Hitting the wall
MARTIN O'NEILL has had a tendency to joke about his early international career as a young Catholic man playing for Northern Ireland. He was fond of quipping that he would soak up all the sectarian abuse hurled in his direction at Windsor Park before exiting the dressing room and going out to face the crowd.
Given the circumstances of the last week concerning Neil Lennon's decision to quit international football with the same side following a sectarian death threat, one suspects the Celtic manager will be less enthusiastic about keeping that particular tale in his after-dinner repertoire. More importantly, he now has to work overtime to keep his midfielder focused on playing his part in another crucial week for Celtic's continuing search for European success.
Tonight, the Scottish champions, take a two-goal lead to Switzerland where they will face a Basel team hoping to halt their advance to the lucrative stages of the Champions League.
O'Neill's message to his team will be to hit the Swiss on the break and grab an away goal which would secure progress.
Lennon, judged by many observers as a peripheral figure in the first leg at Parkhead, will have to impose himself at least as much on the game as he has done on the warped imaginations of those who wish him and his family ill, or worse.
There has already been a shift in emphasis from his manager. After all, no-one is better able to identify with Lennon than the man who became the first Catholic to captain Northern Ireland.
Of course, it is a distinction which should not need to be noted. An achievement which should be is the country's greatest triumph, led by O'Neill, in beating Spain in Valencia in the 1982 World Cup.
In O'Neill's day, he recalls, it wasn't just an enjoyment of playing for the country, there was also a real pleasure anticipating it.
"You had a mixed group, just as today. And maybe because the side was doing fine, and there were bigger crowds then at Windsor Park as many as 25,000 or 30,000 people coming on a regular basis perhaps with the Word Cups and European Championships to shout about, perhaps everybody got together. Seemingly, anyway," he says.
"I heard Gerry Armstrong saying that for a while there was certainly a forgetting of the problems round Northern Ireland where the side galvanised everyone. But that's ephemeral and that doesn't last forever and people have to go back to the problems that blight and afflict."
If there is no enjoyment, and no looking forward, he adds about Lennon's decision, then obviously the player has to reconsider his attitude.
O'Neill did advise Lennon to continue to play for his country, as he had done after the player was booed throughout Northern Ireland's defeat to Norway at Windsor Park shortly after he had moved to Celtic Park from Leicester. But, it was a family decision then, said his manager, as it is now. The manager seems incredulous, and hurt still, about his own bout of suffering over his alleged sectarianism. It is 10 months since his rather surprised and defensive answers to a BBC reporter at an anti-sectarian press conference in Glasgow had him in the headlines on the front pages.
"Within 15 minutes I was being branded a bigot," he says. "You'd be amazed at how disappointed I was. Maybe I should have answered the question better," he concedes about what he could do to combat sectarian chanting at Parkhead "but it did take me aback. And 20 minutes later it's running on the programme, that I was a bigot.
"Everything we do here. It's not worth writing about if it's not confrontational. So it's up to everybody, myself, yourself, to do something about it, if it's possible."
What is possible O'Neill would never say probable is Celtic's advance into the serious stages of the Champions League.
Didier Agathe and Alan Thompson are nearing fitness and both will be available for the next stage, bringing much-needed steel to the midfield flanks, which was so missing in the home leg against Basel. Bobby Petta and Momo Sylla, as their manager diplomatically puts it, lack defensive practice.
"It's finely-balanced," he sums up the tie "but we have to go there and try to score a goal. We'll go positively."
In the first game Celtic did remarkably well, he says, coming from a goal behind in the first minute to score three goals.
"I expect quite a similar game. I want us to be thinking that we will score out there, because that is our natural instinct."
It is pretty much the plan which worked "wonderfully well" against Ajax at the same stage last year. "I actually thought that Basel caused us as many problems as Ajax did," says O'Neill.
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