Former Celtic boss Martin O'Neill has revealed that there was no way on earth that John Hartson was ever going to fail a medical in Paradise.

The Welshman famously saw a deal to city rivals Rangers collapse in 2000 after he failed a medical at Ibrox due to a knee problem.

The Hoops went on to have the last laugh as Hartson bagged 110 goals for the club in a five-and-a-half-year spell after signing for O'Neill a year later.

The Nothern Irishman concedes that he initially brought Hartson in to challenge the prolific goalscoring duo of Henrik Larsson and Chris Sutton - but insists the Wales international would have passed his Celtic medical no matter what.

"I had a number of thoughts about it as Henrik Larsson and Chris Sutton had been terrific in the first season for me," he said. "Sometimes you get a little bit lucky in the injury sense and two of my main players were not out for any real length of time.

"I did think 'if anything happens to either of those two where is our goal power coming from?' If we were going to try and make inroads in European football and remain competitive and retain the league then I needed to do something about it.

Celtic Way:

"So John Hartson came along and he had failed a medical at Rangers. That didn't bother me as he had played 20 consecutive games for Coventry City. At the end of the day if you want a player to pass a medical - he will. If you want them to fail it then they will fail it.

"I just felt that John could come in, he was very strong and I thought he could do a good job. I told John when he first come in that it was his task to break the Larsson-Sutton partnership up. John was going to have to try to do that and initially he was concerned about that as Henrik had a wonderful reputation and Chris was a fine player.

"What I didn't know was that Chris could play in a number of positions like centre-half and midfield - although not as well as Chris says he did!

"He could give you that extra goal power from defence and midfield. If anything happened to any one of them then I could swap things around.

"As it happened Hartson came in and did really well and scored the goals and was very, very strong. Between the three of them I knew Celtic had goals in them if all three could play in the same side.

"I thought they could do it but if Chris hadn't been so versatile then we might be talking about something else entirely."

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