Martin O’Neill goes into his 1000th match as a manager expecting the hardest test of this season as Celtic take on Stuttgart in a Europa League play-off.<\/p>\n
“Stuttgart are flying at this moment, they’re fourth in the Bundesliga, they’re in a Champions League position,” the 73-year-old said before Thursday’s first leg in Glasgow.<\/p>\n
“They’re obviously very strong, physical, with a lot of good players playing for them. So they’ll be difficult games for us, but while we’re there, let’s go for it.”<\/p>\n
O’Neill has lost just once in 18 games across two spells at Celtic this term, away to Midtjylland in this tournament.<\/p>\n
When asked how Stuttgart rank as opponents, he replied: “Oh, without a doubt, it would be the toughest, considering the position that they’re in, considering the league that they are in as well. So this would be pretty tough.”<\/p>\n
O’Neill’s 300th match as Celtic boss came on Sunday, with a dramatic 3-2 victory over Kilmarnock.<\/p>\n
On his latest landmark he explained: “It’s a real surprise because I’d never counted the games, genuinely never, and when the LMA [League Managers Association] told me yesterday about it, it did come as a big surprise to me. <\/p>\n
“It’s nice to do and it’s really pleasing, but I have to thank Celtic for doing it otherwise it wouldn’t have happened.<\/p>\n
“If you’d seen my early matches at Leicester City in late 1995, early 1996, you’d have got long odds of me doing 1000 games in that time.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Martin O’Neill goes into his 1000th match as a manager expecting the hardest test of this season as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":271992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-483780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=483780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}