Martin O’Neill has indicated that he was never close to leaving Celtic, despite a three-game losing streak that left him wondering whether it might be time to step away. The 74-year-old said the decision to carry on did not take long as he prepared for Sunday’s Premiership visit to Motherwell.
O’Neill signed a one-year deal to stay on as manager after two interim spells last season ended with a league and Scottish Cup double. The difficult sequence involved two defeats by Rangers, either side of a 3-1 home loss to Ferencvaros in the Europa League, and O’Neill admitted he felt “it might be time to wrap it up”.
He explained his thinking: “Obviously, I’m disappointed with the week that we had. As long as the football club wanted me, I was happy to do it.” Three weeks have passed since a 1-0 home loss to Rangers, which was Celtic’s first dropped points in the league. O’Neill said: “Leaving at this particular stage would have been poor. Deep down, obviously through the disappointment of losing the games and maybe with the international break coming up at the time, maybe it gave me a little bit of time to reflect. Had there been no international break, I probably wouldn’t even have said what I said.”
O’Neill spoke about the success of last season and said it gave him a spur to want to do it again. He is looking ahead to nine games in a 28-day period before the next international break. “This is what you want to be involved in,” he said. “Whether you’re good enough to play European football might be another thing. But at least you want to be involved in it. So we go with it. I have belief in the team and I think that our focus should be to try to win the league.”
O’Neill won seven trophies in his first period at Celtic between 2000 and 2005 and said his love of the game remains undiminished, even with the stresses and strains it brings. “I have great enthusiasm,” he added. “I always have had a great enthusiasm for the game of football. I enjoyed last season in a strange sort of way, even though I sometimes say that I don’t enjoy management — but I’m past the joking stage. You naturally get concerned for the games. I’m always worried about football matches.”