A crack in the dream

“It didn’t really happen at all, did it”?

How many more times am I going to ask myself the exact same question as my mind tries to return from the numbness of surrealism that has enveloped me ever since Wednesday evening.

As I perch on the edge of an uncomfortable slumber made even more uncomfortable from also being perched on the edge of the settee, time seems to have come to a stop. As I wander down the paths of my mind the clock seems to still say that it is 18.45 on Wednesday. I can still feel the damp wind on my face and hear the noise of the traffic as I turn through the car-park of the Tulip Hotel and head in anticipation towards Sharkey’s to watch us strutting our stuff in Europe.

I can see the gathering of the Green and White masses on terracing, I can hear the chants and songs, the laughter and pent-up expectation, but most of all I can feel the gnawing disappointment that through my own inability to run a bath I won’t be there.

And then I am suddenly sitting bolt upright and wide awake as firstly a carelessly discarded shoe digs into my side, and secondly an even sharper pain skewers my brain as a voice of doom and gloom intones like a mullah’s fatwah over the background broadcast of Sport-on-five radio.

Five- Nil!

Yes folks it did indeed happen and through that result we are not only achieving the full and deserved acknowledgement of just about every radio station you can think of, but we have through interview, phone-in, and website (and by ‘we’ in this case I mean ‘us’ the supporters’) given so much ammunition to such Celtic aficionados as Leckie and Smith (and earlier in the evening the disgusting parasites that are Cosgrove and Cowan), that they are cashing it in big-style with their thinly disguised vitriol clothed in a gossamer of crocodile concern.

Remember the cyber back slapping of only a few days ago, remember the ‘well done PL’ postings, the ‘great job GS’ contributions, the ‘what a coup’ acknowledgements, and most of all the ‘brilliant deception of the press’ cries.

Well guess who that self same press are now quoting in their shark-like frenzy to feed on the bleeding and battered body that is Celtic football club? And guess who is pointing them straight to the tender and vulnerable underbelly?

Other than a repeated post-mortem of GS’s words of embarrassment and hurt, they are quoting ‘us’ as they spear us from every side encouraged by more and more self-destructive condemnations of ‘our’ manager who has been in the job for so little time.

They are boaking out in wretchingly vivid verbal vomit the ‘almost Universal view that Strachan must go, he should never have come, he is not one of us, he has never done anything and will never recover from this’ and in quoting ‘us’, they unfailingly remind everyone in mockingly sneering showers of corrosive spit that ‘it is not us that are saying this – it is the “greatest fans in the world”’

Don’t get me wrong, last night was not another Fir Park. It was much worse!

At Fir Park, we lost a title made worse by who actually won it.

Last night was much more serious; Last night the vivid hues of my long nurtured stained glass dream began to lose their sharpness, and with that came the realisation of just how important that dream was to me.

It is a montage of everything I romantically remember and identify with in more than 45 years of utterly illogical but life-enhancing devotion to this thing called ‘Celtic’.

It is a spinning catherine wheel of images of victory and defeat, of triumphs and disaster, of celebrations and wakes, but most of all at its centre there is an axis of smiling, sad, drunk, sober, cheering, noisy, loud, green and white clad ‘dafties’ who over the years have laughed and cried together in places are far flung as Aberdeen and Argentina.

And not only are they pictures from the past, they stretch forward in time depicting glorious victories and glorious defeats still to come.

But what is not there is the picture of us lining up one by one with trays of nice juicy off-cuts of hearts and souls, seasoned with a liberal dose of gastric bile, presented on silver salvers to the salivating predators of Trinity group and its peers.

We need to stop serving them up this sustaining blooded steak and start rewarding them with instead a more appropriate and terminal thrust of a stake through their proverbial undead hearts.

The team and management have a duty to be embarrassed WITH their performance, we have a right to be embarrassed AT their performance. We both have a duty to be angry, but we must, must, must, must avoid the self-destructive carnage of a family at war.

We must channel that anger through the team and support into a controlled aggression on Saturday against Motherwell and then once more into a performance of consummate professionalism and an atmosphere of irresistible intimidation next Tuesday.

We play our parts every week through our pockets. Let us once more play our part next Tuesday with our hearts on our sleeves and our scarves in the air.

Without this dream I am a lesser person.

I refuse to be part of anything that allows those scavengers of everything sordid to hijack our emotions and turn them to the advantage of their decrepit soulless agenda.

I am 51 years old and though now in the autumn of my years I will be at Motherwell on Saturday and at Paradise on Tuesday. Unsurprisingly I will be hoarse on Sunday and Wednesday.

Come on everyone give me another couple of friezes to add to my dream.

I won’t let this dream fade and die.

Will you?