Martin O’Neill has hit back at Ally McCoist’s plea to have an asterisk placed against Celtic’s 2019/20 Premiership title win.
The former Rangers boss was in charge when Neil Lennon set out on the current winning run but is now on the outside looking in at the greatest run of domestic success that the Scottish game has ever known.
Monday’s title win was the 11th domestic title won by Celtic to hoist the club onto 110 major honours.
For many with Ibrox connections it is becoming too much to bear with the notion that the honours were generally split between two Glasgow clubs proving harder to stand up.
O’Nelll was in at the coal face for five years and has nothing but admiration for the way that Neil Lennon has driven Celtic to unprecedented success.
Picking up on an interview The Sun reports O’Neill saying:
They need to be congratulated; it’s been a great season for them. They’ve deserved to win it, absolutely no question about that. Had the season been extended for a couple of weeks, they would have taken the points and got there.
There’s no way that Rangers could have caught them. From that viewpoint [it was] deserved. I can understand Rangers wanting to put an asterisk besides things.
I’m sure if the shoe was on the other foot, that might be the same case. Obviously to prevent them from winning nine in a row, for a start but there should be no asterisk attached to that at all, absolutely not.
Celtic won it on the field and had the games been completed they would have surely gone on to do it. They deserve the credit for that, I don’t think any asterisk can be attached to Celtic.
If they were two or three points clear, I could have understood that but they were so far in front that Rangers couldn’t have caught them.
When the title was called Celtic had taken 80 points from 30 matches, since the winter break they had won 28 out of 30 points available as well as reaching the semi-final of the Scottish Cup where they will eventually face Aberdeen.