Celtic manager Martin O’Neill believes “everybody wants Hearts to win” as he prepares his side for Saturday’s Scottish Premiership title decider.<\/p>\n
Defending champions Celtic host Hearts (12:30 BST), needing to win to overtake them into first place. A win or a draw for Hearts would take the league trophy to Tynecastle for the first time since 1960.<\/p>\n
O’Neill was asked about the fallout from the award of a penalty in Celtic’s midweek win at Motherwell, which kept his side within a point of leaders Hearts.<\/p>\n
At 2-2, Motherwell’s Sam Nicholson jumped with Auston Trusty and, after a VAR intervention, John Beaton ruled Nicholson had committed a handball.<\/p>\n
Hearts manager Derek McInnes described the award as “disgusting” and said his side were “up against everybody”. Other prominent pundits have questioned the spot-kick, which was converted by Kelechi Iheanacho.<\/p>\n
But O’Neill said: “It’s obviously been magnified because of the occasion as much as anything else.<\/p>\n
“Am I surprised? No, I’m not surprised, because everybody wants Hearts to win. It’s really as simple as that.<\/p>\n
“Everybody outside Celtic and the Celtic diaspora wants Hearts to win.<\/p>\n
“And so if it wasn’t Hearts, it would be Rangers, it would be somebody else. That’s the nature of it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Celtic manager Martin O’Neill believes “everybody wants Hearts to win” as he prepares his side for Saturday’s Scottish…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":585776,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-585775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585775","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=585775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/585776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}