on Tuesday night were nothing special, yet they blew us away. The only thing I particularly cared to hear from Martin O’Neill afterwards was his acceptance of responsibility. He does not deserve to take all of it, but the idea that he can slink away carrying none of it is for the birds. His performance, like many of the individual performances on the pitch, was lamentable.

Everyone could see that the game management was appalling.

Some of the substitutions were plainly ridiculous, much of what Celtic did made very little sense, and when you look back over the development of this transfer window, it was Martin himself who apparently did not regard defensive reinforcements as a priority. We can hardly blame the board for every single football judgement he has made.

What Celtic supporters want more than almost anything right now is brutal truth from the people in charge of the club. The only thing they would probably prefer is resignations, and we all know those are not going to come.

That makes honesty even more important.

In the aftermath of the game, O’Neill went out of his way to suggest that some top-class targets who might otherwise have joined Celtic would no longer do so because Champions League football had disappeared. That explanation immediately runs into a rather significant problem if reports around Gvidas Gineitis are accurate.

Gineitis, the Torino midfielder Celtic have pursued and who has been widely presented as one of the major midfield targets, is now also being linked strongly with Red Bull Salzburg. Salzburg are not a Champions League club either.

They are currently playing through the Europa League qualifying process, precisely the same competition Celtic will now enter.

If Gineitis ultimately signs for Salzburg, any attempt to explain Celtic’s failure to land him solely through the loss of Champions League football is going to look extremely weak. It would mean a player supposedly unwilling to join Celtic because we are in the Europa League had instead joined another club playing in the Europa League.

Supporters are sick of explanations which fall apart the minute anybody examines them.

If the manager wants to protect the board from criticism after they have humiliated him almost as badly as they have humiliated the rest of us, that is his decision. But every time he repeats an explanation which does not stand up to scrutiny, he puts some of his own remaining credibility on the table.

That would be incredibly foolish.

This football club tolerates an extraordinary amount of third-rate performance, but Tuesday night went beyond what any serious club should simply shrug off. I am very much of the view that sackings would have followed at plenty of European clubs after a four-goal advantage was thrown away through a combination of tactical confusion, dreadful substitutions and a team which seemed increasingly incapable of understanding what it was supposed to do.

Before the game, I used the poker analogy. Celtic had the cards. We knew what they were and, from that point onwards, everything depended on how those cards were played. Did we play safe, chase, bluff or trap?

We played them like drunk tourists spunking their weekend money in Las Vegas.

The board is accountable for failing to replace key players before the most important matches of the summer, but neither O’Neill nor his coaching staff gets to hide behind that. It is easy to blame Nicholson, Desmond and the rest of them today, and plenty of us are doing exactly that because ultimately they are responsible for the structure which produced this mess.

But you cannot pretend the coaching staff looked remotely on top of their jobs when the team looked tired, frightened, disorganised and increasingly unmotivated. At times it was like watching the worst performances under Wilfried Nancy again, and he would have been crucified for producing game management that inept.

The board dealt Martin a flawed hand. Martin then played it atrociously.

Both things can be true.

By our running calculation, Celtic are still sitting on a transfer surplus of around £8 million in this window. Whatever transfer budget Martin O’Neill has actually been allocated, Celtic have not begun eating into it. That is a familiar story at this club.

Brendan Rodgers spent years operating in windows where the money brought in repeatedly outweighed the money going back out. Ange Postecoglou was one of the few Celtic managers in recent years who was allowed a genuinely aggressive period of spending, and even then, the club balanced the books through major player sales.

There should therefore still be room to complete several signings without touching the large cash reserve Celtic have spent years accumulating for the rainy day which this board is perpetually preparing for. The irony is that their supposedly cautious strategy somehow seems to produce an extraordinary amount of stormy weather.

O’Neill also deserves some leeway because of what he achieved last season. He rescued Celtic from a situation which could have ended disastrously and delivered an outcome which enormously enhanced his standing at this football club.

That does not buy him immunity from Tuesday night. It does buy him the right to expect serious backing even now.

Look across the city and the contrast is absurd in its own way. I may not believe that the Ibrox club’s signings are particularly impressive, and I think some of the financial risks they are taking are reckless, but nobody can seriously claim that they have been unwilling to back the man in their dugout. They are spending money.

If that spending blows up in their faces, the consequences will be enormous. You can laugh at their ineptitude while still recognising the ambition which underpins the spending.

At Celtic, we seem endlessly fascinated by constraints which other clubs treat as problems to be managed. FSR is discussed as though it is a force of nature uniquely hanging over Celtic Park. Transfer fees are treated like radioactive material. Wage structures become sacred texts whenever an ambitious target appears.

Meanwhile, other clubs decide what they need and try to get it.

We know what positions Celtic need strengthened. That is why the idea that our principal midfield target might suddenly be unavailable because Champions League football disappeared, while simultaneously being willing to join Salzburg, would be insulting to the intelligence of supporters if that transfer goes through.

The other favourite excuse is that players simply do not want to come to Scotland.

That one has been used far too readily for far too long.

Austria is hardly the centre of the footballing universe either. Its league operates on smaller crowds than Celtic play in front of every week and its leading clubs do not possess some magical geographical advantage which makes Glasgow an impossible sell by comparison. Celtic can offer enormous crowds, major wages, European football, a chance to win trophies and a platform which has repeatedly put players into richer leagues.

And Scotland itself is not some frozen wasteland from which footballers desperately flee at the first opportunity.

This city has selling points which have been attracting European calibre players to this locale since time immemorial. Glasgow is a major European city. The Highlands, world-class golf courses, beautiful residential areas and cultural centres and everything else Scotland offers sit within reach, while professional footballers at Celtic are paid extremely well for living here. This is not a city in a shattered warzone.

Sell the place properly. Others have done it before you. The notion that high-quality footballers simply cannot be persuaded to play in Scotland is not an explanation I am prepared to accept every time Celtic fail to close a deal.

The more obvious explanation is that this club does not want to spend serious money often enough. Deals which appeared close before Tuesday have suddenly become more difficult after Tuesday, and I have little doubt that the board has recalibrated what it is willing to spend after causing the very disaster which reduced Celtic’s European income.

That is the part which should infuriate everybody. They gambled on getting through without completing the squad. The gamble failed. The failure cost Celtic Champions League money and the loss of that Champions League money can now be cited as a reason for spending less on the squad. That is the cost of having these people in charge.

Anyone pretending this result has not altered the board’s appetite for spending is asking supporters to ignore everything they know about the people running this club. Of course it has altered the calculation.

But Celtic still have money. We still have transfer income from this window. We still have substantial reserves. And we still have a football team which demonstrated on Tuesday night exactly why strengthening is not optional.

That brings us back to O’Neill and his credibility.

I said when he won the double that he should seriously consider walking away at the top. There was nothing left for him to prove at Celtic.

His legacy had been enormously enhanced, he had elevated himself into an even more iconic position in this club’s history, and there was very little he could realistically achieve this season which would top what he had just done.

The downside was enormous.

Almost from the moment he agreed to remain, this board seemed determined to make the task as difficult as possible. Tuesday night demonstrated just how dangerous that decision was for him personally. His reputation took a battering.

There are players whose Celtic careers may never recover from what happened in Austria. In almost any other serious corporate culture, repeated strategic failures on this scale would have produced consequences in the executive suite long before now. Six qualifying disasters should have created a bloodbath in the Celtic boardroom.

Instead, everybody survives.

The people at the top have colossally failed in their responsibility to maximise the potential of Celtic because they do not know how to build the modern football operation required to do it. I think that has become obvious even to some of the most slavish board apologists on the most slavish board-apologist websites.

But I also believed our manager and coaching staff were considerably better at their jobs than they demonstrated on Tuesday, and if they are this inept we’ve been riding our luck to a greater extent than we were ever aware.

That is what scares me, because this was one of the most egregious failures I have witnessed from a Celtic coaching team in all my years watching this club. Nancy himself would have been thoroughly ashamed of it.

It was not merely that the players performed badly. The entire response to the changing match looked confused, passive and desperately outdated.

If that is representative rather than aberrational, Tuesday night may not be the end of the humiliation. It may only be the beginning.

That is why Martin’s acknowledgement of responsibility was important. It was one of the few things he got right on the night, because credibility after a disaster is rebuilt through truth, not spin. He should remember that over the next few days.

The board will be desperate to frame whatever happens next in the most dishonest terms. Targets who do not arrive will suddenly have wanted Champions League football. Deals which become too expensive will become impossible deals. Players Celtic did not sign will become people the club was never especially interested in anyway.

We have heard all of it before. Martin O’Neill should want no part of that game.

These people are already playing with his reputation because theirs has been damaged beyond any prospect of repair. They can afford another round of supporter contempt because they have spent years becoming immune to it.

Martin cannot. His credibility still matters to people. His standing amongst Celtic supporters still matters. His legacy matters.

That is precisely why he should protect it.

If Celtic fail to sign Gineitis because Salzburg simply offer Torino more money, say so. If Celtic decide the fee is too high after losing the Champions League money, say so. If the player chooses Salzburg because he prefers the sporting project, say so.

But do not tell supporters that Europa League football makes a player impossible to sign if he subsequently joins another Europa League club.

Do not insult people.

Tuesday night damaged everybody associated with Celtic. Players damaged themselves. The coaching staff damaged themselves. The executives responsible for building this football operation produced another catastrophic entry in an already appalling European record. Nobody gets a free pass. But Martin O’Neill still has something those people in the directors’ box have largely squandered.

Credibility. He should guard what remains of it very carefully.

But I’m going to be honest; last night was such an atrocity that if he decided that it was better to hang up his tracksuit than continue, if he decided that the best way for the club to look credibility was with a little human sacrifice, I would be in no hurry to talk him out of it.

In the aftermath of that, someone has to promote the idea that standards matter here and I would not be terribly disappointed if that’s how he chose to do it.

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