Celtic’s wake-up call was in Austria. I guess the coaches slept through it.

After yesterday’s game, I listened to every word that came out of Martin O’Neill’s mouth. Where I couldn’t find audio, I read his comments, and to call it unimpressive is to understate how angry I was listening to some of it.

Especially when he talked about the things he had learned and suggested it might be a wake-up call. I don’t even know where to start with that.

In case he missed it, the wake-up call was about three or four weeks back, when the Austrians took five off us in one game of football, when we had a 4-0 lead in a tie which we ultimately lost.

That was the time for the wake-up call. That was the time for people at our club to take note of the situation and fix problems. And what happened? We signed six players on the final day before registration closed for the Europa League, and some of the most glaring problems weren’t addressed at all.

Again, he had a go at journalists for doing their jobs and asking questions that we, the supporters, want the answers to. I suggest that instead of telling them how unhappy he is with their work, he concentrates on doing his own job a little bit better. In fact, a lot better. Because he is not impressing anybody I know right now.

He still has no idea how much of a hammering his reputation has taken in light of what we watched in Austria.

If there were going to be lessons learned, that was the night to learn them. But nobody at this club has learned those lessons, and Derek McInnes was gloating to the media last night about how he told his players exactly what to do to beat us.

O’Neill can question the mentality of the players all he wants. Some of those players are multiple title winners. The problem is not with the personnel. The problem is with the way they’re coached and the way they’re organised to play.

McInnes’s team has been beaten by sides inferior to the players we put out on the pitch yesterday. So, the problems don’t start with the team. The incoherence of the tactical plan is where our problems really lie right now.

For all I know, Mika Baur’s a great footballer. He certainly looks like he has some nice touches and does some nice stuff. But to play him and Nygren in the same team at Ibrox, with a leggy, ageing Callum McGregor?

That’s on the management team, and for them to act like they’ve just discovered that we have a physicality problem in the team is an atrocity.

That problem has been screaming at us from every direction for years now. He and the management team at the club had a whole summer in which to fix that.

I am tired of people at Celtic pretending that things which have been obvious to the rest of us fell on them out of a clear blue sky.

It doesn’t wash. It’s garbage. It insults our intelligence to expect us to believe that these were unforeseeable issues. They were nothing of the sort.

As I said in the piece last night, McInnes’s great insight into how to beat us was not tactical genius. You saw it. I saw it. We all saw it. We could see it a mile away, and it’s been telegraphed to us by every club we’ve played this season until it’s flashing in neon lights 100 feet high and 200 feet wide.

One of the things we have argued on this blog for a long time is that no one wants to be accountable anymore at Celtic. No one wants to take responsibility, to have responsibility or to exercise any responsibility.

O’Neill doesn’t take training. He leaves that to the coaches. The coaches aren’t getting it done. You can see that a mile away. So, who’s responsible?

Nobody, because there’s no real leadership structure there.

Those at the top, above O’Neill’s head, aren’t responsible because none of them wants to take responsibility either. The guy in Ireland isn’t responsible because he delegates the day-to-day running to his lackeys, who aren’t up to the job. But he won’t sack them because he doesn’t want that responsibility.

And that culture spreads all the way down and infects everything inside the walls. When there’s no leadership at the top, you are not going to get leaders emerging at the bottom. It is that simple. When no one wants to be accountable and no one wants to take responsibility at the top, that attitude will permeate all the way to the ground floor.

Then you wonder why no one steps up on a day like yesterday, when what needed to happen was for someone to grab someone else by the scruff of the neck and tell them, “You do this. You do that.”

But there’s nobody willing to do it.

I am tired of people at Celtic claiming they’ve just figured out that we have issues when some of us have highlighted those issues over and over again, over a long period of time. And there isn’t a single one of us, not one, who has the knowledge base to do the job that these guys are paid to do.

So, what is the problem? Why is this not clear to them? And if it is clear, why not fix it? Is there some hidden obstacle, some hidden blockage that we don’t know about? And why hasn’t anyone got it out of the way?

This whole club reeks of dereliction of duty, and I’m not even going to absolve the supporters from that. The Collective had its meeting last week, and fans are divided on whether or not to continue the Not Another Penny campaign. If it goes, we need something to take its place. But what exactly is that? No one can agree.

It’s another failure of responsibility. No one wants to take any. We can all agree that this club has problems, but actually ask people to act to solve those problems, and in the silence that falls, you’ll hear the sound of crickets and a dog barking halfway up the street.

Obviously, a lot of that is frustration talking.

I’m not really pissed off with the fans. I just had to vent.

We are the only good thing about this club. We’re the only thing about this club that is honest and true and faithful, but precious little good it does us when the whole rest of the organisation is an undisciplined mess.

And that manifests itself in so many, many ways. Good results can sometimes mask it, but the stink of rot is obvious, and it should not be ignored.

Our club needs gutted from top to bottom. Nothing we do makes any sense or has any real coherence or logic to it. Even when we sign good players, we don’t know what we’re doing with them.

Anybody who thinks that Camilo Duran would have had any more luck yesterday, playing alone through the middle, than Kasper did either didn’t watch the game or doesn’t understand what it was they watched.

We’re lumping the ball up the pitch to a guy whose game is not built that way.

He’s a penalty-box player. In order to get him on the scoresheet, you need to put balls into the penalty box. You do that, and he’ll knock them away for fun, but that’s not what we try to do.

In a packed penalty area, against all those big, physical defenders of theirs, do you really believe Camilo Duran would have made any significant difference with the same service? You watched a different game from me. The only way to open a defence like that is with quick passing and movement off the ball. Pull their players out of position. Make them chase shadows. Exactly the opposite of that stupid, slow, painful-to-watch shit that we served up yesterday.

If you’ve identified that your team is likely to be in a physical battle, pick a starting eleven that reflects that. Leave Nygren out. Leave Tounekti out. Leave out all the guys you know can’t hack that.

Instead, we played those guys. We put perhaps the shortest player on the park in the middle of the pitch against two of Ibrox’s bruisers. We have a 33-year-old trying to cover ground like a guy who’s still in his twenties, and it’s only now that the penny has dropped with our coaching team that maybe that’s part of the problem.

None of this is new.

All of this has been evident for months, if not longer. We’ve been talking about it for months. We’ve been talking about how the 4-3-3 no longer works for literal years now, because teams have figured us out.

We’ve been talking about how we lack physicality in the middle of the pitch.

So why did he play one of the most unimposing midfield players in Scotland yesterday in the centre of the battle, with McGregor behind him and Nygren in front of him?

Then they wonder why we didn’t get the ball into the advanced positions you need to reach in order to create chances. They wonder why we couldn’t press our opponents up the pitch, and then they have the cheek to blame that on the mentality of the players.

Our coaching team cannot hide behind this bullshit.

No one at the club can hide behind it. These aren’t problems that only emerged yesterday. We’ve conceded 150 shots at our goal this season so far, and the two teams with the quality to exploit the gaps and spaces we have left have scored eight goals against us in two matches. In the game at Celtic Park against Linz, they had the ball in the net twice, and we were lucky those goals were chalked off. The first one came so early in the game that if it counts, that turns into a rout as well.

It takes someone with real balls, or someone who thinks the audience is stupid, to come out after a game like yesterday and say that it should be a wake-up call when the wake-up call already happened. And no one woke up. The team that beat us in Austria is not a world-beating side. It is a well-organised and functional team that took one look at the way we play and instantly realised they could capitalise on it.

I have never, in my life covering this game, heard a manager sound so confident before a second leg in which his side is 3-0 down from the first. Confident not only that they can come back, but that they will come back and win the tie. Even when we scored another goal, they were not dissuaded from that belief.

People at Celtic still don’t get it.

The scales fell from our eyes that night. We watched the coaching staff stand at the side of that pitch and not know how to stem the bleeding. Yesterday was only a shock for anyone who didn’t acknowledge what the performance that night meant.

That was the wake-up call for the rest of us. It seems it wasn’t for the management team, who slept through that one. Only now that we’ve suffered a similar reversal on our own doorstep are we getting talk of change and lessons and things we could do better. I’ll tell you this now: we couldn’t be doing them much worse.

And I am tired and sick to my soul of people at this club making excuses for their own failings. Those failures are everywhere you look.

All the weaknesses that these people have belatedly identified, or claim to have identified now, were so clear to us all so many weeks ago.

If this really is the first time they’re noticing, there isn’t a single one of them who should turn up for work tomorrow. Because that would be an admission of failure so stark that their departures shouldn’t even be a matter for debate.

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