Unity is Strength

 

Unity is Strength

It’s that time of year when the scars of the previous season’s football start to heal and thoughts turn towards the campaign ahead. Celtic’s new manager, Ange Postecoglou, has had a decent reception among Celtic fans, with only a few rushing to judge him before his Celtic side has kicked a ball.  It was suggested he was a ‘yes man’ based solely on the fact he hasn’t thrown a few of last season’s failures out the door. The last thing a new man in any work place wants is to cause an atmosphere of fear. He’ll assess the situation in his own time and we will see changes in the months ahead. He said at the press conference, ‘there will be changes, it doesn’t mean people will be going but we might be bringing other people in.’  He also said clearly, ‘I’ll make those decisions in the coming weeks.’

The big Aussie has been around the block a few times and comes across as the no nonsense type of manager many feel the club needs. His avowed aim is to play attacking football in the best traditions of the club but he’s an intelligent man and he’ll know that Celtic need to keep the back door closed too.

Postecoglou has already met the Scottish sporting media and will soon become wise to their strangulated prose and ability to spin anything he says into a story that suits them. His comments that there is an ‘urgency’ to fill certain positions in the team was translated as ‘emergency’ by the BBC. He’ll get used to that sort of thing but somehow, I don’t see it bothering him. As Fergus McCann once said, ‘the dogs bark but the caravan moves on.’ He’ll have far more important things to concern him, like a Champions League Qualifier in just over 3 weeks.

Finding suitable players to augment the squad by then will be a challenge. The covid situation will complicate things further with potential signings self-isolating when they arrive in Scotland from certain other countries. There will need to be a degree of patience with Postecoglou as it may take him a few months to assemble the squad he wants. There remains the nucleus of a good team at Celtic but it requires work on the spine of the team from goalkeeper to striker. The Celtic supporters will need to be patient but after the calamity that was season 2020-21, there will need to be clear signs that he is structuring and organising the team with more cohesiveness than we saw towards the end of Neil Lennon’s reign. Steven Gerrard was given three seasons to get things right and stuck to his 4-3-3 formation even when things were going wrong. In the end the addition of better players saw the side improve although it has to be said that Celtic went backwards in that period and made his job easier.

FC Midtijylland will provide tough opposition in the upcoming Champions League qualifier. They made the group stages of the Champions League last season and held both Liverpool and Atalanta to a 1-1 draw at home. They are no mugs but they are a side Celtic should be able to overcome in normal circumstances. However, we don’t live in normal times and Celtic badly missed their fans in Europe last season. They face the prospect of playing FC Midtijylland in an empty or near empty stadium and that will help the opposition.

The job facing Postecoglou is a difficult one, especially the need to strengthen the side in the midst of the pandemic. There will be players coming and going over the next few months at Celtic and blending those remaining with the new blood into an effective and confident side will be his focus.

Postecoglou’s Celtic have arguably the three toughest away ties on the fixture list in the first quarter of the season. (Rangers, Hearts & Aberdeen) while Rangers have all of those sides plus Hibs at Ibrox first. You have to face them all in the end but it is always helpful getting them at home first. There is no suggestion of chicanery at the SPFL as these fixtures will reverse next season but it is a tough start for Celtic.

The allure of the Scottish Champions being one of the 32 sides going directly into the group stages of the Champions League in season 2022-23 is a huge motivation for Celtic to back Postecoglou and build a team to have a real crack at the title this season. The club knows the boost a Champions League campaign would give the supporters but perhaps more importantly the financial lift it offers is a serious motivation. It is up to Celtic not to meekly hand it to our biggest rivals who have built their team on borrowed money and hand-outs from wealthy directors.

Ange Postecoglou has a lot to consider in the weeks ahead. There will be patience from most of the Celtic support in the coming season but they will want to see progress. Last season saw a perfect storm of circumstances in which Celtic failed to cope with empty stadiums, the pandemic and key players not producing the form of previous years. It also saw the emergence of a minority of self-entitled fans, weaned on a diet of success who turned on the club when they most needed their support. If Celtic are to succeed under Postecoglou then the supporters, the team and those who run the club are going to have to come together and offer a unified front. When Celtic and their fans are united, they are a much more potent force.

Good luck Ange. We’re all right behind you.

 

 

Calling it out

 

Calling it out

Old Mr Murphy was what you would call an old-fashioned gentleman. Even after retiring, he would be out in his suit, clean shaven and had a smile for everyone. His life, like that of so many Glaswegians, revolved around his family, his local church and his football team. He would stroll down to Celtic Park in all weathers as he had done since he watched Tully and Evans as a boy. He lived in what we used to call a ‘good close’ in a Glasgow tenement building and got on well with his neighbours. One family up his stair were of the orange persuasion but he had the same smile for them as he had for anyone else. All in all, a nicer old fellah you couldn’t meet.

His passing a good few years ago was cause for genuine sadness for all who knew him and his funeral service at the slope roofed, architectural marvel that is the church of Our Lady of Good Council, in Glasgow, was well attended. There were many tears shed as his coffin was blessed at the end of the service and the congregation sang the touching farewell song, ‘receive his soul.’ As I watched his sons and nephews bear the old chap out of the church for his final journey to Dalbeth cemetery, a trip that would of course involve a pause as it passed his beloved Celtic Park, I couldn’t help notice two of the family downstairs had chosen to stand outside the church rather than attend what was in fact a beautiful service.

I spoke to one of the family members who did honour Mr Murphy by attending his funeral and he told me that his siblings ‘beliefs’ meant they wouldn’t set foot in a Catholic church. It struck me as very odd that you can live next to someone for literally decades, like and respect him but not enough to actually attend his funeral and demonstrate some solidarity with a family in obvious pain. It is at its heart an un-Christian thing to do and yet folk who call themselves Christians do it often. Perhaps they were off school the day the teacher told the story of the Good Samaritan.

I was reminded of that story when reading an article in the Scotsman a couple of weeks back which questioned whether it is time Scottish Society actually faced up to the anti-Catholic prejudice which lingers yet in some dark corners. Andrew Smith’s article eviscerates the uncouth behaviour we saw in George Square in mid-May when thousands of Rangers supporters celebrated their team’s title success. It was to be expected that an outpouring of emotion occurred after a near decade of dominance from their rivals, the trauma of liquidation and years of being the butt of jokes. Celtic fans expressed similar joy in 1998 when Wim Jansen’s side won the title in similar circumstances. The difference was though that Celtic fans celebrated long and loud without expressing hatred for anyone’s religious faith. Smith wrote in his article…

‘We in the media have all been enablers in allowing a corrosive sense of entitlement to be brewed with a cocktail of anti-Catholic/anti-Irish bigotry. The concoction percolates into a mindset that now twice inside three months – just ponder that, twice! – has resulted in Glasgow city centre disturbances that have been despicable in scale and nature.  We hear the word “minority” bandied about. The word was, predictably and depressingly, front and centre in an apology of a statement from Rangers that, astonishingly watery and mealy-mouthed, made reference only to “inappropriate behaviour”. In itself, entirely inappropriate. The Ibrox club’s deliberate obfuscation on these fronts is fingers-in-the-ears and hands-over-the-eyes stuff. Of course, the miscreants were a minority. A sizeable minority, though...in a huge fanbase. It is no minority of the 50,000 crowd that were singing the Super Rangers song, with its line about “Fenian bastards”, or The Billy Boys chant, which talks about being “up to our knees in Fenian blood”, when Ibrox was full to the gunwales pre-pandemic.’

Smith’s namesake, Walter, a Rangers legend after two very successful spells at Ibrox said in an interview in 1995, ‘there is a Protestant superiority syndrome around here. You can feel it sometimes.’ For those many decent Protestants who follow their faith with humility and Christian charity, such words are anathema. Didn’t the man who was the inspiration of the Christian faith talk of being humble, loving your enemies and loving your neighbour as yourself?

I spoke on many occasions to a local Church of Scotland Minister, a man who went on to be Moderator of the General Assembly and who is perhaps one of the most decent, Christian people I have ever met. He told me that he arrived in his first parish in Glasgow in the winter of the dreadful Ibrox disaster in 1971. He noticed the casual sectarianism in the community around him and challenged it whenever he could. As Moderator, he met Pope John Paul II and chose to display a picture of him meeting the Pontiff in the entrance of his church. ‘Could I have done that in 1971?’ he asked me before adding, ‘I could have but some would have voted with their feet.’ He also told me that one of his first acts as a Minister was to visit the local Catholic church and ask the local Priest to walk with him around the community in a visual act of unity.

 

Good men like that Minister remind us that anyone who claims to be a Christian yet holds hatred in their hearts isn’t actually living up to their faith. How many of those involved in the drunken goings on in George Square a few weeks back would have been at church that week? This is little to do with religion and everything to do with tribalism and the bonds that come from having someone to hate. Andrew Smith also said in his article….

‘There is a faction of Rangers’ fanbase – Protestant and unionist in hue – that is motivated by hate, pure and simple. Hatred of a closest rival, Celtic, because that club has roots and a culture firmly Irish Catholic, and republican. Ahead of Rangers’ admirable on-field renaissance, that rival had been lording it for so long in the game. Moreover, these fans have the ultimate slag for their Rangers counterparts with the new club/old club teasing, a consequence of malfeasance by previous owners of the Ibrox institution that has created desperate insecurities over sense of history. All of these elements underpinned what has exploded into the public domain in recent times. As so often happens in such situations, these insecurities allowed for the fomenting of a bogus sense of victimhood, Rangers falsely presenting themselves as the oppressed. In these situations, so often the believed oppressed actually become the oppressors.’

I have been heartened by Scottish society’s response to the events in George Square in May. Many of us have scolded the hypocrisy of the political classes for castigating racism and Islamophobia while turning a deaf ear and blind eye to the expressions of anti-Catholic rhetoric in our streets. Imagine for a moment the outpouring of rage in society if thousands sang about being ‘up to their knees in Jewish blood.’ Why then was it deemed unremarkable when ‘Fenians’ were the target? It’s time to change, time to challenge this nonsense and build a better country than the one we saw in the grubby, uncouth goings on in Glasgow in mid-May. Good people of all faiths and none have a stake in building that better society so that our children and grandchildren can live in a land where we are all the People. 

As Edmund Burke once said, ‘the only thing necessary for evil to thrive is for good people to do nothing.’ That is no longer an option. Time to call it out and make the change.