A load of balls

 

A load of balls

Back in 1994 I attended the League Cup Final between Celtic and Raith Rovers. It was a match Celtic could have and should have won, but fate degreed otherwise and it came down to a penalty shoot out which Celtic lost. The decisive penalty miss came from one Paul Michael Lyons McStay. The guy is Celtic to his core and that miss hurt him as much as any of the watching Celtic fans. Three days later we trundled along the M8 to play Hibs and the Celtic support sang McStay’s name and held up a banner reading; ‘You’ll never walk alone, Paul.’

Those days were tough. Celtic had gone five years without a trophy at that stage and in truth we thought we’d have too much for Raith Rovers on the day, but they gave their all and took the cup. McStay would exorcise the demon of failure the following May when he led Celtic to a Scottish cup win over Airdrie. It wasn’t the renaissance we thought it would be, but we cheered out skipper loudly as we were delighted that he was a winner. We were all in it together, backing our team through thick and a lot of thin in those years. Our day would come but we had more near things and disappointments before we would again be kings of Scotland.

To some of you younger folk reading this and thinking, ‘here goes another Celtic da warbling on about the bad old days of the 90s,’ I’d say that the bitter taste of defeat helped us enjoy success all the more when it finally came. We didn’t meekly accept defeat then, it bloody hurt. It was all the harder to swallow when it was sauced with the triumphalist bigotry of some of the followers of EBT United across the city. But we stuck with the team, gave them tremendous backing and knocked the pretenders off their perch in the end. There were those who took issue with Fergus McCann and his seemingly parsimonious transfer policy and the acrimonious departure of Wim Jansen. Elements of the media were only too happy to do a hatched job on McCann to the degree that some fans actually booed him as he unfurled Celtic’s first championship flag in ten long years. Subsequent events when the good ship Rangers hit an iceberg of debt and sank, led to a reappraisal of McCann’s business model and the ‘bunnet’ was cheered to the rafters when he appeared at Celtic Park a few years ago.

What I’m getting at here is that there was a time when success wasn’t a given. We had to dig in and earn it. We had to accept that some years things would go wrong and we wouldn’t win anything. I’m pleased to say that the past 25 years have seen Celtic experience a degree of success to match any period in our history.  Since the year 2000, Celtic has won 19 league titles, 12 Scottish cups and 12 league cups. The one constant in the good times and the bad was the Celtic support. To paraphrase Tommy Burns, ‘they were there and they’ll always be there.’ We have prided ourselves on being the ‘12^th man’ who drove Celtic on and provided an atmosphere which was praised throughout Europe. That reputation is crumbling before our eyes.

As one Celt said to me, ‘we are eating ourselves from the inside out.’ He has a point. Yes, the board has overseen a drastic reduction in the quality of the side over the past couple of years. That is unforgivable given that they sit on a huge pile of fans' money like Smaug the dragon in the Hobbit. The last transfer window was an epic failure as they seemed to put all their eggs into one basket with their pursuit of Kacper Dolberg who strung them along before joining Ajax in the last few days of the window. That led to the frantic last-minute scramble at Celtic to get players in. The fans are right to be upset about these issues and are perfectly within their rights to protest, provided it stays within safe and reasonable limits. We all want the best for Celtic and failure to build on a position of strength is a recurring theme in the club’s history.

The form the protest took against VFB Stuttgart the other night was self-defeating and worked against the team. Martin O’Neil would have given them their instructions about getting in the Germans’ faces early on and pumped them up before the match only to find that 15 seconds in, a handful of self-appointed disrupters have taken it upon themselves to hurl a load of balls onto the pitch which held the game up for three minutes. It knocked the stuffing out of what had been a decent pre-match atmosphere and didn’t help the players one bit. Martin O’Neill was quite clear about what he thought of this type of protest…

‘Anybody who thinks that’s a good idea needs their heads examined. It sends out the totally wrong message, we’re playing against Stuttgart, the game is hard enough and they’re coming here. The problem is that away back years some ago this was an incredibly intimidating place to come to. I’ve managed here when sides like Juventus were scared stiff coming here. That sort of thing doesn’t help at all. There’s been battles going on but that doesn’t help because what it does do is that Stuttgart who come to this wonderful football club find that there’s a lot of infighting going on here and things are being thrown onto the pitch. It doesn’t make any sense to be because if I’m a Stuttgart player I’m thinking, I’m pretty happy in this environment if that’s the case.’

Like many Celtic fans, I understand the anger at the board but no protest should be detrimental to the team. The squabble isn’t with them so when that whistle blows, get behind them in the manner we have done for decades. In the aftermath of Martin O’Neill’s comments, a small minority of fans on social media turned on him. A club legend who dragged us up by our bootstraps and made us respected in Europe again during his first tenure at the club was suddenly a ‘board lapdog’ and a ‘mouthpiece for the board.’ It takes a particularly myopic and ignorant mind to reach those conclusions. I abhor this division in the club and the vicious cycle we are now caught in. There needs to be a bit of humility and compromise on all sides so that we can get back to what we should be doing; building a better team and making our stadium a place where opposition teams worry about coming too.

Season 2025-26 has been a turbulent one for Celtic FC. We have had three managers, including that disastrous month under Wilfred Nancy and one of our ultra groups is banned from the stadium. The ongoing struggle between the board and a sizable section of the support is helping no one but our rivals. Yet, despite it all, we’re still in touch at the top of the league, still in the cup and have a manager who has yet to lose a domestic match this season. There’s much to play for so when the whistle blows get behind the team and remind the football world of the difference Celtic supporters can make.

Let the players know, just as we did for Paul McStay in 1994, that they’ll never walk alone.

The Year of the Ox

 

The Year of the Ox

Watching Alex Oxlade Chamberlain curl home that exquisite winning goal against Livingston this week, made me think that this gifted footballer might just be a difference maker as the season reaches the decisive phase. Celtic have struggled at times to deal with teams who park the bus and utilise a low block to frustrate them. The art of shooting from the edge of the box seemed to have been somewhat forgotten this season as the antidote to packed defences. The powerful Englishman is no stranger to shooting from outside the box and has demonstrated his skill in this area on a few occasions over the years. The other players’ reaction to his goal spoke volumes too. There was relief that the game had been salvaged, but as they mobbed him, it was obvious they were delighted to have a player of his calibre on their side.

Martin O’Neill has organised and motivated a squad that was in honesty running on empty. His second stint at the helm this season has seen 7 domestic matches, with 6 won and a draw at Tynecastle with ten men.  It hasn’t always been pretty and there have been some late, late heroics to win the games, but there is a feeling that the squad will fight to the very end for the manager. He seems reasonably happy with the business the club did in the transfer window and it has to be said that the squad looks as if it has more depth now. Hopefully we see one or two of our injured players back too as the spring weather arrives and the boss has more options.

The mantra now is to win at all costs. An improving Kilmarnock side will provide a stiff test for Celtic on the plastic pitch on Sunday. The Hoops also need to start converting a higher percentage of their chances. In the recent games with Dundee and Livingston, they had over twenty attempts at goal in each game and still only managed to win them in stoppage time. With Adamu, Cvancara, Iheanacho and Maeda all capable through the middle, O’Neill now has more options up front than was the case. Hopefully that’ll pay dividends as the heavy fixture list unfolds. Celtic now have 11 games in the next 4 weeks and squad rotation will be needed. Every game becomes a must win when the league is so tight, but there are more twists and turns to come in this fascinating league season.  

Hearts have improved as have Rangers but in truth the competitive edge we all wanted to see in the SPFL has come about because of a levelling down, not a levelling up. Celtic allowed a lot of firepower to leave the club without adequate replacements being brought in. Key players were injured and the squad depth and quality were proved inadequate. Brendan Rodgers was dismissed, rightly or wrongly and the board sanctioned the hiring of a manager who knew nothing about Scottish football and stuck dogmatically to his 3 at the back tactic, even when it was clear that Celtic didn’t have the personnel for it and it wasn’t working. Wilfred Nancy was at Celtic Park for 33 days and oversaw the worst run of results in nearly 50 years. Six of his 8 games ended in defeat and 12 league points and a cup final were lost. Such was the defensive chaos under the Frenchman, that Celtic conceded 18 goals in his 8 games in charge. They lost 15 goals in the previous 24 games. Celtic have lost 6 matches in the SPFL this season and 4 of them were lost in that mad month under Nancy. We can but hope that we now have enough in the tank to recover from that self-inflicted wound.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but the sensible thing to have done when Rodgers was fired would have been to leave Martin O’Neill in charge for the rest of the season. That being said, he has steadied the ship again and there is all to play for in the league and the cup. We may Ibrox on 2 consecutive weekends, but should Celtic hang in there in the SPFL, we have both Hearts and Rangers at home after the split so all things are possible. New players have arrived and will in time contribute more fully. If they are on loan, then it is likely that they weren’t purchased outright because the new manager arriving in June will doubtless want a say in who comes and who goes.

The wind of change is blowing through Scottish football and I feel the Celtic side we see in July will be much changed from the one we are backing now. Hatate and Maeda look likely to be moving on and Schmeichel may decide that it’s time to hang up his gloves. Engels is attracting interest too and we surely won’t resist another £25m bid for him in the summer? The new boss will want a decent budget, and the fans will accept players trying their luck elsewhere provided the revenue raised is spent on replacements of a similar ability. We saw how the downsizing of the last year left the team weaker and that cannot be allowed to happen again.

Before we even contemplate season 2026-27, there is still much to fight for domestically this season. It remains to be seen if Oxlade Chamberlain can reach anywhere near the levels he did at Arsenal or Liverpool. If he can, then we’ll have quite a player on our hands. This is the business end of the season; there is little room for error, but despite the trials, tribulations and squabbles, we’re still in there swinging. We might still look back on this topsy turvy season and remember it as a good one. With a bit of luck, we might even recall it as the year of the ox.