How can Celtic hope to get the energy they need when the team, the dugout and the boardroom are all full of tired old faces well beyond their sell-by dates?

All of a sudden, the key to putting Celtic’s wobbling campaign back on an even keel is getting the right energy. Martin O’Neill was on about it in the wake of that Europa League humbling at home to Ferencvaros. Now, it’s Mika Baur.

This energy gubbins is the kind of chat you expect from dreadlocked stoners found at wickerman festivals or middle-class mums into wild swimming and Ayurvedic yoga while hubby is away buying and selling people in his banking job in the city. Aimless types lacking concrete ideas.

It’s certainly not what you want to hear football persons discussing as a central tenet in sorting out a team that looks like collapsing in on itself every time opposition of any kind of remote quality decides to have a proper go.

Tactics, structure, fitting players into suitable positions, maybe even constructing a functional style of play. That holds a little more weight. However, in a rather disconcerting night of fielding questions from the media, Parkhead manager Martin O’Neill didn’t offer any real answers over those more conventional issues in the wake of his side’s latest no-show on Thursday.

Instead, he spent his time talking about how ‘the football club’ had become used to 4-3-3 and that it might take time to find another way. OK, but he’s the manager. That’s up to him. If he doesn’t think 4-3-3 is working, why has he lined up that way for the first 11 games of the season?

All this is before we even get to the fact that Celtic – eager to find a way to put £25million worth of recruits in Kasper Hogh, Camilo Duran and Haissem Hassan in the same starting line-up – don’t look like they have the personnel elsewhere in the squad to support having two up front and certainly haven’t recruited with that in mind.

Maybe O’Neill will lay out the blueprint on Celtic TV in that interview he’s going to give to explain the wisdom in bombing goalkeeper Viljami Sinisalo out of the team for no good reason before having to U-turn and stick him back in against Ferencvaros following Sam Johnstone’s horror show at Ibrox. You know, the one he promised after refusing to answer a perfectly understandable question about his reverse ferret on telly pre-match.

In the meantime, there’s only one glaring issue with this talk of conjuring up new energy with which to burn away all the bad stuff going on.

Celtic is a club of stale old men at the top of the pyramid, a 74-year-old in O’Neill who should have left on a high after magicking them to a Double last term and a team that actually looks like it is going backwards no matter how many new signings the hierarchy’s scattergun approach delivers. Energy is the last word you’d associate with this set-up.

All respect to the guy for his achievements, but what does it say about Celtic’s recruitment that a 35-year-old James Forrest – who did all right during his 57 minutes, it should be said – is still starting big games in Europe?

You might say the same about Callum McGregor. He’s only 33, but he has a ridiculous amount of miles on the clock and is looking marooned in midfield now. He doesn’t have the legs any longer, there’s no one with any of the required physicality and athleticism around him and he’s being painfully exposed.

Clearly, throwing money around on a load of attackers and hoping for the best while still turning a hefty profit from the summer transfer window must meet those personal ambitions he spoke about the club having to match last season.

There’s a school of thought that, with the club having failed to nail down any of their targets for an Arne Engels replacement and no doubt reeling over how poor loan signing Oliver Sorensen looked the other night, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain might be the guy to come in and help shore things up in the centre of the park for Sunday’s Old Firm league visit of Rangers.

He’s 33 years old as well, though. He’s only played four games this season after the bit-part role filled last term. Just another guy whose best years are so far behind him that a fair chunk of the Green Brigade would have been running around in nappies when he signed for Arsenal 15 years ago.

Meanwhile, you’ve somehow got Anthony Ralston, a late sub against Ferencvaros, still playing in major matches despite Jordan Lotomba supposedly turning up from Feyenoord to play right-back during that frantic, flailing finale in the market.

Even Kieran Tierney being back at the club makes little sense. All those wages being spent on a fellow with no resale value and only capable of playing the full 90 minutes in two of eight outings this term. Let’s not even go into the defensive element of his performance against the Hungarians. It was awful.

Defensively, mind you, the entire team looks dreadful. They are wide open. So easy to play against. Auston Trusty is back on the naughty step and Liam Scales is back looking like a mistake waiting to happen in major fixtures. In addition to that midfielder who never arrived, why wasn’t a dominant centre-half part of the recruitment plan, especially with Cameron Carter-Vickers having had his fair share of injury trouble?

Of course, all this chat about whether O’Neill is even picking the team or setting out the tactics is slowly starting to seep from the dark corners of the interweb into mainstream platforms as well.

On TNT Sports’ coverage the other night, Stilian Petrov stated openly that he doesn’t feel this is a Celtic team playing in O’Neill’s style.

McGregor’s stark admission that ‘it’s a little bit broken’ reads like no one is quite sure what they are trying to achieve. O’Neill certainly doesn’t give the impression he’s got a grip on what’s required to fix it.

It’s interesting, too, that there was no huge reprise of the ‘Sack the Board’ stuff after 90 minutes that confirmed, as if it were needed, that Celtic are to remain nothing other than an absolute comedy turn in UEFA competition for another year.

It’s almost as if even the most irate of punters can see there are issues and questions in all manner of other departments that need addressed in isolation.

That’s not to suggest for one second that the directors are out of the woods, by the way. Brian Wilson, aged 77, has now been in the post of ‘interim’ chairman for nine months following the departure of 67-year-old spring chicken Peter Lawwell.

He announced on Friday that the board had been freshened up with new non-execs in Raymond Buchanan and Mark Keane. That the latter, no matter what he might bring, is the son of John Keane, who spent 20 years on the board, just gives fuel to those who regard the incumbents of the inner sanctum as too insular and too reliant on the same old faces or even the same old families.

The loss to Ferencvaros may have been met with a general sense of apathy. It seems safe to say that won’t be the case if Rangers dish out another spanking like last weekend’s to a Celtic set-up with a pensioner in the dug-out, a pensioner as the public face of the board, an invisible CEO in Michael Nicholson answering to 76-year-old Dermot Desmond and a team dependent on too many of the same old names because bad transfer window after bad transfer window hasn’t seen them replaced or challenged.

More of the dross served up in recent weeks and O’Neill will feel more energy around the east end of Glasgow than you can shake a stick at on Sunday. Toxic energy. A new kind that will swamp the technical area as well as the directors' box and ask exactly why a club that got away with murder last season opted not to count their blessings and make big changes for the better.