The Champions League group stage is almost upon us, but after so many years away, is it still the tournament Celtic fans knew and loved earlier this century?
The Champions League draw. Not until that guy started live-streaming planes landing at Heathrow during Storm Eunice had humankind managed to create something so utterly mundane yet unbearably tense at the same time.
Somehow UEFA always manages to take this event – one of the most glamorous and hotly-anticipated on the football calendar – and make it feel like a conference for photocopier manufacturers in Slough. You tune in on a late summer afternoon and you wait, and wait, and wait, then you have a bit of a moan on Twitter and wait some more, as awkward silences and forced laughter echo round the auditorium and a parade of suited and booted ex-pros loiter on stage, waiting for their monosyllabic answers to be translated by those slightly creepy bilingual cyborgs UEFA always hire to host the shindig.
This year though, none of us Celtic fans are allowed to complain about these things. And if you see anyone doing so later today, you’re permitted to publicly clamp them. Because after five years away, being back in the Champions League for just the third time in the last nine seasons should be feeling a bit like that first school trip to Alton Towers for every one of us. From the camera panning in on Michael Nicholson and co in their club suits, through to the moment when Cafu, Clarence Seedorf or whoever it is this year holds up the little piece of paper with ‘Celtic FC (SCO)’ on it, and Giorgio Marchetti (the little guy with grey hair and glasses) says something along the lines of “..European champions, of course, in 1967..” we should savour every second of this big bureaucratic snooze fest – especially with the group stage kick-off less than a fortnight away.
You certainly can’t accuse the club of not milking the fact they’re ‘back in the big time’. They used Zadok the Priest as walkout music on trophy day back in May, have been tweeting about the draw for what feels like a month now and have also been running a series of web articles looking back at Champions League glory nights of yore – Naka against Man United, Sutton against Juve, etc. As a fan you never really tire of this stuff, but there is undeniably a slight disconnect looking back at it from a distance of 15-20 years. Because what exactly does Champions League football represent for Celtic at this precise juncture in the club’s history?
It represents money of course, and lots of it. It represents the sheer comedy of tapping Rangers’ goal-bound shot over the line after they’ve ran from the halfway line with Scotland’s coefficient these last few years. But it should be about more than that. Indeed, it has to be, if we’re to get to where you suspect Ange Postecoglou would like to take us as a club. If done right, this is nothing less than a chance to completely redefine where Celtic stand in the wider landscape of European football.
I wouldn’t have had any trouble telling you what Champions League football meant to Celtic if you’d asked teenage me during the early and mid-noughties, but it would have been easier to show you. Up the back of the cupboard in my bedroom, there was a box (and no, just in case my mum’s reading, it did NOT contain scudbooks I’d upcycled from the woods) It contained back pages and match reports snipped out The Record and The Herald the day after landmark Celtic results. Sometimes a big derby win would make the cut, but the vast majority of clippings were about European nights; all the obvious ones but less obvious ones too, like the impressive but ultimately meaningless 1-1 away to Barcelona in 2004 or that agonising 3-2 loss to an unbelievable Olympique Lyon side the previous December. This, as far as I could see at the time, was what Celtic were about. It was why we existed.
This was before Sellik Das going full Vietnam vet when talking about the ‘90s was a thing, and we couldn’t flash forward in time either, so my generation probably took for granted that we were coming of age in an era when Juventus, AC Milan and Manchester United being flung around Parkhead like the proverbial empty trackie was just par for the course, not realising that the previous decade had been spent getting skelped in the early rounds of the UEFA and Cup Winners’ Cups, or that the following decade would largely became a losing battle against the quicksand of the dreaded Champions League qualifiers.
So much has changed since that noughties heyday that if it wasn’t for the familiar theme tune and branding, the Champions League would barely be recognisable as the same competition. We hadn’t an inkling what Gazprom or the European Super League were back then, and listening to Jake ‘Accidental Partridge’ Humphrey and the BT Sport pundits talk about how the English clubs are going to beat everyone 25-0 certainly makes a change from the STV coverage with Jim Delahunt back in the day.
The biggest change however is the yawning void that’s developed between the haves and the have-nots, and how inhospitable the tournament has become for clubs of Celtic’s stature as a result. In terms of pure entertainment the Champions League was as good last season as it’s been for many a year, but unpredictability, competitiveness? Not so much.
Three separate clubs smashed through the group stage with 100% records, and the knockout rounds were mostly dominated by the same small group of elite clubs that have been monopolising the competition’s spoils for years. Villarreal’s run to the semi-final was a pleasant surprise, but they were the reigning Europa League holders, with a squad full of Spanish internationals and a serial winner of a coach. The fact their presence in the last four nowadays qualifies as a ‘fairy tale’ seemed to say a lot.
All of this was evident five or six years ago, when Celtic took their last two stabs at the Champions League during the reign of Brendan Rodgers. The draw was especially cruel in those campaigns, throwing us in with not one but two mega clubs on both occasions, and Rodgers’ naïve tactics didn’t help either, but there was no getting away from the sobering reality of back-to-back campaigns where Celtic accrued six points out of a possible 36 and lost their opening fixtures by a combined score of 12-0. The fairground where we’d lived out our dreams in the O’Neill and Strachan years suddenly seemed to have become an underground fight club, a damage limitation exercise where you simply took your bumps, grabbed the money and ran.
Perhaps that’s why the idea of sauntering back into European football’s biggest bearpit with Angelos Postecoglou at the helm is so intriguing and – for now at least – exciting rather than frightening. Because if there’s any manager for whom the idea of trying to lose 2-0 rather than 4-0 and treating the Champions League group stage as a mere preamble to a Europa League campaign will be anathema, it’s Ange. It’s been said that the Australian’s refusal to compromise his principles and lack of a plan B makes him liable to fall into the exact same holes Rodgers did, and considering how badly Celtic were exposed defensively against Bayer Leverkusen and Bodø/Glimt last year, it’s not an outrageous theory. But what the theory disregards is that Rodgers’ faith actually did falter, when he fielded a back five against Barca in 2016 which in fact did sweet FA to stop us getting obliterated. Ange’s faith is more like that of a devout monk, completely unshakeable, and importantly, it’s shared by his players, many of whom have a level of swagger, technical prowess and youthful enthusiasm which just might allow them to produce something even better than they’ve shown us up until now.
The consensus seems to be that third place and a Europa League parachute would be a positive outcome. And even that won’t be easy, when you look down the list of last season’s third-place finishers and see names such as Barcelona, Borussia Dortmund and Sevilla. But maybe, just maybe – and you’ll have to forgive me for tempting fate – this is the year when the long overdue spawny draw falls into place, and Celtic FC (SCO) land in a group along the lines of the Salzburg-Wolfsburg-Lille-Sevilla one last season.
Whatever happens, Celtic will need luck. They’ll need the defence to be superlative and for Joe Hart to be in Fraser Forster ‘La Gran Murulla’ mode from matchdays one through to six. They’ll need Jota to be the best version of himself, and for Kyogo and the forwards to be ruthless with their finishing and strike early where possible, like they conspicuously failed to in games like the 0-4 at home to Leverkusen last season. More than anything else, they need the draw to be a lot less brutal than it was in 2016 and ’17. But who knows, that box up the back of the cupboard still has room to have a few more clippings added to it before the end of the year…
I want us to get the jammiest draw possible and for kid on Rangers to get the group of death. Whoever said cheats never prosper never factored in Scottish football because the huns and the footballing authorities in Scotland can blow that claim clear out of the water. The corruption in our game is unbelievable and let’s not forget our board are complicit in this too, the same board we and Ange and the players are putting our faith in. I fear though that we’ll get the group of death and they’ll get an easy group and both of us will subsequently drop out altogether or to the Europa League.