Towards the end of last season and all through the summer, right up until Martin O’Neill was officially announced as Celtic manager, several names kept appearing over and over again as potential candidates for the job.

And there were two moments during that process which gave me enormous relief.

The first was when Steve Clarke signed his new Scotland contract before the World Cup. The second was when Jens Berthel Askou left Motherwell for Toulouse.

I know for a fact that both of those guys were on Celtic’s shortlist. I know for a fact that there was significant discussion inside the club about both of them and that either would have been regarded by some people there as an acceptable choice.

I disagreed completely.

When Clarke signed his new Scotland deal, I thought that ruled him out. As it turned out, he resigned not long after Scotland’s World Cup campaign ended, but by then I think most people already expected Martin O’Neill to get the Celtic job.

Askou was different. His decision to leave Motherwell for Toulouse genuinely gave me one of my first lifts of the close season. Because with Clarke apparently tied down by Scotland and Askou heading for France, I thought the two managerial appointments I most feared had effectively been taken off the table.

I thought the greatest danger had passed.

As it turns out, that might have been a little premature.

Steve Clarke was never a name I would have accepted. I don’t think he was a name most Celtic supporters would have been particularly comfortable with either.

In spite of people in the media, including Michael Gannon, promoting the idea that Clarke is actually a manager who wants to play attacking football but has been constrained by the players available to him with Scotland, I don’t see it. I never have.

And the fact that Clarke has still not returned to club management since leaving Scotland doesn’t exactly suggest that the rest of football has been fighting its way to his door either.

For Celtic, it would have been a lowbrow appointment. It would have infuriated a large section of the support and, for me, it would have represented exactly the sort of unimaginative thinking which has characterised too many major decisions at this club.

Askou was different. He had a very vocal constituency within the Celtic support itself. There were people promoting his cause almost endlessly through the tail end of last season and into the summer, and there was an enormous amount of noise around him in the mainstream media as well.

People who genuinely know things were talking about Celtic being unable to ignore him. At that point, I became convinced that something substantial must have been happening behind the scenes. From what I have subsequently heard, that was very much the case.

I have it on pretty good authority that Celtic were fairly confident a deal could be done, but were unwilling to meet Motherwell’s price. If that information is correct, then once again Celtic trying to do things on the cheap may have been what prevented something truly transformational (one way or another) from happening.

At the time, I would have regarded that as a small mercy.

Now I’m not nearly as sure.

Askou hasn’t exactly torn Ligue 1 apart with Toulouse. There have been difficulties, and nobody should pretend otherwise. But he has apparently done enough to attract attention elsewhere, and there is clearly a feeling around him, particularly among people who have worked with him or watched his coaching closely, that he is going to end up at a bigger club eventually.

And this is where I have had to reassess my own position and, in some ways, I really haven’t changed my mind at all. I still don’t think Jens Berthel Askou was the level of manager Celtic should have been aiming for.

But I know one thing with absolute certainty: 74-year-old Martin O’Neill certainly isn’t either.

What made Askou stand out in comparison with the current coaching team was that his Motherwell side last season had a very clear identity. All the pieces mattered, and all the pieces joined up.

He was able to take players who were very ordinary footballers, players who are proving again this season just how ordinary they are, and make them look better than they had at almost any other point in their careers.

And that inevitably makes you wonder what he might have done with a squad containing genuine talent like the one Celtic have right now.

It is a tantalising thought. He certainly would not have rejected outright the idea of strengthening the central defence. I believe we would have added a defensive midfielder as well. In the attacking areas, who knows what the squad might have looked like?

It is clear that Camilo Duran had been on Celtic’s radar for some time, so I think there is every chance we would still have signed him. And Askou would surely have been happy to work with a player of that quality.

I’m less certain about some of the others.

The squad would have looked different. But I strongly suspect it would have looked as though there was an underlying plan.

And whilst I’m not going to sit here crying the blues over an opportunity missed, what bothers me is that Celtic simply didn’t try hard enough to find a different answer.

We didn’t look far enough out into the football world.

The fact that our realistic choices appeared to consist largely of managers on our own doorstep, plus Robbie Keane, tells you quite a lot about how far-thinking and progressive the process actually was. And this is really the heart of it.

The mistake was not necessarily failing to appoint Jens Berthel Askou.

The mistake was failing to conduct a managerial search which might have produced five or six candidates with the same broad qualities: modern, progressive, tactically coherent, ambitious and capable of improving players.

Celtic should not have been choosing between Steve Clarke, Martin O’Neill, Robbie Keane and the Motherwell manager. Celtic should have been searching Europe for the next outstanding coach before everybody else knew his name.

That is what a properly ambitious football club should be doing.

Askou, whatever else you think of him, represented a different type of manager. He represented the idea of a coach with a defined style, a clear tactical structure and an obvious view of how a team should be built.

That is what Celtic are missing now.

I look at the current side and I see good players who do not always appear to complement each other. I see players being asked to perform roles which do not naturally suit them. I see a team which can look one way one week and completely different the next, without any obvious underlying philosophy tying it all together.

That is not what Askou’s Motherwell looked like.

You could see the football. You could see the structure. You could see the ideas. And the fact that he was not at Motherwell for much more than a season before another club came and took him away tells you that his work was being noticed outside Scotland as well.

So even that imperfect solution would probably have left Celtic in a better place than the one we occupy right now.

That is really what bothers me. I don’t so much regret that Celtic didn’t take the Askou path. I regret that we didn’t seriously pursue another path at all.

But in terms of the man himself, Askou would at least have given us an identity. He would have given us a coherent philosophy about how the game should be played and how the squad should be constructed around it.

He would not have been continually ramming square pegs into round holes.

Because if he had been given genuine freedom to build the squad around his football, you would expect him to recruit players who complemented one another and complemented the style he wanted to play.

And that is the real loss. Perhaps not Askou specifically, although I am no longer as ready to dismiss the idea that he might have been a good appointment as I initially was. I mean a progressive type of manager. The modern-thinking coach. The guy with a clearly defined football philosophy and an idea of how every piece fits together.

That is what Celtic could have had.

So maybe I was wrong about Askou.

Or perhaps, more accurately, maybe I was wrong about the risk.

Given the chance to do it all over again, I would make a different choice. I would take the risk. Because the real danger was never appointing someone like Askou. The real danger was appointing another familiar name and hoping familiarity would somehow turn into progress.

And that is exactly where Celtic ended up.

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