Celtic’s season is threatening to come apart. A shellacking at Ibrox on Sunday was followed by a 3-1 defeat to Ferencvaros in their Europa League opener, a result that added three more goals to a rapidly growing pile of concessions and left Martin O’Neill facing uncomfortable questions about where his side goes from here.
The performance itself offered little comfort. Celtic were absent-minded in midfield, loose in defence, negative and inaccurate on the ball. There was no firm grasp of the basics of pass and move, not enough intensity and not enough work-rate — not enough of anything needed to give a team a real chance. At 3-1 down they attempted to stage some kind of gallop, but the efforts came from distance: hopeful attempts rather than anything built on coherence, pressing and speed.
The contrast with Celtic at their best is stark. The finest days under Ange Postecoglou were built on aggression and ingenuity, on dynamism and risk-taking, on pace and belief and pulling defenders into places they did not want to be. What is on show now reads as a poor imitation.
This is not an isolated result. Five goals were given up against LASK, followed by the desperate experience at Ibrox, and now this. In moments against Ferencvaros, Celtic’s football harked back to darker nights — the failures against Cluj and Copenhagen in 2019 and 2020, the Sparta Prague tie of 2020, the feel of Legia Warsaw, Salzburg and Maribor. The energy levels were low, the booing was loud, and the sense of a side with no answers was unmissable.
Afterwards, O’Neill spoke about frustration, failure and psychological damage, about how low moments like these hit hard and test your resolve. He promised to “get ourselves together” for Rangers on Sunday, but his tone was flat and a touch tired. He outlined some of the ways Celtic were deficient on the night, yet he did not sound like a man holding the answers. In many ways his post-match comments mirrored his team’s performance: leaden, stale, disheartening.
The manager’s track record demands respect. O’Neill has fixed many problems over the years, not only in his trophy-laden first spell but in his return to chaos last season, when he restored order and confidence — two things that have since been lost. The force of his personality once gave Celtic fight. They were not always pretty to watch, but they were ferociously hard to beat, and nobody managed it on the title run-in. That kind of never-say-die spirit only seems like yesterday, yet in other ways it feels an awfully long time ago.
The Ferencvaros game followed a familiar pattern. Celtic had a decent start before conceding a soft goal, hauled themselves back into it with a brief glimpse of quality, then fell back into destructive habits: safe passes, little zeal, only a modicum of fire and emotion. The goal they conceded just before the break was the type a poor side gives away — hesitancy to fight for the loose ball, weakness in trying to prevent the cross, then defensive disorganisation and bewilderment. Celtic had 62.5% of possession in the opening half but still trailed 2-1 at the interval.
Individually, too, there are problems. Camilo Duran, playing through the middle ahead of Kasper Hogh, managed just eight touches of the ball. A player who showed such zest and love of his new life in Glasgow only weeks ago now looks a shadow of himself. Hogh, who scored against Manchester City (twice), Atletico Madrid, Inter Milan, Sporting, Porto, Jagiellonia and Olympiacos (three) during his time at Bodo Glimt, has become an awkward-looking centre-forward with a poor first touch and no chances to feed on. He has now scored in only one of his eight games as a Celtic player, and O’Neill has so far failed to get the best out of a signing the club paid £11m for. Callum McGregor, the great totem, looks a little lost.
There was further salt in the wound through Daniel Arzani, the former Celtic player who came and went in a blur of nothingness. His goal was a magnificent strike on the counter-attack that exposed Celtic badly. Arzani appeared in acres of space on the left after Colby Donovan had over-committed going forward and was left busting a gut in a forlorn attempt to recover. He showed patience and precision, whipping his shot into the top corner.
O’Neill needs a serious number of solutions in the coming days. Football is strange, and he may yet find them, but his team is currently lacking ideas, conviction, composure, physical and psychological heft, creativity, ruthlessness and stomach for a fight. The manager himself looks short of inspiration. He has bounced back from challenging situations before, and it is almost instinct to expect him to do so again, but there is a lot to fix.
Sunday will tell us much about the way of things between the Glasgow giants. The second act of this season’s Old Firm show is at Celtic Park, and there surely has to be some kind of response from O’Neill’s team to their pitiful fate at Ibrox. Rangers, meanwhile, may be licking their lips at the prospect of facing a wounded animal — with the usual warning to beware the backlash. McGregor has said the team is “a little bit broken” at the moment, and Rangers have an opportunity to land another blow. The derby will reveal a great deal.