BEFORE one of the biggest seasons in their history, Celtic were already facing a fork in the road, with both paths laden with pitfalls that would put 10 in-a-row at risk.

With a dressing room half-full of players who didn’t want to be there anymore, the Celtic backroom team and board were left with a choice. Either bow to player pressure and let some of their top stars depart, leaving them open to outrage from supporters had they then failed to win the league, or keep them at Celtic against their will, and put the house on men who were anything but all in for the cause.

In the end, they went with the latter course of action, knowing they would have been crucified had they allowed the likes of Odsonne Edouard or Kristoffer Ajer to jump ship if their hopes of making history were sunk. In the end, a resurgent Rangers torpedoed their hopes in any case, with Celtic’s ragtag bunch unsurprisingly lacking the stomach for the fight.

For Lee Naylor, the former Celtic full-back who has now become an agent, alarm bells were already ringing in the early part of last summer. Not only was he hearing of the unrest in the dressing room, he was concerned over the recruitment process, having pitched potential signings and been rebuffed not by former teammate Neil Lennon, but by head of football operations Nicky Hammond.

For Naylor, the 10 in-a-row dream didn’t die during Celtic’s winter of discontent, but right there and then.

“The only positive is now knowing who to get rid of,” Naylor told the Celtic Huddle Podcast. “On the pitch there’s nothing much they can take but at least now they can rebuild. They’ll know who wants to be at Celtic and they can clear out those who don’t.

“The signs were there at the start of the season. When you have that many people who are wanting to leave, subconsciously you can’t do it on the pitch.

“If there’s interest in that many players, the time was right to make change then. We tried to keep hold of too many players to get 10 in a row and it ended up hurting us.

“As a club you should be preparing for the future. Celtic have always had two or three coming though from the youth ranks and putting their foot in the deep water with the first time.

“You’d then have three or four signings in the summer coming on to strengthen the side.

“You can cope with one or to wanting to leave and you can get through the season.

“But when you have five or six who want out the door, there’s no way you can recover.

“On top of that, players coming in have been well below par, so you are always heading for a downfall.”

Naylor could scarcely believe what he was seeing both the park from Celtic this term, with the team showing none of the characteristics he associates with the successful Celtic sides of the past.

“You need players that can step in at any time,” he said. “We had that but it’s not seemed that way this season and they’ve paid the price.

“When we played we had an urgency about us. I remember [Gordon] Strachan showing us a video of when we lost the ball while attacking. He paused it half way through and asked us, what’s going on here?

“He had every player on the pitch sprinting back – that was the fear of Celtic losing.”

Off the park, it has been a similar story, with Naylor disappointed to see supporters protesting outside Celtic Park and calling for former teammate Neil Lennon’s sacking back in December of last year.

“That’s not the Celtic I know,” he said. “I never thought I’d see fans gathering outside the club in so much disappointment.

“It wasn’t nice to see. I obviously don’t condone bad behaviour or violence, but that was the real low point for me.”

Naylor is hoping though that a fresh start can revive Celtic’s fortunes next term, and if Eddie Howe is indeed the man to come in, he has tipped him to re-establish that identity which has been lost along the way during the last nine tumultuous months.

But he has warned that just as Celtic will need to adapt to suit the demands of their new manager, so must he to suit the demands of the club.

“He’s a good young manager,” he said. “He won’t be used to what it takes to be a manager in Glasgow because you need to win every single game.

“I’m sure he’ll bring identity to the club again on the pitch in the way we play.

“We’ve been needing that for a while. It’s a tough one because it takes time but you are under scrutiny regardless.

“If you are a Celtic or Rangers manager you need to win regardless.”