NafisaThere was already plenty for Celtic to digest before Martin O’Neill faced the cameras.
A 3-0 defeat to Rangers at Ibrox is painful enough on its own, particularly when the performance leaves little room for argument. But Celtic’s problems appeared to run deeper than the scoreline, with captain Callum McGregor offering an unusually blunt assessment of what had gone wrong.
McGregor did not simply point to missed chances or individual errors.
Instead, the Celtic captain suggested his team had lost its collective identity during the Old Firm defeat, admitting they looked like “a team of individuals” and questioning their willingness to work for each other when they did not have possession.
It was a remarkably honest assessment from the skipper.
Yet when O’Neill was asked about the mentality issue after the game, his response offered a rather different interpretation of what had gone wrong.
The Celtic manager did not completely dismiss the importance of mentality. Instead, he appeared to challenge the idea that it was the root cause of the defeat, arguing that Celtic’s technical shortcomings with the ball had played a major role in allowing Rangers to take control.
And that distinction could prove significant as O’Neill attempts to prevent one damaging defeat from turning into something much bigger.
O’Neill questions the mentality explanation after Rangers humiliation
McGregor’s comments had painted a particularly concerning picture of Celtic’s performance.
The captain admitted his side had failed to function as a collective and suggested that Celtic’s inability to work together without the ball had been one of the biggest differences between the two teams.
O’Neill, however, was reluctant to immediately place the blame on mentality.
Instead, the Celtic boss pointed towards something much more basic: passing.
“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.”
It is an important distinction.
O’Neill’s argument is essentially that Celtic’s problems may have started with what happened technically on the pitch before eventually affecting the players psychologically.
Give the ball away repeatedly, particularly against a Rangers side capable of attacking quickly in transition, and frustration inevitably follows.
The more mistakes Celtic made, the more pressure they placed themselves under.
And once Rangers had established control, O’Neill believes the mentality issue became a consequence rather than the original cause.
That interpretation does not necessarily contradict McGregor completely, but it certainly places the emphasis somewhere different.
The captain saw a team that stopped functioning collectively.
The manager wants to first understand why that happened.
Martin O’Neill refuses to accept Celtic were simply expected to win at Ibrox
There was another part of O’Neill’s response that appeared to challenge the wider expectations surrounding the fixture.
Following the 3-0 defeat, the result was understandably treated as a major setback for Celtic. But O’Neill was frustrated by the suggestion that his team should have been expected to arrive at Ibrox and simply win.
For the Celtic boss, history alone should have been enough to remind everyone that this fixture rarely works that way.
“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.”
The reference to the absence of supporters adds another layer to O’Neill’s argument.
Rangers were able to produce a dominant result despite the unusual circumstances surrounding the fixture, and O’Neill clearly does not want Celtic’s players or supporters to approach future trips to Ibrox with the assumption that victory should be routine.
The Celtic manager then reached back into his own history with the fixture to illustrate just how quickly expectations can be turned upside down.
“I came here 26 years ago in November time and got mauled 5-1. We had a really good side and had beaten Rangers 6-2 a couple of months earlier and never lost another league game after that. So we have to learn from these things. I am not saying that’s going to happen, far from it, as it’s too difficult. But at the end of the day, we have got to learn from this, and that’s the biggest thing. If we can learn, then we can do something about it.”
It was a revealing comparison.
O’Neill knows from personal experience that a humiliating Old Firm defeat does not necessarily tell the entire story of a season. Celtic can recover, but only if they properly understand what caused the defeat rather than allowing the result itself to define them.
And that is perhaps where his response to McGregor’s mentality criticism becomes most interesting.
O’Neill and McGregor may agree on the problem — but not the cause
There is an obvious overlap between what McGregor said and what O’Neill said.
Neither man attempted to disguise the scale of Celtic’s problems.
McGregor effectively questioned the team’s collective commitment, describing a side that looked disconnected and warning that Celtic could not afford to defend with players unwilling to run.
O’Neill, meanwhile, acknowledged that mentality can become a problem — but only after repeated mistakes have already begun to undermine the team’s confidence.
That creates a subtle difference in diagnosis.
McGregor’s comments put the spotlight on the players’ collective mentality and their willingness to sacrifice for the team.
O’Neill’s response suggests he wants to examine the football itself before reaching that conclusion.
And the manager’s choice of words is particularly telling.
“You keep talking about mentality.”
That line came immediately before his explanation that Celtic had repeatedly misplaced passes while enjoying possession.
O’Neill was not saying mentality was irrelevant.
He was saying he does not yet know whether it was the cause.
For Celtic, that could be an important distinction.
If the problem was primarily technical, then improving their passing, decision-making and ball retention could help restore confidence.
If the problem was fundamentally psychological or collective, however, then O’Neill may have a much bigger challenge on his hands.
Either way, the manager knows Celtic cannot afford to simply move on without learning from what happened at Ibrox.
The 3-0 scoreline was brutal, but the response could ultimately tell Celtic far more about the character of this team than the defeat itself.
And with O’Neill insisting that Celtic must learn from the experience, McGregor demanding that the team quickly rediscover its identity, and both men acknowledging that the performance fell well below the required standard, the next few games will show whether Ibrox was a painful warning — or the beginning of a much deeper problem.
Nafisa
