Whatever the future at Celtic holds, it won’t be a Maloney coronation.

All of us have asked over the last few weeks exactly whose team we are watching. As that question becomes more and more common, repeated on blogs and podcasts all the time, the clearer it becomes that Celtic has to establish a coherent tactical identity again. I did a major piece earlier today on the tactical alignment of this team, and it is a mess. But whose team are we actually watching?

Forget for a moment that we don’t have the personnel to make Martin O’Neill’s grand vision work now. That is just the way it is. We can build a version of it, but it will not be a dominant version which gives us every confidence that it will succeed. Besides, Martin has hamstrung himself with his insistence that his best players should all be on the pitch, no matter what that does to the shape of the team.

It is not just that there is an obvious contradiction between the personnel and the style. It is that we don’t really know whose style we’re watching. There are people who swear blind that this is still O’Neill’s team. There are others who swear blind that the fingerprints of Shaun Maloney are all over it.

The fact we’re even having the debate is terrifying. There should not be the slightest confusion anywhere about whose authority stands, about who is deciding team strategy once the players are out on the pitch.

But one thing is absolutely clear from the discussion raging around this: if this was the board’s attempt to audition Maloney for this job, it has failed spectacularly. Even those who recognise that O’Neill has to shoulder some of the responsibility for the mess we are watching are overwhelmingly negative about the role Maloney has played here.

So it is not an audition with any promise of success at the end of it. It has done for Maloney what Dermot Desmond did for his own son in sending him to the Celtic AGM to slam the Celtic fans last year. It’s game over as far as credibility goes.

At the end of this season, I fully expect that O’Neill will leave. He’s already said so, and although there was an option to retain him for an extra year, I don’t see how that’s in his interests. I certainly don’t see how it’s in ours.

What is absolutely rock-solid certain, watching the way this team has regressed and the tactical incoherence and incompetence we witnessed in Linz and then again at Ibrox, is that the entire coaching staff has to go with him. He chose these guys. He fought for those guys. And he was right to do so; I want that made clear right now.

Those coaches got us over the line last season. When Martin O’Neill was entrusted with the responsibility, he was entirely entitled to pick his own people and to keep faith with them.

But in terms of progressing this club, it is clearly not going to work. We may still put together a coherent run and win the title. We may still finish this season with a domestic double. In fact, I expect it. I will accept nothing less.

But this particular little experiment has failed already. You don’t run a football team by committee. You don’t have confusion over where the power, the responsibility and the authority lie.

If we lose on Thursday and then again at the weekend, all these guys are done. They may keep their jobs, but their credibility is gone. Nothing will remain of their authority amongst the players or their support among the fans.

Those who get nostalgic about O’Neill the man, and the manager Martin O’Neill was, will fight his corner, I’m sure. But football is not a business that respects the past. It is one that is lived in the present and projects into the future. Whether his authority lasts for eight more months and into the summer, or whether it ends straight away in the eyes of most supporters, the O’Neill era will be at an end.

In my view, fans should already be gearing up for the push that topples the current executive structure. You would fire any manager at your club for the number of repeated failures these people are responsible for. Anyone who trusts them to pick the next manager, anyone who believes they can sell any quality candidate on the job with the way they conduct themselves, with the man in Ireland still pulling the strings, with the way this whole club is structured and run, is not paying attention.

We are entering a dangerous period. That would have been the case whatever the result in Linz and whatever the result at Ibrox. The idea that these people can pick another manager of this club should be preposterous. That it is almost certainly going to happen damns all of them.

What they certainly cannot do now is promote from within. The way fans feel right now about that idea, it would be akin to pouring petrol onto what is already an inferno and then chucking some dynamite into the flames, just for giggles.

Of all the potential scenarios for the end of this season, the Shaun Maloney ascension is off the table. It doesn’t matter whether it’s real or whether it’s not. It doesn’t matter whether Maloney is responsible or whether he is not.

It does not matter if the tactical incompetence of this current coaching staff lies with Maloney or somewhere else. Perception is all that counts. No one is going to forget the sight of those men standing on the touchline in Austria, completely clueless as to what to do. We saw the same all over again on Sunday, and those images are going to stay in our memories well beyond this year and this season.

Whatever the future holds for this club, it does not hold that scenario. Every single member of that coaching team must go. They cannot stay. They must not remain.

This whole club needs a reset, and if it’s not going to start in the boardroom, then it has to start on the training pitch. This is one of the worst-coached Celtic sides I have ever watched. Whether that’s a consequence of it being run by committee or whether it’s one person continuously, unacceptably screwing it up makes no difference at all. They’re all in it together, and we are not going to progress as a football club with any of them in post for the next campaign.

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