The coaches at Celtic have to up their game as much as the players.

I listened to Martin O’Neill’s comments after the game last night and I agreed with them in the main, but they still left a strange taste in my mouth. I think the problem is that, in those comments, I see a little too much dodging of responsibility.

He said the players cannot expect others simply to put the ball on a plate for them. I agree with that. But if he thinks our central striker lacked mobility last night, then I think he is absolutely wrong.

Some years back, I remember John Kennedy talking about Patryk Klimala shortly after Celtic had decided to sell the player. Kennedy’s response was that Klimala had not been a success at Celtic because he was a counter-attacking striker and we did not play counter-attacking football.

That is the kind of comment which makes you question the sanity of signing him in the first place.

We have two main strikers at the club. We also have two young strikers, one who belongs to us and one who belongs to Chelsea, but the two principal guys are Kasper Høgh and Camilo Duran. What makes those two interesting to me is that they are not interchangeable footballers. They are different types of striker, and that means you need to play differently depending on which one you are using.

You cannot expect Kasper to do what Camilo Duran does. They do different things.

So if you are going to play Kasper rather than Camilo, you have to tailor the style and the system to suit that. I thought, maybe erroneously, that this was part of the reason we brought two different types of striker into the club in the first place. Partly to complement each other, and partly so that we could use different playing systems, even when we were only using one of them through the middle.

To expect one to do what the other can do is not realistic.

Listen, we are a winning machine under O’Neill. His record since coming back has been extraordinary. But this brings us back to something we have talked about before.

He does not run the training.

So, I do not know whether these players are being drilled in a way which makes this a coherent, functioning team.

The way we behave when we lose the ball is terrible. We sometimes look like we lack organisation. We lack structure. And it was precisely because we lacked organisation and structure that the LASK manager was able to come out after the game at Celtic Park and predict that his side would still go through.

He watched us for just 90 minutes and knew exactly how they would handle the second game. Even after going 1-0 down over there, they did not stop believing they could win.

Coaches can either blame players or they can look at what they themselves could be doing better.

I would prefer our coaching staff worked on a coherent team shape, something which does not look like it has been assembled in 60 seconds whenever the opposition has the ball.

Because that lack of structure also translates into the attacking phase.

Players form partnerships. They make runs depending on where other players are going. Kasper is big and mobile, and part of his game is taking an extra touch and seeing whether somebody else is in a better position.

I said last night that I like watching players who put the team first.

That is the way he plays.

If you insist on playing him in exactly the same system, in exactly the same place where you would play Camilo Duran, and expect him to do exactly the same things, all that is going to happen is that we will spend the whole season getting very, very frustrated.

And the player will spend the whole season getting very, very frustrated as well.

I do not want to see that happen to an expensive asset who has already shown that he can score goals, and at a much higher level than we are asking him to do it here.

I have concerns about the way we are coached. I have concerns about the way we approach both the defensive and offensive parts of our game.

We have the players now to turn teams’ lights out.

But they have to be drilled properly.

If you are asking a player to move into space, he has to know that when he pulls defenders with him, somebody else is making a run into the space he has left behind. He has to know that if he runs into a certain channel, the delivery into that area is going to be made at the right time and with the right weight.

That is what functioning attacking football looks like.

If you watch Kasper during the game against Kilmarnock, where he got his hat-trick, everything looks like poetry in motion, especially for the third. He comes off the defender at exactly the right second when the ball comes over.

Because there are two elements to a striker scoring a goal. He has to be in the right place, but the other attacking player has to put the ball into the right place as well.

That is why I want to understand O’Neill’s comments more.

If Kasper had been snatching at chances all night, fine. If he had been missing sitter after sitter, fine. Then talk about him needing to do better.

But he did not get enough chances last night.

He spent much of the game operating inside a packed penalty area, and we still do not know how to break one of those down properly.

That is not about personnel. That is about coaching. We cannot rely on individual moments of brilliance to win this title. That is not how leagues are won.

Eventually, the well-oiled machine has to start resembling a well-oiled machine. It has to start looking like the sum of its parts, not just a handful of talented individuals doing something clever.

That is why I find it easy to dismiss O’Neill’s jokey comments about Duran last night, because I hope they were jokey comments. I hope he is not seriously suggesting that our entire forward play depends on one player.

Because if it does, that is a problem.

Every single person is going to have to up their game. Not just the guys on the pitch. You can see that there are basic things not happening in the coaching just by watching this side. And what I think the coaching staff has to realise is that a lot of blinkers fell off during that second leg in Linz, when they all stood there on the touchline looking as if they did not know what they were doing or how to fix the problem.

Trust takes a long time to establish. You can lose it in an instant.

And that night was not just a one-off performance which we can all simply ignore. It was a shambles. It was an incoherent riot. It was a mess of biblical proportions.

It looked as though 11 strangers had wandered onto that pitch wearing the same shirts, with no plan binding them together. Once you see that, you cannot unsee it.

You can only hope that the people in the dugout know how to fix it.

So instead of blaming players who they are not necessarily using properly, I suggest the coaching staff focuses on the problem itself and finds a solution to it.

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