This is serious stuff today. The Celtic coaching team needs to win this.

Martin O’Neill did his press conference on Friday, and he said that he doesn’t believe this is a must-win game. It is too early in the season, he argued, to talk about matches that will define the campaign.

Under normal circumstances, he would be absolutely correct.

This is September. To talk about season-defining games at this stage would be mad under almost every circumstance. Except that we have already had one.

We had it in Austria.

It wasn’t simply a defeat. It was a defeat from a position where losing should have been almost impossible, and that is what has set the mood music for everything that has followed.

That might not seem terribly fair, but it is a fact nonetheless.

That was the moment when confidence in this management team was shaken to the core.

So, although Martin is correct to say that today’s game will not define Celtic’s season, because there will still be plenty of football left and we will remain top of the table regardless of the outcome, I think he is missing something much more important.

This game might define his.

The last seven days have profoundly shaken a support which was already concerned. There is an obvious direction of travel right now, and it has to be arrested. If Celtic fail to do that today, O’Neill is going to spend the next three weeks surrounded by a level of scrutiny he has not yet experienced in this spell.

He says he does not read social media.

Fine. But Celtic cyberspace exists whether he reads it or not.

And the mood there is grim.

I cannot say for certain what would happen if you polled supporters right now and asked whether Martin O’Neill should remain Celtic manager, but I suspect the margin in his favour would be disturbingly narrow.

If Celtic lose today and you ask the same question again, I think the answer becomes much clearer. Because after another defeat, his margin for error would be almost zero.

If the Ibrox club wins this match, O’Neill will not immediately be standing at the exit door. But he will be moving towards the place every manager hates more than anything: going into each game knowing that another defeat might be the one that finishes him.

Once a manager reaches that point, it becomes extremely difficult to get out of it.

The irony, of course, is that it wasn’t very long ago that Derek McInnes was staring down the barrel himself. One result has changed the atmosphere around him, which to me is absolute madness. He hasn’t become a world beater overnight.

Even when the Ibrox club was winning league games, the performances were hardly overwhelming. But their 3-0 win against us last weekend changed the emotional landscape for their support because derby victories do that.

That result probably says far more about our problems than it does about any sudden brilliance on McInnes’s part.

And he isn’t completely free of pressure yet either.

But McInnes would not be facing the sack if he lost today.

O’Neill probably isn’t either.

The difference is what happens afterwards.

If Celtic do not win this match, the narrative throughout the three-week international break will be absolutely crushing.

Fan sites will write editorials calling for a change. The podcasts will be merciless, and there will be no game a few days later to change the conversation. No opportunity to produce a performance and move everybody’s attention elsewhere.

Only time. Time to think it all over. Three weeks of people asking what has gone wrong. Three weeks of discussing tactics, coaching, recruitment, team selection and whether the manager is still capable of turning this around.

That is why I wonder whether everyone on the coaching side fully grasps where we are.

They are in a very bad place going into this game. Confidence in them has already taken a battering. Today either begins the restoration of some of that confidence or puts it under pressure unlike anything they have experienced so far.

And nobody at Celtic Park should be under no illusions that the international break automatically solves anything; it may, in fact, make matters worse.

If today goes badly, no matter what he does over those three weeks, the first game afterwards immediately becomes not just another pressure match, but the absolute epitome of a must-win.

Because imagine it; lose that one and supporters will conclude that the international break itself was the opportunity for the reset and that the opportunity was squandered.

The pressure is enormous.

It might not be fair. It might not even be rational for it to be this intense so early in the season. But it exists nonetheless.

LASK is why. That collapse remains one of the most profoundly shocking things I have witnessed as a Celtic supporter, and all of us have bad memories of European nights.

Bratislava was horrendous. Lincoln Red Imps was humiliating. But those moments were followed by evidence that things could be repaired.

Brendan Rodgers won the return leg after Gibraltar and we had an Invincible domestic campaign, a singular accomplishment which none of us will ever forget. Gordon Strachan recovered from his disastrous European beginning and almost recovered the tie.

Celtic had established a commanding position in Austria and then simply collapsed.

The team folded like a house of cards.

What made it even worse was that the opposition manager had spoken beforehand as though he believed Celtic could be made to do exactly that. So, in one sense, this season has already been defined whether the coaching staff likes it or not.

The last two games have not answered, positively, any of the questions that drubbing posed us as a club. They have increased the volume at which the alarm bells are ringing.

That is why supporters are already making comparisons with the Covid season.

That campaign did not begin with domestic catastrophe. Celtic won nine of their opening ten league matches. The collapse came later.

But when it came, it came quickly, and plenty of supporters had seen the direction of travel long before the league table reflected it.

That is what people fear now. Not that today mathematically decides anything. Not that defeat automatically ends a title challenge in September.

But that we are watching something deteriorate at speed.

Today is Celtic’s final opportunity to change that mood before everyone disappears into an international break with nothing else to discuss.

Anyone who believes the club can simply bunker down for three weeks and emerge into a calmer environment is seriously deluding themselves.

If Celtic win today, we can re-set and go again. If Celtic lose, the season will continue. Of course it will. Martin O’Neill is absolutely right about that. But it’s no longer certain that he would continue leading us through what remains of it.

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