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.