Martin O’Neill has heaped praised on the Celtic players he will lead for the last time on Wednesday as the interim manager prepares to bid farewell.<\/p>\n
The 73-year-old will make way for Wilfried Nancy after the home game against Dundee and is hoping to make it seven wins from eight games in charge.<\/p>\n
With a 100% record in the league, O’Neill has helped narrow the gap on Premiership leaders Hearts from eight points to two, while there was a League Cup semi-final success against Rangers and a win away to Feyenoord in the Europa League.<\/p>\n
The only blemish came with defeat to Midtjylland in the same competition.<\/p>\n
“I just think the nice thing about the players is that they have responded,” said O’Neill. “They’ve shown a willingness to try and implement some of the things that I think are important about the game.<\/p>\n
“They’ve been great and I couldn’t praise them highly enough. There’s one more game for me. They’ve got big, big matches ahead.<\/p>\n
“When I was watching Celtic from afar, you can form an opinion about players and then find out that when you’re actually working with them, that’s different, either good or bad.<\/p>\n
“For instance, I thought from afar that the captain [Callum McGregor] was a really good player. I didn’t realise how good he is.<\/p>\n
“Some players who have played almost every single minute of games have been absolutely outstanding.<\/p>\n
“And then you’re getting to know some players. And I said to some of the lads, I mean [Michel-Ange] Balikwisha hasn’t played under me. The next manager will step in, play him and find out he could be the best – and I’ve made that point to him.<\/p>\n
“And that’s for all of them. The incoming manager will have maybe a different opinion on some players than I would have. That does not mean I’m right.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Martin O’Neill has heaped praised on the Celtic players he will lead for the last time on Wednesday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295581,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-295580","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}