So last night we got some comments from Martin O’Neill on the squad, and one of the remarks that has raised a little bit of controversy is the one where he talks about Luke McCowan. And listen, I’m not going to sugarcoat this.

The last person I want to hear about, the last player I want to hear being effectively guaranteed that he’ll be getting games soon, is Luke McCowan.

When McCowan and Scales were given their contracts last season, I was outraged.

At a club that is supposed to be prudent and supposed to be smart, giving new deals to two players who should be nothing more than squad filler, and arguably not even that, seemed outrageous to me.

McCowan barely plays anyway, so when we gave him an extended deal, I could not work out on what basis we had done it. He had done nothing to justify a new contract.

McCowan was one of those guys I believed would simply see out his deal and be allowed to leave for free. Instead, we gave him more money for doing nothing.

Then you had O’Neill’s decision to play him in two of the most high-profile games of the season, and the disbelief from supporters made it clear what they thought of those calls.

McCowan should not have been near the pitch in either of those matches, and in particular the game at Celtic Park against the club from Ibrox, where he was dreadful and the decision to start him was lamentable, absolutely without justification of any kind.

Luke McCowan is an SPFL-grade player, and not even a particularly good one.

And because our squad has people like this in it, because it has warm bodies in it, because it has the kind of players supporters can say, “Oh, he’ll do us a job at a push,” we never actually improve.

Every penny he takes out of the club is money that could be better spent. His position at the club is a position that could be filled by someone better.

Even the excuse that he takes a European place as a domestically trained player no longer stands up as a good enough reason to have him in the team.

I understand that it is part of a manager’s job to keep players happy. But I do not think O’Neill is well served by promising Luke McCowan game time. And I certainly do not think Celtic is well served by that promise.

Celtic is being served perfectly well right now in relation to Luke McCowan by not having him in the team, and by not pretending that he is good enough.

I also appreciate that we have a long run of games coming up where we will need to rotate, and where sometimes you are going to play players who otherwise would not be in the side.

But supporters will not react well to any match in which McCowan is named in the starting eleven. And the manager cannot afford to put too much weight on McCowan’s shoulders, because if it goes wrong, McCowan is not the person people are going to blame.

They are going to blame the manager who picked him, and who appears completely blind to his many, many, many, many, many faults as a footballer.

It is not enough any longer simply to blame McCowan. McCowan will do the job he is asked to do. There is no issue with that. I have no issue with that.

I will have an issue with the people who put him into the side. O’Neill is not doing himself any favours right now. This is a guy with three wins in nine games.

If he thinks that is a record Luke McCowan is going to save him from, then I tell you what: play Luke McCowan if that is what you think.

But if you play Luke McCowan and it goes wrong, if Celtic lose the game, it is not even going to matter whether McCowan is the one who makes the mistake that costs us.

It is not going to matter if he is largely blameless. It is not going to matter if his passing percentage is the highest on the pitch. It is not going to matter.

People are going to look at the options left on the bench and say they were simply better options. And if we have not won the game, the obvious criticism will be that O’Neill did not play his strongest team.

He should be ready for those criticisms, because those are exactly the criticisms he will face.

And I cannot argue with them. To me, this is not a particularly complicated situation, and it does not have to be overcomplicated by the manager or by anybody else.

All he ever has to tell Luke McCowan, if Luke McCowan wants to know why he is not in the team, is this: You are not good enough to play.

Nobody else is asking the question. Nobody else is wondering, because everybody else knows and everybody else understands the situation.

It is the same argument, in some ways, as the one that is always put forward when supporters suggest changing the wage structure so that we have a better chance of keeping our best players.

What we always hear is: yeah, but if we start paying Player X some amount, then Player Z is going to be knocking on the manager’s door asking why he is not earning it too.

I have always thought the answer to that was fairly simple.

You are not worth it. And he is. That is why football is the ultimate meritocracy.

A time like this offers players who might not otherwise get into the team the opportunity to show us what they can do.

In two enormously high-profile games, Luke McCowan showed us what he can do. And all it did was raise more questions about why we gave that guy an extended deal and a pay rise, which now makes him more difficult to move on.

I understand that he probably does not want to be sitting in the stand, and there is a certain amount of integrity in not wanting to earn your money by sitting there doing nothing.

But it is still the best place for him. The damage has already been done in giving him the new deal and giving him more money.

How much more damage do we want to do to ourselves? Because that damage will surely come if we put him back into the team.

There is a reason he has been out for so long, and it has got nothing to do with supporters being on his back or the media giving him a hard time.

Those things do not happen in a vacuum. It is because everyone at Celtic, everyone in the football department, knows he is not good enough to play.

And that is it. Nothing is going to change that. There are questions over players like Oxlade-Chamberlain, who has impressed when he has been in the team and who is also earning, I would think, reasonably big money.

He is not in the side, and a lot of supporters want to know why. There is Vandenberg, who we spent a lot of money on and who is now supposedly fit.

I would rather see him start ahead of McCowan because we still do not know what he can do. We have not had a proper chance to evaluate him, and if he has something to offer, then we need to see it. The same arguments do not apply to McCowan at all.

And I am dismayed that O’Neill has made that promise, because his first responsibility is ultimately to put the best team on the pitch that he can.

Even accounting for the need to rotate, this one would be a stinker of a decision.

We tolerate enough mediocrity at this club as it is.

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