“I just wonder what the great Jock Stein would have thought of it,” Martin O’Neill

Q: Martin, unprecedented scenes at the AGM, what do you make of it all?

Martin O’Neill: “Do you know what I thought? I thought it was a really sad, sad morning. A really sad morning.
I’ve just done a little interview there. I mentioned, I just wonder what the great Jock Stein would have thought of it all, you know, who preached unity at the football club, said that a club not united would never be successful. And yeah, it was really sad. It’s as sad a morning as I’ve seen. I mean, I’ve been to a few of these AGMs before, and I suppose because we’d been doing well at the time, that it was nice. I’m not even sure I was ever asked a question at the time. But yeah, that was rather raucous.”

Q: Peter Lawwell did warn the floor a couple of times that, you know, if the behaviour didn’t improve, then he’d be left with no option. Did he have no option?

Martin O’Neill:  “Well, it looked that way, really, because no one was being heard. And I think that there were an awful lot of people in the room who would have wanted to have asked questions, you know. And I think the board, listen, I’m not an apologist for the board. I’m here on an interim basis. And I am privileged to be here for a second time, as I was for the first time as well, too. But, you know, there were people who had wanted to have asked questions, and the board have said that they’ve made mistakes. And I think there’s only so many times that you can apologise, and then, you know, you have to get on with things again. So we’ll start again, and hopefully that will start when the new manager comes in. Just a united Celtic that will be far better equipped to compete and try and win again.”

Q: Do you think that’s possible after scenes like that?

Martin O’Neill: “Well, it shouldn’t be impossible. Really, it should not be impossible. I think that there’s got to be a coming together again from this. And the success at the Football Club over the last 20-odd years has been obviously there for all to see, I must admit. But, yeah, it wasn’t great. In fact, it was quite poor. But at the end of it all, yeah, I feel as if that there’s an obvious disconnect at this minute, but that surely can be rectified.”

Q: That disconnect obviously, Martin, was evident way before you came back for the second time. Did you think with your arrival perhaps could have forged some sort of connect again?

Martin O’Neill: “Well, I think, well, that would be asking a lot of…”

Q: Just in terms of what you mean to the supporters?

Martin O’Neill: “Well, naturally it’s nice, and I’ve had a really decent reception, which I am pleased about, and that could end very, very quickly. You know, you have to win football matches in this to keep things going. I look around. I’ve gone to Lennoxtown, and I remember travelling to Lennoxtown in 2005, just before I left, where they were thinking about moving to a new ground. It was just the big castle-y sort of thing up there, and just a set of fields. And I go up there now, and it’s incredible. It’s incredible. And the players, they have everything, you know. It’s there. The pitches are immaculate. They are so well looked after, so well looked after now. So there have been changes. That’s obviously cost a lot of money.

“We trained at Barrowfield way back 20-odd years ago, and sometimes when they were rolling out the tarpaulin, their tarpaulin would go to about minus four, but if it was minus seven, then we had a frozen pitch. You know what? It didn’t matter. I never heard Henrik Larsson or Johann Mialby or anybody ever complaining about it. Neil Lennon might have done once or twice, but overall, yeah. So things have improved immensely. I get back to the point about, you asked me a question with my interim period, you know, fusing things together. I don’t think that was ever going to happen, but what you have to do, in the mean, is that you’ve got to now realise that that has happened. Mistakes have been made, and they can be rectified, and hopefully rectified quickly.

Martin’s quotes continue on the next page…