Martin O’Neill Celtic future questioned as revealing Lennoxtown comments emerge

Michael Gannon admits he remains unsure whether Martin O’Neill will still be Celtic manager when the Hoops return from the international break.

O’Neill has come under mounting pressure following Celtic’s Champions League elimination and consecutive Glasgow Derby defeats, despite the Hoops remaining top of the Premiership.

The extended break has given the Parkhead board time to assess the situation, while O’Neill himself admitted following last weekend’s defeat to Rangers that he would reflect on his own position.

Asked on The Hotline whether he was confident O’Neill would be in the dugout for Celtic’s trip to Motherwell at Fir Park next month, Gannon said: “No. Still not, no I’m not. Nothing surprises me at Celtic.

“I don’t think he’ll walk away; there are around £1.5 million reasons why he wouldn’t walk away, to be brutally honest… but no, I don’t think he will, because I don’t think Celtic have got a plan B at the moment. They’ll be begging him not to walk away.

“I just don’t know. Some of the things he’s been saying, he’s just come back from illness and his spell in hospital. Having had my brush with mortality, it’s not easy!

“They’re going into a gruelling spell as well. Martin O’Neill came out after they won the cup – he’d earned the right to be asked the question – and he said ‘I don’t know. If you ask me today, I’d say no, I’m too tired’. At that point in time, it should’ve been taken out of his hands.”

He continued: “Just a bizarre situation, really. I mean, have you ever heard of a manager emptying his soul like he did after the game on Sunday? Literally vocalising his own self-doubts about his ability to turn this around, about his energy for the job… laying it all out there.

“You might think that personally and in private – but to bare his soul like that, I thought, was extraordinary. And it doesn’t come as a surprise, because the week before the first Rangers game, we sat down with him at Lennoxtown and were asking about his excitement at the job.

“And he was saying things like, ‘I sometimes ask myself why I’m here’… we said, ‘games against Rangers are why you’re here’, and he said, ‘rather the opposite!’

“I know he says it tongue-in-cheek, but you’re walking away thinking, ‘I’m not sure if that was up or down.’ There was a lot more going on that weekend, so it didn’t really have much traction. But that’s doubts he was having before even the first game.”

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