Martin O'Neill resigned to employing ugly Celtic style for most of the season

Martin O'Neill is resigned to having to play whatever-it-takes-to-win football to get Celtic over the line as far as the Premiership title is concerned.

The Bhoys currently have a four-point lead over Rangers at the top of the Premiership, and they are in fine form domestically, winning all-but one of their games, albeit that one was against Rangers.

At this point, we have a title race, but Celtic have shown themselves to be ultra-consistent in the league, while Rangers are nowhere near as consistent against the so-called lesser teams.

Despite that, O'Neill believes he has a batle on his hands. "No, I think Rangers are a big challenge this season" he said.

"Also, I don't think for one minute that Hearts are out of it either. I can only try to concentrate on my own things, which is the very obvious thing.

"But in terms of having a job on your hands, yeah, you do have a job on your hands all the time. You're managing a big club like this and the expectation is to win."

O'Neill resigned to what some are calling 'Maloneyball'

It hasn't been lost on fans that O'Neill's right-hand man, Shaun Maloney, who does pretty much all of the coaching, has employed a rather basic style of play. The talent level doesn't help, with this team perhaps incapable of playing good football and getting results, especially against better teams.

But O'Neill himself is resigned to playing ugly for most of the season if it means getting results. He added: "We had two separate weeks of domestic winning in the sense that every time we made an attack, we seemed to score a goal against Hearts, and then we had to fight for everything in the other game.

"There are different ways of winning football matches. During the course of a 42 game season, you’ll probably only play incredible stuff maybe 12 to 15 times. The rest of the time you really had to grind it out, and that shows you something about the spirit of a team."