Let’s be brutal about this. Only very foolish people believed that Martin O’Neill had come in and worked a miracle. Only very foolish people thought that simply having O’Neill in the dugout instead of Rodgers had solved all our problems—because only a fool ever believed Rodgers was the whole problem in the first place.

I’m not particularly bothered about the Europa League.

Our focus must be on the domestic front, and O’Neill plays a style suited to that level. At that level, we have better players than every other team in the country. But when we go abroad and play like that against teams who are technically skilled and physically strong, we get found out.

It’s because our ideas are outdated. Our management team is a throwback to twenty years ago. On top of that, our coaching is wrong, wrong, wrong—and has been for years.

The implications of last night are crystal clear. We need modernisation across the club. Those who thought O’Neill had performed some minor miracle, that he had some kind of magic touch, have now been exposed to a harsh truth: a manager can raise morale, and he can tweak the style just enough to coax...