GLASGOW, SCOTLAND - SEPTEMBER 13: Martin O'Neill, Manager of Celtic, looks on before the Premier Sports Cup Quarter Final match between Rangers and Celtic at Ibrox Stadium on September 13, 2026 in Glasgow, Scotland. (Photo by Ian MacNicol/Getty Images)
It used to be the case that after a major defeat, everyone at the club had an inquest. They sat down and examined what had gone wrong. We might as well not bother, because apparently that is not what we do anymore.
If it was what we did, this would not have happened.
So here is what I suggest: whatever decisions we made in the aftermath of the Linz game, let us make them all over again. Because if we did not learn from the beating we took that night, then we are not going to learn now. It is very clear that even after that humiliating defeat, we did not even try to learn.
I do not know how many times on this blog I have talked about the gaping hole in the middle of the team. Whenever the opposition gets the ball in and around our penalty area, it is there to be exploited. It was so obvious that the Linz manager got his players to attack that empty space again and again, and they destroyed us.
McInnes had his team exploiting the exact same weakness in the exact same place today.
Dan Neil scored twice from the exact same position, in the exact same way: unmarked, unchallenged, with the whole goal to aim at.
We do not look coached. We do not look organised. We do not look as though we are willing to take lessons from our performances, not even when the Linz manager said before and after the game that they knew how to exploit us.
McInnes simply followed their playbook because we did not change ours. Of course we paid for it, and we will continue to pay for it as long as we refuse to learn from the mistake.
I have never seen a Celtic side with a balance in midfield that was so obviously completely and utterly wrong. Callum McGregor, if he ever had the legs to play as a defensive midfielder covering that space, no longer has them.
Every single one of us knew that we needed a player who could. More than that, we knew that we needed a hard bastard of a ball-winner who would dominate games. It was the position screaming to be filled, and it was the position we simply ignored.
We may have signed good midfield players. I do not know.
We will not know for a while whether the new guys are going to settle in. But if you are playing Mika Baur, Callum McGregor and Benjamin Nygren at Ibrox, in a midfield battle, you have not watched any of those guys play.
You get what you deserve.
The headline-maker before the game even started was Tounekti. He had been preferred in the side over Hassan, and I told people who were complaining about it that this was not even our biggest problem.
The Ibrox side was so confident of winning the midfield battle that McInnes sacrificed his usual midfield three for a midfield two.
And it worked. For once he knew exactly what he was doing.
Because they knew what apparently we do not: that the midfield we chose today is lightweight. Playing Nygren is like playing without a midfielder at all. Baur may be a very nice footballer, but when you need blood and thunder and someone who will fight in a war, he is not your guy.
We have lamented the lack of physicality in this team. Well, they made us pay for that today. We continue pumping high balls towards Kasper Høgh as though he is that kind of player, which he is not. We will pay for that all season long, watching the decline of a Champions League level striker because we do not know what we signed him for.
Again, that is a failure of the coaching staff. It is a failure of imagination. It is a failure to understand the tools you have in front of you. Simply playing that three-man midfield is a failure to understand the tools you have in front of you.
But it is the failure to cover an obvious deficiency, an obvious weakness, something that could have been solved by coaching and tactical awareness, that we keep running into again and again. Good teams are going to punish us for it again and again.
Nothing we did today was right.
The team selection from the start was wrong. The half-time substitution, where we made a like-for-like change in the wrong area of the pitch, was wrong. The problem was not anywhere near as glaring out wide as it was in the middle, yet we waited until the second goal before we even considered changing it. In fact, we waited until they thought they had scored a third before we turned to the subs again.
Because we did not course-correct, their third goal was exactly the same as the first one.
Changing your goalkeeper for a game of this size, when your goalkeeper has a clean sheet at Ibrox and already knows what a back-to-the-wall game is like, was further madness. Martin O’Neill said he wanted to give the player a taste of the derby.
Well, he has had a taste of it now, picking the ball out of his own net three times. How does that make him a better goalkeeper? Let me make a bet right now: the next time he has to go there, he will go there on the bench.
Thank you to the management team for making that almost certain.
Everything this club does is screwed up and backwards. Everything this club does is short-sighted and stupid.
When the transfer window closed without us having replaced Maeda on the left, without us having signed a serious central midfielder of standing and substance, and without us paying the good money required to address those problems, we set ourselves up for a day like today. Linz was the last warning; perversely, we used it as an excuse not to do the necessary work. The script for today was written in that decision.
When the management team said that they did not think we needed to make any signings in central defence, we set ourselves up for a season of this.
You may have surmised from the tone of the stuff I have written over the past few weeks, that I was never particularly confident today. I said we had the best cards; it all depended how we used them. Their side is not a good side, but we were always capable of being our own worst enemies.
And so, Derek McInnes will swagger around Scottish football like a conqueror, at least until next weekend. Where I can see us making the same mistakes all over again.
Do I believe that the home crowd at Celtic Park will influence affairs? No more than I believe that the 100 per cent home crowd today influenced theirs.
We were the biggest influence on that game today. We were passive. We were weak. Whatever the game plan was, it was badly thought out. We did not change it quickly enough and, by the time we did, it was too late.
I said the other day that managers build their reputations over time. It takes years to establish a reputation as a top-class coach, but you can throw it away much quicker.
I thought that our strongest card was Martin O’Neill, but that confidence was shaken to its core by the performance in Austria, not just of the team but of a coaching staff that stood by and watched what transpired. That confidence is not coming back.
I do not know whether we are, as some people fear, a club run by committee. I do not know whether the tactical planning is split between two people, three people, four people or ten people. But it certainly does not look coherent. It certainly does not look joined up. It does not look as though we are following any kind of plan.
We do not learn. We do not adapt. We do not change quickly enough or forcefully enough. Any side with firepower is going to hurt us over and over again, and Europe is now a possibility so dreadful that I barely want to think about it sober.
We are going to suffer more humiliations over the course of this season in Europe, and quite possibly domestically as well.
We will keep suffering them until something dramatic changes in the way we play, the way we are set up and the way we think about the whole game of football. To go there today with Baur, Nygren and McGregor in midfield was to invite exactly the disaster we saw.
We were all relieved when we got in at half-time and it was only 1-0.
Instead of changing the system, we made one change and effectively swapped players out wide when that was not even close to being our biggest problem. That simply invited the second goal we had avoided up until then.
It was obvious, I would think, to almost every single one of us. Every one of us, except the coaching team at Celtic.
So, my advice is this: if they want to take tomorrow off, they should go ahead. It is better that they take it off and go home to nurse the hangover from today than waste that time with another training session, another little game of running around, capture the flag or whatever the fuck it is they do at training.
Because I know they don’t work on tactics, or positional awareness, or how to react in transitions. Because I know they did not watch the Linz game. I know they did not learn from it. I know because the midfield set-up today was the same, the tactical system was the same, the gaping holes all over the team were the same.
Since they could not be bothered to take any lessons from the first game against Linz at Celtic Park, where we won 3-0 but conceded an awful lot of possession, and they did not learn from the second, thus costing us a place in the Champions League, I am not going to expect them to learn lessons from this.
This has only cost us a place in the League Cup semi-final and another trip to Hampden. A modest loss in comparison to the earlier one.
I said that by the end of the day some questions would be answered, and they have been. The answers are not good. The squad is imbalanced. The midfield is a lopsided shambles instead of something that has been assembled as a coherent whole. We still have not seen the Dutchman we paid a lot of money for.
Martin O’Neill defended the strategy by saying he wanted quality, not quantity. It is just not clear that the signings followed any kind of structure or plan.
Likewise, I could not tell you what we were trying to do today. I could not tell you what that was out there. I spoke about Sun Tzu before the game and his maxim that “Every battle is won before it’s ever fought.” When I saw the team today and that lightweight midfield I had a bad feeling that it was about to proved in the worst possible way.
Every bit of criticism coming our way over the next few days is deserved. I will not defend us from any of it, and it is not even the end of our problems. We go into Europe on Thursday against a very good team, and I expect the worst.
I do not want to hear people after this game saying that we will learn lessons, because we did not learn them after Linz, and I do not think we will learn them now.
There has been a lot of freeform dread floating around in Celtic cyberspace over the past seven days because, on some level, I think all of us felt that this was going to be a much harder task to navigate than the domestic form of the two teams would suggest.
We have won games, and we have even won some of them well, but there are glaring holes in this team which any manager with the resources to exploit them is going to exploit because we will not fix them.
With the transfer window closed, some of them are going to have to be lived with. And January? Do not even get me started. I do not expect them to be fixed then either. Why? Because they never are.
What a goddamn mess we have made of this.
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Yet another humiliation, another total collapse away from home. Can’t you see the parallels with the LASK game? Anxious, passive, unaware, weak, meek, often making wrong choices, not having any idea what to do, conceding the ball easily. Total lack of physicality and poor mental state. Easily bullied by half decent players. AGAIN the opponents are always first to every second ball. When defenders have the ball and play it forward, we always seem to have our backs to the opposition goal. Hassan and Duran with all their quality find it extremely hard to do something, getting the ball facing away from the goal.
There is something FUNDAMENTALLY wrong with the way we play. As long as the problem with this system is not addressed, nothing will change. Sevco looked like Barcelona at times. The same was in Linz. We give rivals everything on the plate. I’m thankful we didn’t advance to the champions league. We would have been humiliated and destroyed every single game.
The most important issue is that we have FAR MORE QUALITY than what we are now showing. Hogh regularly scored against world class opposition in champions league last season, yet here he looks completely lost, having scored in just one Kilmarnock game out of six against Scottish opponents so far! Starved of service. After 15 minutes I knew we would lose. There is NO clear way of playing. Players don’t know what to do. This system 4-3-3 is terrible and ineffective with the players we have got. The same was under Rodgers. We were often outplayed at Ibrox. Do you remember when Clement registered his first derby win against Rodgers? The same scoreline, the same performance. Nothing has changed.
Players can’t cope with pressure away from home. Can’t start the match well, passes going back to the defence and keeper, or sideways. Midfield non existent again, McGregor Baur Nygren vanishing, like against LASK, can’t play forward and all hiding. With two Neil’s goals he’s got so much space with our midfielders posted missing. All of them are totally lightweight with no aggression nor desire to get to the opponent. It only takes for rivals to apply some pressure and we are lost, hopeless and helpless. All the midfielders look like they are all asked to be in a role they are not suited for. Carter Vickers, unaware of who is close to him, caught by surprise by a third tier German league striker. The keeper horrendous, my God, palpable anxiety on his face. May somebody spare me this deep pain and drive Tounekti away from Glasgow? Useless all the time and before. It’s not gonna change. An absolute waste of a jersey, he can’t make even one forward run. Hassan did more in two minutes than Tounekti in all the first half. Did you see Nygren kicking the ball out of play in the second half? Donovan makes the run and he kicks the ball out. What are they doing on the training pitch? Nygren and McGregor are neither physical nor can they even get the ball out of their own half, losing it in dangerous areas. They look quality against Kilmarnock, but look like little kids asked to play like adults. The way we play from the back is atrocious. Scales to keeper, him to CCV, then to McGregor, then to the centre back again, then to keeper and he kicks the ball high onto the pitch. The best player on the park was a teenager, Colby Donovan. That sums us up. And a great refereeing from officials. Sterling doing some sumo stuff on Hassan being all over him with his hands and Hassan gets booked, but Sterling does not! Absolutely amazing.
A scathing appraisal, Wonderbet10 — and I wholeheartedly agree with both you and James. We aren’t coached. We aren’t fit. We’re rudderless, and everything looks like a big laugh for these players. A big jolly. And why would we expect anything different when Fozzy is at the forefront of our coaching team?
A total revamp of the coaching staff is necessary.
What I lament most about today is that I didn’t see a single Celtic player animated. Not one. No fight. No urgency. A meek surrender — and as James has alluded to, more pain will come if we refuse to learn from past mistakes.
O’Neill didn’t exactly fill me with confidence in his post?match comments either. I genuinely shudder to think who’s actually running this show.
NOTHING will change until the “owner”, currently at the golf with a literal sack of shit, fucks off and takes his parcel of rogues and shysters with him.
Not even the fact that I’m sitting on a beach in Greece, rather than being in Glasgow gives me any comfort after watching that pasting. And pasting it was. Second in every aspect of the match. I think few of our players have the heart and mindset to play for Celtic, even the good ones. CM, KT and JF get it but their best days are behind them. The rest don’t have the guts or care enough to fight for the shirt. As for the management and coaches, I’ve never watched MON teams capitulate so meekly as we did in Austria and today. Back in the day we had Walton and Roberton to take training, now we have Shaun Maloney etc. who are not in the same league. Im actually beginning to wonder if MON is the Manager or just a face/ figurehead. MON never made the same mistake twice and im surprised he has now, even allowing for his age. This season so far, I fear the obvious problems present last season haven’t been addressed. As James said, we still have that big hole in front of our CBs who aren’t the greatest anyway.
As for Europe, the sooner it’s over the better, as the board has no ambition in that regard. We’re not in a great place.
I know my opinion counts for little and people who read the comments are probably sick of me banging the drum about the midfield but I’ve been saying for weeks (if not months) that the midfield 3 is outdated and done. Rodgers brought it in in 2016 and had the players to use it, likewise Ange. Ange signed players to play a specific position, we had a system and a structure. I know people won’t hear a bad word said against ONeill but what exactly is his influence on this team? He simply plays Rodgers system without the players for it. We all know the formation doesn’t work, we change nothing to combat the teams we play which is why we have lost heavily against the two sides this season with any reasonable quality. He had the whole of pre season to bring in his own style of play, his own system but he clearly couldn’t be arsed and just kept the same rubbish from last season. If you go into a job, surely you want to do things your own way? You don’t just say to your new colleagues “Whatever the last guy did, just do that”. If ONeill cant be bothered then let someone else do the job who is actually willing to try and take this team forward.
I am a Celtic fan from Poland ever since Artur Boruc was signed back in 2005 and I remember watching Legia Warsaw – Celtic 4:1 trashing, which could have easily been 7 or 8:1, from the stand of Legia Warsaw home supporters. It was under Deilla in 2014 with Forster in goal and van Dijk in defence. Callum McGregor scored a superb opening goal of the game. And he didn’t play a central holding midfielder like he is now. I have no idea why on earth somebody came up with an idea to utilise him in that role? He is not a fighting physical presence, does not have this instinct like Neil Lennon did have, to get close to opponents, to be aggresive etc. Yet he has been used in that role for years. Even Brown was not this kind of player, before signing with Celtic he has been used in a more advanced role, like McGregor had been. We need a new Lennon, a new Wanyama etc. Nygren is a hopeless case, he knows how to score goals against Dundee or St Mirren, but is useless in such encounters like today or in Austria. And what are we doing as a club? We sign Baur who does not offer more than McGregor or Hatate. All the midfield has to change get rebuilt from scratch. Because you can hardly blame defenders for today, except their second goal. The midfield is to be changed.
That’s the last time I wake up at 5:30 am on a Sunday for a Celtic match. What an embarrassment.
This is probably one of the few occasions (LASK was another) when I’d say criticizing the Board and the MIB misses the point. Today is on the players, the coaches and MON. Poor team selection, poor tactics (if any), and poor performances all round. And the transfer window is closed!
What next. TBH I’m not sure MON and the coaches are up to the job. Next week’s game against the Ibrox team will tell us everything.
Out fought, out managed!
Goalkeeper,Tonetki and In play decisions total bizarre, long hard season ahead!
Your article and the comments say it all!
The biggest worry is no one at club seems to know what they’re doing !
Pretty shocking …
Or will learn from it.
Reporter:
So Martin can you explain why your team were rag dolled everywhere and managed only 1 shot on target in 94 minutes, does your team have the minerals?
MON:
Erm.
Knock knock
Reporter: whose there?
MON: Little old lady.
Reporter: Little old lady who
MON: I never knew you could yodel, ha ha, see you later.
Happy clappers be like ; I hope DD had a lovely day with Trump at the golf.
Sam Johnstone’s two attempted assists for Sevco set the tone for being bullied all game. This team has no character or balls.
Tounetki is lazy+not good enough.
Calmac posted missing.
We constantly fall over too easily and expect a free kick that never comes.
Who is fecking training these guys ?
This must not be repeated , I’d dock everyone’s wages MON included.
I will say this again. Nothing will change until we get a manager who will drop MacGregor and the slow build up game. Any other derby is hard fought, end to end stuff but we are playing like a 1960’s Italian team. Hopefully score then hang on to the ball.
Calmac is a good player but should not be captain or allowed to control the pace. I think not playing Hassan only served to confuse us and not the opposition and by the time he came on they had gotten hold of the game.
I honestly believe MON and Maloney should resign.
McGregor is not a good player and never has been. He should’ve been moved on years ago. Yes, he won medals — but that was during 15 years of domestic dominance, not because he was a great midfielder. That era was never going to last, and now the challenge is here.
I didn’t see a captain out there today. I haven’t seen one in a long time. We’re a laughing stock as we capitulate time after time, even against mediocre opposition.
O’Neill should get a pat on the back tonight…thanking him for stepping up to the mark and wishing him well in retirement then go a get a few pounds from the bank and get McKenna in ASAP cause tactically things are not going to improve under O’Neill
We took this game too seriously. The players shit themselves like they did v LASK. The players are cowards James. A couple of weeks ago you were talking about McInnes being sacked at this point. We lose the next 2 home games MON is history. Ferencvaros must be rubbing their fucking hands just now.
We are big tough guys playing St Johnstone with the whole ground supporting us…a wee bit of aggro from the stands against a bog standard team and we are like petrified mice.
Totally agree with you. They ARE cowards. Hostile atmosphere plus an opponent who doesn’t hold back and our mob shite themselves. Spot on, Mr M.
As soon as I saw the team the warning lights were flashing, every one connected with Celtic except MON and his coaching staff knew that our M/F were powderpuff, Nygren is either part of a front 2 or he shouldn’t be in the team,Tounekti hasn’t got the balls to play for Celtic.
Putting that team on the park was manna from heaven for McInnes, He saw a weak Celtic team and went for the kill, just as he did in October last season, when his Hearts team beat a weak Celtic team 3-1 at Tynecastle.
Thr similarities with our defeat by Lask a couple of weeks ago was frightening, The lad Neill twice had so much time and space to pick his spot from the edge of the penalty area it was embarrassing.
The M/F is the engine room of any team, and if it isn’t working properly, then the whole team is adversly affected, Our M/F hasn’t been working since the start of the season, and we’ve been easily beaten by two teams just a wee cut above the run of the mill SPFL teams that we’ve defeated this season.
This Celtic Manager, coaches and players have two games to get us back on an even keel, Our M/F is the key to us functioning as a team, MON and Maloney had better come up with answers.
The question is, have we the M/F players available to change things for the better, and should we be playing a different system to shore up the M/F ?
Worra pile of shite,
Are our players not taught or do they not know how to win a fuckin one on one .
Jesus fucking christ that was fuckin dire .
I’d never have thought we would capiulate to another team after the lask game.
Mcinnes may be shite manager but he sussed us out and what lask did to us.
Never mind. We will absolutely hammer them 1-0 at celtic park
Bloggers are as bad as the board. Yous wrote the whole summer about how inept the board is but as soon as the season starts it is MON and the coaches. MON should not be the manager at 74 but that is on the board. No ambitious young coach on the up will go near us knowing transfer windows are for profit at our club. MON was probably the best option which is a an indication how bad the board is. There is no way MON would have rejected a powerful centre half or full back unless he was very limited in funds available to him which turned out to be the case.
Some fans need to get a grip picking on a manager who is helping us out due to a hapless board.
That group of players are weak, weak weak. That turned out to be Rangers easiest game so far this season.
If you slate MON and you want someone else in, they would need £40m+ to sort that squad out and we all know that ain’t happening.
No manager would make a great team out of our players.
Until this board is gone, please lay off the staff, who are trying to make the best out of one of the physically weakest Celtic sides of my 65 years.
Our fans class CCV as a great player, he is slow and cannot compete against opposition centre halfs in the air at corners and free kicks, he cannot jump. Tierney is broken and can’t last a full game yet he is seen as a first pick. Scales is a journeyman. Calmac looks jaded as he has no help in midfield. Hogh looks greatly overrated. A player of that stature has to be stronger. A Chris Sutton, he certainly is not, someone who can get in centre half’s faces. Looks like he needs his goals on a plate.
Very worrying times for football fans but excellent times for the accountants and their bonuses.
I keep reading Celtic are a huge club. What we are is minnows with a big support and big bank balance winning mostly by the odd goal in a very poor league.
by the way those AI pictures at the top of articles are absolutely terrible.
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https://paradisebhoy.com
Open to discussion — all opinions welcome.
We have all been saying for weeks and especially since Lask, that we are easily bullied and played through in midfield.
So I have absolutely no idea why we continue in the same vein?
Presently there are far more questions than answers to this Celtic team.
Have we not even considered a 3-5-2, or 4-4-2 at times…if we want Hogh and Duran in the same team, I would say they have to be up front together !
We can’t afford to carry luxury players or guys that don’t want to the heavy lifting in crucial fixtures.
Today like Lask, was completely embarrassing and totally unacceptable!
“Celtic jerseys are not for second best, they don’t shrink to fit inferior players”
Surely all players coming into Celtic either read or are told that.
After watching the capitulations at Lask and now Ibrokes, it’s time to start reminding these players what they get paid handsomely to do!!!!
This is now a huge week for ALL concerned at Celtic and could define whether we have learnt anything from two dreadful results/performances and somehow make the necessary adjustments, in shape, tactics and personnel…or whether we are going to continue muddling on and try to put square pegs into round holes.
I can only pray that we choose the former and collectively, MON, Maloney et al start to realise that the correct decisions have to be made, and that all these players fully realise what is required from them !
As results and performances like today, let down the most important people…us, the fans !
Get it sorted Celtic !!!!!!!
Poor show from Celtic but unusual circumstances, midfield should have been stronger but weren’t helped by some inexplicable refereeing decisions. They got away with some tasty challenges we got nothing.
Stop the MON pile on he won us the league last season literally with his hand tied behind his back!
Need a stronger midfield next week and hassan should start!
Stop the ginger witch and celting lion and Mcinness rat p*sh ahead of next week’s game please!
We move on! HH.
We move on — that means O’Neill retires and Maloney is sacked.
We won last season because Maeda went on a run of worldies.
O’Neil had us playing some of the most turgid crap imaginable.
Two out of the three best 45 minutes we played last season had Nancy in charge.
We as a squad and a club are going nowhere.
The execs don’t want the challenge of running a growing club.
And the squad are phoning it in because the coaching staff don’t ask for more.
O’Neill is totally out of his depth.
Old guy clinging to “last year’s” ideas and tactics.
Struggling to deal with new challenges and young players.
In it for the money and relying on Maloney to run training.
And McGregor running the dressing room — has there ever been a worse captain?
We get what we deserve — the execs are not taking the club seriously.
Easy solutions and little effort is what the do now and what they have always done.
I wonder who made money from this game?
The bookies — is Tournetki the new bat signal when once it was Mickey Johnson at CF?
We played as if we knew we were never going to win.
O’Neill and his squad fails looms large in this.
The only issue out there — will change ever come?
Solution —
74 year olds phoning it in — Chaka Khan vs Martin O’Neill?
Waiting for the third disaster to show up?
With all due respect MON accepted this job by trusting the board to provide him with the necessary players required to do the job.
As far as we know he hasn’t rocked the boat to obtain that ,like BR did and if that is correct how is he blameless?
That doesn’t answer the questions on MON also accepting the board’s timing of bringing in new players far too late for CL qualifiers.
Or the 4 punts on the final week of the window.
Or MONs tactics in the three biggest games so far this season, in one we got lucky and the other two we’ve been humiliated and knocked out 2 competitions by early September.
The midfield can’t be sorted till January.
Good evening James,I have repeatedly said over the last 9 months, Rome is burning. Martin O’Neil is sacrificing his brilliant legacy for the sake of this deplorable board.A shame.
The stench from the despot and his lackies is descending onto the pitch.
Should we lose on Sunday (which sadly is probable) then my predictions are becoming reality.
Rome will not be burning.
Rome will be ablaze.
Remember I said this 9 months ago.
This board are destroying us.
Hi James, team structure is definitely a problem just now. James Forrest, Yang and Maeda understand tracking back to help the full back. 2 aren’t with us for tomorrow and JF is 35. Duran has worked selflessly but is not sure of his place in the team just now. I’ll be watching Haissem tomorrow. Is he someone who actually works hard? I’m not so sure.