The Celtic manager can snipe at his critics or he can do better and silence them.

Martin O’Neill did a press conference today where, thankfully, he confirmed that Camilo Duran is fine, and that is obviously good news. He talked about the need for everyone to bounce back from the disaster at Ibrox on Sunday, and I 100% agree with him on that.

This club needs to bounce back from that result, and it needs to do it in a big way. Two home wins, to start our Europa League campaign and smash Ibrox eight points distant in the league, would be a good way to get it underway.

But let me be blunt, as if you expect anything else by this point. I thought that his criticism of his critics, and his attack on those of us questioning his tactical decisions, was pretty absurd and pretty disingenuous as well.

He said that we are still winning games domestically, that we are still getting the job done in the league, which is all true. It’s absolutely true. And that no one complained about his tactics when we were winning.

That is the standard managerial defence: no one questions me when the results go our way.

Well, you know, that’s true in any walk of life, in any profession, in any business.

But it’s hardly original thinking.

In professional sport, you are judged on what’s happening right now.

The past is a distant memory.

And that’s just one of the problems with his statement.

There’s an obvious and much bigger problem, and it’s that it’s largely nonsense anyway. To say that no one was complaining and no one was asking questions about the tactical style of this team when we were winning is simply not true at all. Not even close.

If he wants to go back and read editorials on sites across Celtic cyberspace, if he wants to go back and listen to guys on the podcasts, he’ll see that. If we weren’t saying this team is not functioning correctly and has to improve, then we were screaming warnings about the number of shots on target we were conceding, just in domestic football, in games we were winning.

And we have been doing that for many, many weeks, if not months.

Every one of us was happy with what was being produced at one end of the pitch. Nobody was happy about what was being produced at the other, because it looked porous. It looked as if it could spring a hundred leaks, and there was obviously something not right.

Even before Ibrox, some of us were asking: why does this team look so disjointed, and why does the tactical style look so incoherent? Is the team being properly coached? That led to questions about whether we have different people coaching the team and picking it, whether the whole thing is being done by committee, and who’s really in charge of the process.

I spend all my time when I’m not working listening to other Celtic fans, whether it’s reading what they have to say or listening to the podcasts. I’m telling Martin O’Neill, in case he doesn’t know this, that those questions were being asked as early as the first leg against LASK, which we won 3–0. Nobody liked what they were watching. Nobody liked how easily we were carved up, and a lot of people following that first leg were not optimistic about our prospects in the second if LASK took an early lead.

We didn’t realise, any of us, even the most nervous of us, that we would take a one-goal lead on the night and still throw it away. I think that came as a gigantic shock. But Sunday wasn’t a shock at all.

This is not fans having a knee-jerk reaction to a bad result. Many of us saw it coming. Many of us muted our enthusiasm prior to the game because we saw it coming. It is the only time in recent memory before a Glasgow derby that I wasn’t completely confident we would win.

And I speak as somebody who watched the Ibrox club in every minute of their games, just as I watched us in every minute of ours. It was painfully obvious that they had better players at their disposal than some of the other domestic sides who had six or seven shots on target against us in games and just lacked the players to finish them off.

The gaping hole from which Dan Neil scored his two goals in the same match was highlighted on blogs and websites again and again and again before the game. It was staggering to see that he was able to exploit that position. Derek McInnes himself said he told his players explicitly to attack that area of the pitch because they would get results by doing it.

What are we supposed to do? Ignore that? Ignore what we see with our own eyes? I’m sorry that the coaching team either didn’t see what we saw or didn’t know how to fix it. But the simple fact is that O’Neill is not being honest with himself.

All these criticisms predate the game against the Ibrox club. All of them. In the cases of many online commentators, they predate the second leg in Linz. There are people in the mainstream media, themselves no geniuses when it comes to this stuff, who have been highlighting Celtic’s soft underbelly all season long.

And that’s to say nothing of the fact that the team shape is incoherent, that players are not being utilised to their full strengths, or another issue which has largely gone unmentioned in the mainstream media but which every Celtic site is talking about. The players look unfit.

I’m sorry he doesn’t like getting criticised. I’m sorry he doesn’t like people asking questions. But I’ve said already, and I’ve said it several times: when he’s snarking at journalists, he’s snarking at people asking questions that fan media would be asking if fan media were still allowed in the building. These are questions we want answers to. These are things we would like explained.

And you know what? I want the media to ask these questions because I want to hear answers. And not just answers, I’ll be perfectly honest. I want to hear reassuring answers. I want to hear answers that make me feel better about what I’m watching in front of me, that explain some of what we’re seeing and offer assurances that these problems are being resolved.

Criticism goes with the territory. Whether he likes it or not, and whether he cares to hear it or not, we are not the cult of Martin O’Neill. We are Celtic fans. We are Celtic supporters. We care about the wellbeing of the club first and foremost.

This is not about personalities, and it never has been. If he thinks he’s getting criticism, he wants to see the criticism his two predecessors got. Wilfried Nancy didn’t stand a chance because it was being levelled at him from the first day. Brendan Rodgers, who delivered more domestic trophies than any other manager in Celtic’s history save for Willie Maley and Jock Stein, was the victim of a smear campaign from inside the club which many supporters absolutely believed.

The mild scrutiny O’Neill is getting right now is nothing compared to what our last two managers had to put up with. And it’s nothing compared to the scrutiny Lennon got when he was in the dugout. This is a pinprick, and I hate myself for saying it, but a lot of this was grimly inevitable.

No one forced him to return to this job. He was warned by many of us that, having ended last season on such a high, it could only go in one direction. There was no topping what he did last year. There was only the colossal risk of the downside of the roller coaster, and of putting his faith in the people who couldn’t even provide for him last January, when everything was still on the line.

None of this is the fault of the fans. None of this is the fault of people asking questions. I wish we didn’t have to ask those questions. I wish we didn’t have to scrutinise this situation. I wish this situation didn’t exist.

As I said at the end of last season, it brings me no pleasure whatsoever to come on here every single day and have to be negative. I hate it. But to pretend it’s not happening, to ignore what I see with my own eyes, for all of us to ignore what we see with our own eyes, is just bullshit. We won’t do it because we care too much about the club. In short, we’re doing our jobs. I suggest he does his a little bit better.

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