Martin O’Neill's Remarkable Return to the Champions League

Martin O’Neill has been away from the Champions League touchline for 22 years. By this time next week, he could be walking back into it as if he never left.

Some of the players who dragged Celtic to a ruthless play-off win over LASK on Tuesday were not even born when O’Neill last prowled the technical area in this competition – a goalless draw with AC Milan at Celtic Park in 2004. The gap is enormous. The authority feels unchanged.

He is 74 now. Earlier this month he spent time in hospital after what the club called a “small procedure”, missing a comfortable Scottish Premiership win at Kilmarnock while he recovered. The image of a veteran manager easing himself gently back into work would be an easy one to paint.

It would also be wrong.

O’Neill remains the central force at Celtic, the man whose fingerprints are all over last season’s title and cup double and this season’s sharp, confident opening. He calls the shots, sets the tone, then lets Shaun Maloney and Mark Fotheringham run the daily drills. The old-school manager in a very modern structure – but still unmistakably in charge.

“Martin is a manager,” Scott Brown said on Sportsound, the emphasis almost audible. Brown played for him, knows the temperature in those dressing rooms. “The times have changed but it is amazing that he has moved with them.

“See the calmness when he talks on radio or TV – he just oozes confidence. You can imagine what he does to fans, to us, to players, he oozes that confidence and that calmness as well.”

On Tuesday night, that calmness sat beside something more ruthless.

LASK arrived in Glasgow as Austrian champions, in form, and not short of ambition. They carved out chances in the east end, enough to make Celtic’s back line work. For a spell, the tie looked like the tight, edgy affair many had predicted.

Then the game tilted.

Benjamin Nygren ripped a shot into the top corner to break it open, a finish that changed the noise inside Celtic Park and the mood on the pitch. Suddenly, LASK’s composure began to fray.

The pressure grew. Celtic started to play as if they could smell weakness.

Summer signing Camilo Duran then produced the kind of goal that makes a European night feel like a European night – a magnificent volley before half-time that left LASK reeling and the stadium roaring. The Colombian wasn’t finished. After the break, Nygren slipped him in again and Duran smashed home his second of the evening.

Three goals. All of them emphatic. A 74-year-old manager watching his team tear into a champion side with the kind of conviction that once defined his first spell in Glasgow.

O’Neill, being O’Neill, refused to get carried away. He stressed that the tie is not finished, that there is work to do. But this is another chapter in a comeback story few saw coming.

When Brendan Rodgers resigned last October, Celtic turned to O’Neill as a short-term solution, a steady hand for a turbulent moment. He came out of retirement, took charge across two interim spells, and somehow walked away with an unlikely league and cup double. It felt like a farewell tour.

It wasn’t. Earlier this summer he agreed to stay on permanently, to build something again rather than simply rescue it.

“Sometimes it’s hard to see what Martin does for the team, but he seems to be able to mould a side,” former Scotland winger Pat Nevin said on Match of the Day. “The great managers do that. It’s understanding what players work with other types of players and getting the best out of them.

“The job he did last season was out of this world. Whatever happens, he will always be a legend of the club, but if they have a good run in Europe, that’s fantastic.”

A legend already, yes. But with Celtic now a step from the Champions League proper, O’Neill stands on the brink of something more: not just a nostalgic return, but proof that, two decades on, his voice still carries and his ideas still win on Europe’s biggest stage.