There was a piece tonight on one of the Celtic sites which concerned itself with Martin O’Neill’s comments after the game about Celtic’s record in European away matches over the last twenty years.

O’Neill was very quick to point out that he had not been here for those twenty years, and the feeling in that piece was that he was being cagey in his answer.

I think that is too generous.

I think he was being disingenuous, which is not the same thing, because nobody was suggesting that Martin O’Neill personally carries responsibility for two decades of Celtic’s European failures. That was not the question.

The question was about the club, the institution and the pattern.

And O’Neill knows that.

That distinction is important, particularly when you put it in the context of everything else we have watched over the last week.

O’Neill has repeatedly defended the very people who actually have been around Celtic for much of this period. He is the manager publicly backing the largest shareholder while that same shareholder has used the official club website to attack sections of the support.

Nobody is pointing the finger at Martin O’Neill for twenty years of European underachievement. But he knows perfectly well who that question is really aimed at.

Instead of answering it properly, he narrowed the question until it became something he could dismiss. He effectively said: well, I wasn’t here.

True. Also, completely beside the point.

Martin O’Neill seems willing to do almost anything to avoid pointing the finger of blame where it really belongs. He tried to turn the answer into a discussion about what previous managers had done in Europe, as though this were simply a series of unrelated managerial failures stretching across two decades.

He knows that is not the real problem.

Those managers encountered many of the same structural limitations he is running into now. The same limitations which had O’Neill sitting in front of the media after the Linz exit explaining that Europe was not his priority anyway, because deep down he knows Celtic have not been equipped to treat it as one.

There is no point pretending otherwise.

He has not been given the squad for it.

And perhaps he himself knows that he is no longer the man best equipped to lead Celtic through that sort of European campaign either.

The irony, of course, is that one of Celtic’s more positive recent European results came under O’Neill last season.

But that already feels like a lifetime ago because this is not the same team and, in several important respects, it does not even feel like the same club.

We could go over this again and again. We could talk endlessly about O’Neill’s reluctance to publicly criticise the people above him, even while those same people make damn sure the consequences of their inaction are hung around his neck.

When we criticise Martin, as we are doing right now, the Board probably loves it. If the anger is directed at him, perhaps they imagine it is not being directed at them.

Nobody has forgotten who stands behind the manager.

Everything which happens at Celtic reflects on those people. Everything which happens at Celtic reflects on Dermot Desmond.

If Martin O’Neill is out of his depth, whose fault is that?

It is not his. The fault lies with the people who put him in that position and then refused to recognise what they had done.

If O’Neill is underfunded, if the squad is weaker than it was, if Celtic are being asked to compete in Europe without the tools required to do it, those are not his choices either.

He can ask for players, and it is clear that he did.

Whether he asked loudly enough, whether he pushed hard enough or whether he made his feelings forcefully enough is almost beside the point.

A Celtic manager should not have to go to the wire, threaten a rupture or push the relationship to breaking point simply to receive the players the team obviously needs.

We know where responsibility for that lies.

Where I do criticise O’Neill is in how he handles all of this publicly. I blame him for not fighting harder, for continually shielding the people above him and for refusing to point the finger where it belongs.

But I do not blame him simply for remaining in the job.

He may well feel he needs the money. He may be in a position where walking away is not straightforward unless he is paid what he is owed. If this tenure goes badly, he is going to find the aftermath uncomfortable enough without voluntarily walking away from money he is contractually entitled to.

So no, I do not blame Martin O’Neill for being here.

I blame the people who put him here, failed to give him what he needed and now allow him to absorb the criticism for the consequences.

What I blame O’Neill for is pretending, too often, that those people deserve protection from the consequences of their own decisions.

That is why his answer on Celtic’s European record annoyed me.

Everybody knows what the problem is. The journalist who asked the question knows what the problem is. This is a club which has underachieved in Europe for two decades.

Two decades.

And you only have to look elsewhere around European football to understand that none of this is inevitable. Bodø/Glimt beating Borussia Dortmund at Champions League level is another reminder that clubs with fewer resources than Celtic can build structures capable of competing far beyond what their finances might suggest.

It does not have to be this way.

Celtic are here because of choices.

Bad choices.

And the people responsible for those choices are the very people O’Neill keeps defending.

So, when he was asked that question after Benfica, he could not give the honest answer. He deflected. He narrowed the discussion. He tried to focus attention on the wrong thing.

That does not work anymore.

Supporters know exactly what they are watching. We know exactly what to expect now when Celtic travels abroad to face serious opposition.

This has gone beyond simple underachievement.

It has become a catastrophic failure even to build towards something better.

And the more O’Neill deflects, the more he risks making himself part of the problem.

Because what Celtic desperately needs now is honesty from inside the building. Somebody has to acknowledge what ails this club, even if doing so comes at a personal cost.

That is when you find out who is willing to stand up. Who is prepared to put the higher duty to Celtic above personal relationships, loyalties and convenience.

O’Neill did not need to take a flamethrower to anybody’s reputation. He did not need to name names or declare war on the Board.

All he had to say was that Celtic’s European record over such a long period is unacceptable and that it is something the whole club needs to reflect on.

That would have been enough.

It would have answered the question honestly without starting a civil war inside Celtic Park.

And he could not do even that. Or he would not. You can decide which explanation you prefer. But the larger truth remains unavoidable.

This cannot continue.

I say that knowing full well that people were writing those exact words about Celtic’s European failures ten years ago, fifteen years ago and twenty years ago.

Somebody wrote them before me. Somebody wrote them before them.

And still it goes on.

Eventually you think something has to break. Eventually you think even the people running this club, people who have somehow learned to absorb humiliation after humiliation, cannot possibly tolerate another European away embarrassment reflecting directly on their leadership. Yet somehow, they do.

And so, the cycle continues.

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