Celtic fans asking for Martin O'Neill to be sacked are forgetting one very important detail - this board is dysfunctional when it comes to recruitment.
The O'Neill situation is a tricky one to deal with. For starters, O'Neill is a club legend who has earned the right to have plenty of credit in the bank, and he has arguably deserved the right to leave on his own terms, especially after what he pulled off last season, coming in and winning the double.
Another part of this is the situation this Celtic board have put him in. The summer recruitment was poor. Key areas were not properly addressed, including the midfield and the left-back positions, and the midfield issue, in particular, is showing every week.
There is only so much O'Neill can do about that, and it really is a situation created by a Celtic board that cannot get its recruitment right.
But there is also a component to this that exposes O'Neill's lack of tactical ability. He is unable to keep up with better game plans, failing to properly equip his sides for big games and unable to get hold of games when they are not going well.
That is a problem. A manager has to be able to affect games, however badly things are going.
But the problem is who? And even if everyone can agree on the ideal appointment, do we really think this Celtic side can get that person?
The Bhoys struggled to sign players all summer, and that was after they stumbled their way through a managerial search while not knowing if O'Neill was going to stay, identifying Robbie Keane as their main target when they should have known how the fanbase would react to that.
That is by far the biggest problem in all this. Go ahead, call for O'Neill to be sacked, and perhaps you have good reasons for it, but can you really say you have confidence in this board to properly execute a managerial search, get the right man in, and perhaps even more importantly, get that new boss in quickly enough to avoid spending weeks working under a caretaker boss?
They have given us very little reason to have that confidence, and until there is a viable candidate to replace O'Neill, fans would be wise to keep the faith. It's a case of being careful what you wish for, especially with this board.
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