This season of Scottish football has been utterly mental. A month ago, Wilfried Nancy had just lost his first game in charge, prompting a meltdown amongst some sections of the Celtic fanbase. Yesterday, having lost six out of eight games, he was sacked, bringing to an end a fairly dismal management failure.
(I still maintain, as I said last month, that it was absurd to demand his sacking after only one game. However, it did become clear that he wasn't the man for the job - it seemed that almost every manager in Scotland had the beating of him, by seeing what he did in the first half, tweaking their system to suit, and watching the collapse. That inability to counter changes made by others was a fatal flaw.)
And so we're back to Martin O'Neill, this time to the end of the season. It will be very interesting to see how that plays out - on the face of it, going back to the safe pair of hands should be a good step (and it was certainly a necessary step; with the transfer window rapidly running out, Celtic couldn't dither over getting someone in). However, it's worth noting that the five league matches that O'Neill faced before were actually easier, at least on paper, than those faced by Nancy, and it's also worth noting that this transfer window is enormously important - does O'Neill still have the eye for a good player that will allow Celtic to emerge stronger from this window than they go in, and indeed stronger than Hearts, Rangers, and even Motherwell?
Ultimately, I think this is a positive move by Celtic on all fronts - it clearly wasn't working under Nancy and was highly unlikely to get any better, so taking decisive action was right; and appointing O'Neill was the best available option for the rest of the season. It certainly makes things interesting for the run-in!
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