Celtic manager Martin O’Neill has been heavily called out after losing 0-3 the derby against Rangers in the quarterfinals of the Scottish League Cup on Sunday.
Derek McInnes’ side comfortably defeated the Hoops, with Dan Neil scoring in the 22nd minute, Kevin Helsey adding a second in the 59th and Neil completing his brace in the 75th.
Daily Record’s Keith Jackson wrote an opinion column after the match, in which he points to O’Neill for not knowing how to react during the complicated context of the match, and to the players he surprisingly chose to be starters, including Sam Johnstone and Sebastian Tounekti.
“The Northern Irishman appeared to be completely bamboozled by what was going on in front of his eyes,” Jackson wrote on Monday.
“He had no answer to it, and neither did the players he had selected, one or two of whom looked spooked out of their minds by the occasion. And yet it could be that, somewhere deep down, O’Neill may have suspected that something like this was on the cards.”
“O’Neill had seemed almost preoccupied by this looming double-header over the weeks leading up to it. His side may have been churning out one win after the next at the top of the table, but the veteran boss had been strangely cranky throughout.”
According to Jackson, leaving Viljami Sinisalo and Haissem Hassan out was also a problem that, in the end, bred distrust in the team.
He wrote, “He opted to give Sam Johnstone the nod in goal rather than Viljami Sinisalo and, somewhat more surprisingly perhaps, stick with Sebastian Tounekti on the left flank.”
“Kasper Hogh also led O’Neill’s attack, which meant Camilo Duran was deployed on the right of Celtic’s front three. All of which shoved Haissem Hassan onto a seat on O’Neill’s bench. In truth, it all felt like a bit of a muddle.”
Martin O’Neill Fires Back at Criticism of Celtic’s Mentality
Before, just after the game, O’Neill hit back strongly at criticism of his team’s mentality. The manager believes this painful defeat had more to do with basic mistakes in the game, such as passing, than with mentality.
“You keep talking about mentality. I have to analyze it and see whether it was mentality or not. I don’t know,” he told Premier Sports.
“We misplaced a lot of passes today when we were in really good possession, so that doesn’t help. So that’s a technical difficulty in that aspect; that’s not mentality. What happens is that when you play enough bad passes, then mentality comes in.”
O’Neill was also frustrated by the assumption that Celtic should have won the match without any difficulty, pointing out that a trip to Ibrox has historically always been a difficult challenge for the Hoops.
He said, “I don’t understand why you would anticipate a victory. “We are coming to Ibrox; this is a pretty difficult place to come to without one fan in the building. They won’t have fans next Sunday, so let’s see how we go.”
Celtic Boss Martin O’Neill Called Out After Loss to Rangers