I missed this bit
11:24 pm on the 8th of December, 2002I didn’t hear this on the radio yesterday. Don’t the BBC usually have little soundbites to listen to on stories like this? Was it anything like Jim McLean hitting John Barnes a wee while back?
BBC SPORT | Football | Scot Prem | O’Neill defends team selection
December 9th, 2002 at 12:48 pm on the 9th of December, 2002
He lost the rag when asked why he didn’t play Paul Lambert. Jim (tim) Traynor was laughing at O’Neill afterwards (not to his face). O’Neill said that Celtic’s football in the second half was magnificent, brilliant, the way football should be played. Traynor’s comeback to that was to wonder how O’Neill would describe the football by, say, the 1970 Brazil team, if lumping high balls at the head of a burly centreforward was ‘brilliant’.
It was covered in either the Scotsman or the Herald today. Forget which. O’Neill was upset because he was asked why he didn’t play Lambert. His response was to say you might as well ask McLeish why he didn’t play Caniggia. The paper points out that a) Celtic lost, and losers come under more scrutiny, and b) Caniggia is not Rangers captain, so him not playing is not as great a surprise. I would add that Caniggia did play. Perhaps if O’Neill had watched the game closely enough to know this, he’d have also noticed Larson was palpably running on empty for much of the game, that Maloney is quite quick, and Hartson beat Amo for pace, and come up with a solution for his teams problems? Long may he stay in charge.
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