The decision not to sign Celtic a centre back now looks disastrous.

There’s a lot that we can blame the board of directors for, especially in terms of transfers. The summer transfer window was a colossal shit show in a way that should profoundly embarrass every single person at the club who worked on it beforehand, if indeed anyone did, because there are parts of it that look so fragmented that I’m not entirely convinced there was any kind of strategy behind it.

I’ve already written about how whatever plan there was didn’t survive the exit from the Champions League, which means it was never robust. It was never set in stone. It was never that well thought through or that highly thought of, and still the failure on the final day to bring in a defensive midfielder of substance is just scandalous.

That is on the members of our executive. It is a failure that has already cost us Champions League football. I cannot say for sure that it cost us a League Cup semi-final place because the team performance, the formation and the system were so appalling at Ibrox that it may not even have mattered. What it continues to cost us may eventually come to include the careers of the manager and every single one of his coaches.

But in many ways, that’ll be a self-inflicted wound, because there was one thing that cannot be blamed on the board of directors at all.

That is the decision made by the coaching staff – not by anyone else, but by the coaching staff themselves – not to prioritise the signing of a central defender during the transfer window. A lot of people in the support viewed that with utter disbelief, and it has already haunted us in a big way.

It is beyond argument that it cost us a place in the Champions League. It is beyond argument that we would have been better off at Ibrox with better options in that area. And it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that last night was a failure from the central defence, and from Liam Scales in particular, which makes that summer decision look disastrous.

It seems to me that every Celtic manager of the last 20 years has had a pet, a favourite, someone regarded as undroppable no matter how poor the performances might have been. With O’Neill, there is no question that player is Liam Scales.

O’Neill sanctioned a new contract for this guy and said he was the kind of player another manager would look forward to working with. If the next Celtic manager decides to keep Liam Scales, that’s when you’ll know that person is already on board with the next version of asset stripping and downsizing.

When I think of the good players who’ve been allowed to leave this club while he’s still here, it takes my breath away. The guys we give extended contracts to are guys who shouldn’t even be in the building.

Scales is only part of the problem.

Cameron Carter-Vickers has been an outstanding servant for Celtic and will go down in history as one of the guys who has made this era successful. But Cameron Carter-Vickers has some issues. He has no pace to speak of, he is injury-prone, and I have little doubt that he will be out at some point this season for an extended period of time.

O’Neill does not like Auston Trusty. He believes that Auston Trusty lacks bottle, but this is just an example of how parochial O’Neill’s thinking on this stuff is, because Trusty is a vastly superior footballer to Liam Scales. If you’re questioning the guy’s heart and picking a player of lesser ability instead, then I have to question your common sense.

Because a bad player will cost you more goals at the back than one like Trusty ever will, and I don’t think the characterisation of Trusty as being weak is particularly fair in the first place. He should be starting all day, every day, in front of Scales.

But Scales himself is not really the problem either.

The problem is that we have settled for Scales, Trusty, Carter-Vickers and Dane Murray, with only Dane Murray having even the remotest rationale and justification in his favour because he is an academy player and we do not graduate enough of those guys. And he does have the makings of a very fine footballer.

But every single person who has watched our side over the last couple of years knew that a central defender ought to have been a priority this summer.

If we were going to take seriously the idea of Champions League football, even for five minutes, we needed to sign at least one centre-back of genuine quality and presence. Someone dominating in the air and good enough on the ground that they could play whatever version of football these guys are being asked to play.

I am astonished that we didn’t do it. I would be less astonished if it had been a board decision not to do it. But it came from the coaches. They defended it. They confirmed it. And now they are going to have to live with it and deal with it.

Carter-Vickers and Scales have played together in four games as a central defensive partnership. We’ve conceded seven goals across those four matches, winning two and losing two, with one shutout.

But it’s evidently what the manager prefers, and I have half a suspicion that he blames Trusty personally for what happened in Linz, which would be absolutely on point for this season so far, since he has found a way to blame the players for everything else.

The central defensive partnerships do not account, however, for the wider issue, which is how badly organised the defence always looks these days and how the coaches who watched it, just as we did, somehow concluded that everything there was fine.

Their judgement on this is so suspect. They watched the central defence last season. They saw us go behind in all three of our final fixtures.

They saw the absolute mess our back line looked in, particularly in the Motherwell game, where it felt like we could concede every time they went up the pitch. The victory was sweet, the manner of it even sweeter and the sense of relief enormous.

We knew we’d given ourselves a real shot at the title, but nobody was happy with the performance that night, and especially not with the defending.

I think that was one of a number of games sitting at the back of our minds all the way through the summer months.

But the same coaching staff who are with us now watched exactly the same thing and didn’t see any problem with it. They thought it was just fine.

That decision is now coming back to haunt them in a big, big way, and it’s another one of those positions they’ll probably revisit in January.

But our season could be in ruins by then, and at least some of them might not have jobs by the time that window opens.

Of all the decisions made over the summer, this is by far the worst, and for once it cannot be blamed on the board of directors because this was all them. This was the coaching team itself. I don’t know if they regret it now or not, but they will.

They absolutely will.

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