Martin O’Neill has just dragged Celtic to the verge of an unlikely title win and along the way allowed a whole generation of fans to relive their youth.
Around half 10 on Wednesday night I stumbled out of Sweeney’s on Pollokshaws Road and pinballed down the street towards Queen’s Park station. I wasn’t drunk – what we’d just watched on the pub’s screens was so absorbing our pints had sat untouched for long stretches of the night. But my mouth was dry, I was sweating and my heart was pounding. At a deathly quiet Central Station I sneaked past groups of slumped Rangers fans wearing thousand-mile stares, and then people-watched all the way through town, desperately trying to work out who else had just watched what I had and how they felt about it. Once I got home, I lay around for at least an hour rewatching the goals and interviews from Fir Park and scrolling through Twitter and then, when I finally did go to bed, couldn’t get to sleep. My ears were still ringing. The closest thing I can compare it to is that feeling you have when you get back from your first really good gig as a teenager. I tried to remember the last time football made me feel like that. The answer, of course, is more than 20 years ago and the last time Martin O’Neill was Celtic manager.
All of this is slightly embarrassing to admit as a man that’s pushing 40. But that’s the bizarre de-aging magic of Celtic season 2025-26 for you I suppose. The Back to the Future season. The so-bad-it’s-good season. The most divisive, turbulent, tragicomic season most Celtic fans will ever live through, and yet one that could still deliver them into a state of sheer nirvana at around 2:30pm tomorrow afternoon.
Or not. If you think this Celtic team are going to be 3-0 up inside 15 minutes, or even just win without inflicting severe heart palpitations on you several times along the way, I would respectfully suggest you haven’t been paying close enough attention so far. There is still a very real possibility that around 24 hours from now Derek McInnes and Craig Gordon will be celebrating a league title win for Hearts on Celtic’s pitch. And if you want to really pessimism-maxx, we’re potentially eight days away from losing a Scottish Cup final to a lower league club managed by Neil Lennon. But, again, that’s season 25-26 for you, one where the distance between heaven and hell has been measured in centimetres throughout.
Eight league games lost – more than in any other season since the turn of the century. A cup final defeat to St Mirren. £5 million spent on a guy who got hooked against Auchinleck Talbot and hasn’t cracked a matchday squad since. Then there’s Kairat Almaty, Wilfried Nancy’s Twitter, Kasper Schmeichel’s shoulder, three different management teams and two of the worst transfer windows ever seen at a football club of this size. But I’ll stop there, since I’m sure all of this stuff is seared into your brain tissue anyway. The point is, that despite all of these misfires and embarrassments – and the self-sabotaging Green Brigade ban, and the board’s remarkable attempts to put out fire with gasoline where the Celtic Collective is concerned – Celtic are still on course to win 66.6% of the available domestic trophies and equal the best haul Brendan Rodgers could manage in his final two seasons at the club.
It’s a reminder of just how much margin for error Celtic have at the summit of Scottish football – for now. Before Rangers’ owners throw more money at it and Tony Bloom does his own version with far less money but far more brain power at Hearts. In some ways, the most appropriate reaction from Celtic fans if the team does get their hands on the trophy tomorrow would be to emit a collective sigh of relief that registers on the Richter scale then go and lie in a darkened room for three months, dreaming all the while that the club they find when they wake up is one that’s learned, changed and finally got real about what’s at stake if they don’t modernise fast.
Of course, that’s not how football fandom works. Win #56 tomorrow and you can guarantee the celebrations will have more in common with the unbridled ecstasy of ’86, ‘88 or ’98 than anything seen on more recent trophy days down London Road and the Gallowgate. Why? Well, mainly it’s because of something that’s become an alien concept at Celtic Park in recent years – a genuine sense of jeopardy. That vicarious thrill of falling off the top floor of a burning building and straight onto a bouncy castle. But let’s face it, we’d be lying if we didn’t admit it also has a lot to do with that man on the touchline in his ill-fitting black trackie with dayglo piping.
F Scott Fitzgerald famously said there are no second acts in American lives. So it’s a good thing that Martin O’Neill is from Kilrea rather than Kansas City. I have to be honest here – I’m one of those people that thought bringing O’Neill back was a terrible idea. And not because he was in his 70s and hadn’t worked in football since 2019. It was more a suspicion of who was giving us this gift, and their motives in doing so. Nostalgia is a weapon Celtic’s board have wielded like a cosh at times in recent years, dulling fans’ senses and distracting us from the things they’d rather we didn’t talk about. For supporters of my generation, the first O’Neill era is sacred. It shaped our relationship with the club and has defined it ever since. The 2001 treble season VHS is more or less treated as a reliquary in some households. Why take even the smallest risk of tarnishing that in exchange for more short-term success that would only entrench the board further in their echo chamber? Some fans even went a little further and strayed into blasphemy – might a trophyless season, and a third or even fourth-place finish, actually be a good thing if it brought about sweeping reform and long-term change?
It’s easy now, with the benefit of hindsight, to see that those worst-case scenarios were never really on the table with the bold MON in charge. Have his team selections been confusing and frustrating at times? Most definitely. Investing a bit more trust in Reo Hatate, and a bit less in Kasper Schmeichel certainly might have helped turn the tanker around – to borrow a Russell Martin analogy – a little quicker. But it’s important that, even if tomorrow doesn’t go to plan, O’Neill is given the praise he deserves when (or should that be ‘if’? No shower jokes please..) he walks away in the summer. It’s too simple to dismiss his achievements with this extremely limited Celtic squad as just luck, late goals and vibes. Because if that was the case, then younger, more in-vogue managers like McInnes, Danny Rohl and Jens Berthel Askou would have beaten him by now instead of failing to do so in seven combined attempts up to this point. When we think about the first O’Neill era we think of the Henrik Larssons, Chris Suttons and Lubo Moravciks, rather than the Steve Guppys and Momo Syllas. This time around, his entire squad is made up of Guppys and Syllas, yet he’s inspired them to wins over Feyenoord and Stuttgart and no less than six victories where they had to come from behind. The nine-game streak without a 90-minute win over Rangers which was in danger of becoming a major mental block? He punted that into touch on Sunday too, with a little help from Daizen Maeda’s gymnastics.
But as I learned when staggering down Pollokshaws Road as if I’d just been in a Sub Club mosh pit for three hours, it’s the sentiment of the whole thing, rather than the specifics, that’s made this season hit different. Beyond a certain age, football becomes all about nostalgia. We wear retro kits, warm up for derbies by watching Henrik’s chip on a loop and berate young people in pubs for thinking their great team or iconic player is better than our equivalent from 20 years ago. What’s rarer than hen’s teeth in football is the chance to splice the past and the present together, and actually be successful while you’re at it. In fact it’s the kind of thing certain other clubs would kill for. Can you imagine how many handstands your average Manchester United fan would do if you told them Fergie was going to come back halfway through next season and lead them to the verge of a domestic double?
The fact that Celtic were ever allowed to decline so drastically that they needed a 74-year-old legend to interrupt his retirement and mount such a dramatic rescue is, of course, a disgrace. In an ideal world the club would have an excellent young manager, a sporting director, a proper scouting system, a revamped board and all the other ingredients to make such surreal time-travel experiments unnecessary. And hopefully, one day soon, they will. But in the meantime, this has been a hell of a lot better than nothing. Now all that’s left is to wait and see if it gets the ending it deserves. Good luck getting to sleep.
Magic stuff Scott! Thanks for this and hope you have a brilliant day tomorrow. HH