The joke in Glasgow is that Martin O’Neill has tinkered with the old Honda Civic, taken it for a spin and shown it’s roadworthy again. Celtic are good to go. The keys are passed to Wilfried Nancy.
It will be 49 days on Sunday since Brendan Rodgers made his infamous, inflammatory remark about being asked to drive in Ferrari style while steering a Honda Civic. Rodgers had just seen Celtic lose at Dundee’s Dens Park for the first time since 1988. In Celtic’s previous two league games they had drawn 0-0 at home with Hibs and needed a last-minute goal to overcome Motherwell. Rodgers’s Honda was stuttering, fans were muttering. As car-shares go, this was no fun.
At Dundee it was 54 days since the definitive result of Celtic’s season – the 0-0 draw in the Champions League qualifier at Kairat Almaty. The exit in the penalty shoot-out soured all and Rodgers could only look at the loss of Kyogo Furuhashi in January, Nicolas Kuhn in July, and soon, Adam Idah, and think Celtic had insufficiently refuelled. (Let’s hope these motoring analogies hit a bollard soon.)
“Goals, speed, everything has come out of the team,” Rodgers said in Dundee, words unlikely to have been well received in the dressing room.
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You can also hear a sigh in his comment: “Until something changes, I have to find the solutions.”
In the Celtic boardroom, they had begun to think about the change Rodgers mentioned.
One week on from Dundee, Celtic went to Hearts, then full of fizz at the top of the table, and lost 3-1. The result was bad, the performance was average. Injuries were a factor – no Cameron Carter-Vickers, Jota still out – but there was a flatness to the display of the normally skippy Reo Hatate that spoke of Celtic’s broad malaise.
Hearts were eight points clear and folk beyond Tynecastle were considering a title challenge from Edinburgh. Rodgers came in afterwards and reminded everyone “it’s so early, there’s 29 games left”. He did not look or sound like a man who would resign the next day.
That’s what happened. The “toxic positivity” Rodgers referred to post-match at Hearts – longhand for complacency – was replaced by the accusation of toxicity made towards Rodgers by Dermot Desmond. It was a scorching. Desmond clearly detested Rodgers’s implication he had not been offered a new contract, among other things.
Meanwhile, the tension and discord in the stands kept coming – in the shape of bouncy balls thrown on to the pitch by Celtic fans at Dundee – and the club was still 18 days away from an AGM so acrimonious it was curtailed prematurely by a board at odds with chunks of Celtic’s support.
[ Celtic AGM abandoned after 25 minutes as supporters heckle board membersOpens in new window ]
Into this uneasy, fragile and potentially damaging situation walked Martin O’Neill, aged 73, from Kilrea. He was to stay until Rodgers’s successor was found.
O’Neill arrived bearing self-deprecation and bonhomie. The fact he has been in professional football for over half a century seemed to be secondary to his personality. But it isn’t. As TV showed him wise-cracking, he was off scouting opponents despite not knowing when this limited return to the club he managed with such transformative distinction from 2000-05 would end.
O’Neill’s natural feel for the club, and vice versa, was a temporary balm. Celtic won the first match under him, against Falkirk. His second was a Glasgow derby, a Cup semi-final at Hampden Park against Rangers and again it was won, albeit narrowly, in extra-time.
There was then an education in Europe – a 3-1 loss at Midtjylland. It affected O’Neill, because it revealed the distance Celtic have to travel. It affected O’Neill because Celtic in Europe means something to him.
Go back to his autobiography and he recalled watching Celtic’s glorious 1967 European Cup final as a boarding pupil “in the big hall” at St Columb’s College in Derry. O’Neill supported Celtic, most did. Jock Stein is not a museum name to him; Stein is a real-time hero.
“Real and surreal”, this was how O’Neill described his Parkhead return.
Celtic came back from the “physical mauling” in Denmark and beat Kilmarnock and St Mirren, results that may not impress neutrals or some fans, but as O’Neill wrote of his very first league match with Celtic 25 years ago, a difficult 2-1 win at Dundee United: “I know we can get better but, today, victory is all that matters.”
Critics in Ireland who view him through the prism of those last matches in charge in 2017 and 2018, might think they see a narrow pragmatism in that comment, but O’Neill justified it in the next sentence: “Players respond to your words, your encouragement and your exhortations so much more.”
Celtic’s 2025 players provided evidence for that conviction, winning the next European fixture at Feyenoord having gone a goal down. It was a first European away victory in more than four years. Hatate bloomed again, two more league wins followed, including Wednesday’s against the Dundee team who had been a catalyst for all the upheaval. Suddenly, in less than five weeks, Celtic had won seven matches out of eight, one away in Europe, reached the League Cup final and cut Hearts’ eight-point advantage to mere goal difference.
“We’ve won and it keeps the club going,” O’Neill said on Wednesday night. It is the perspective of the professional manager.
Nancy’s announcement as Rodgers’s successor was the same evening, though fans aggrieved at the running of the club were hardly impressed by Celtic’s official statement to the Stock Exchange, in which Nancy’s first name was misspelt.
O’Neill was asked about ongoing disharmony. He replied he owes his presence at Celtic, twice, to Desmond and he said “unity is the most important thing,” while acknowledging “how it’s going to come around, I don’t know.
“But let’s see what January will bring.” Perhaps that was a hint at Celtic recruitment.
First comes Wilfried Nancy, a Frenchman coaching in the MLS, speaking modestly about “empathy” in his assured introductory club interview. “The idea is the ball”; he considers himself a “leader” rather than a “boss”; Kwame Ampadu, with his four Irish under-21 caps, is his long-time assistant.
There’s a hill-start, four games in 11 days. One is a cup final, another AS Roma and Evan Ferguson. Rewinding to Rodgers’s end, it begins with Hearts at Parkhead on Sunday, the top two.
It is part of an extraordinary period at Celtic, featuring defeats, division, departure, recovery and the surprise reprise of Martin O’Neill – as big a shock as any.
But it worked. Nancy met O’Neill on Thursday at Celtic’s training ground. “What a guy,” he said, “what a guy.”
[ Martin O’Neill enjoys winning European farewell as Celtic overcome FeyenoordOpens in new window ]
