I hereby promise, (after this paragraph), on pain of drinking alcohol-free lager, to refrain for evermore in addressing the events, endured along with everyone else here, of the balls-up in Bratislava, the misery that was Motherwell, and without wanting to go overboard about the horror that we found ourselves embroiled in on Saturday in hell’s kitchen, I think that we can fairly say that it has stoked the fires of those who would wish us ill!
It’s the coming weeks, months and years that matter, and there are only two things which will have an influence on the fruits which we will harvest.
Firstly knowing what the vision is for the team, the style, the supporters and every variegated piece of jigsaw that forms and drives our club.
Secondly we must pick the ingredients and the recipe which will cook and blend with a little bit more paprika there, or turmeric here, a touch of salt and a sprinkling of magic dust formed from that marvellous diaspora of historic necessity, willpower, stubbornness and romantic imagination.
It is in this way that we will create a team not only fit to wear but deliberately fashioned to wear with pride ‘the shirt that does not shrink……’!, simmering and boiling with an intensity and quality which realises that vision in dramatic and multi-cultural flavours of outrageous imagination and skill.
And the main ingredients of that recipe are simply an unrelenting ambition, a hunger to succeed, and a total refusal to accept defeat.
We need once more the essence of the heroes of the past to whom we may very well have been a football club, but a football club with a greater calling and a responsibility which was not a burden but a motivation in bad times and a justification in good days!
It is in the exact circumstances facing us now that the giants of the past strode the sands of time and left their indelible footprints for us not only to marvel but to dare to follow ‘on the one road, sharing the one load, we're on the road to God knows where, we're on the one road, maybe the wrong road, but we're together now who cares………..’.
Willie Maley, Jimmy Quinn, Jimmy McGrory, Robert Kelly, Jock Stein, Billy McNeil!
It doesn’t matter if you agreed with them or not, these were characters many of whom were hewn from the rocks of abject poverty. When it came to being in the vanguard of a fight for what they believed in and what they felt was of value, these men would lead those who at times didn’t even recognise the need, towards a future of hope.
Nothing could knock them off their chosen path and in times of adversity, the hope they instilled, realised or not, was in itself spiritually inspirational in its simplicity and honesty.
Read about them, but don’t weep that we have no-one of their calibre around now, for I believe that we just might have!
Men such as these are master craftsmen and while it is only when the work of art is finished that we can fully enjoy its being, we can also revel in the delights of watching him at work as he sets out his tools, selects his ingredients, and the way he moulds, and chips, and sculpts to create a reflection of his dream.
Through the mists of disappointment I see a shape manifesting itself in the early stages of fast accurate passing from back to front, supported by midfield thrusts of the unexpected, attacking left, attacking right, attacking through the middle, all built on a foundation of versatility, determination and the will to win!
Are we stuttering? Darn tootin’ we are!
Does that make the vision wrong? No way.
Do we need to allow the ingredients to blend? Of course we do!
Do we need to replace some ingredients? Probably!
Do we change the recipe? NO!
We are not going to be served with the score-line centric overpriced, fat-filled burger with a fast hit of artificially satisfying stimulants and e-numbers.
Our fare is that of not necessarily the finest ingredients, but definitely of those which have been selected and prepared individually, and then added to the mix at the right time in the right place.
This will be a feast not of the production line, but of the master chef in the finest of kitchens with a twinkle in his eye and the essence of magic dust at his finger tips which Midas like will once more return the gold standard of association football to its rightful home and its rightful owners!
I believe that Gordon Strachan is that master chef.
We all need to support him in his vision.
Even more we all need him to be our hero!
We’re all getting hungry Gordon so…..
Ready! Steady! Cook!
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Friday, August 12, 2005
E=MCsquared or does it?
In the dim distant recesses of my mind there lurks a late 1960’s echo of those dreary day-dreaming periods in the chalk-dust shrouded mathematics class at St Pat’s, Coatbridge. It was during these moments of enforced mental and physical penance that it was drummed into my karma and forcibly memorised catechism-like in rote fashion, and repeated in a pavlovian inspired survival fashion as a preventative of a sudden encounter with a flying blackboard duster, that ……the figures don’t lie!
In the cataclysmic event that we forgot, ignored, or played fast and loose with this 11th Commandment, old ‘Chung’, our not-quite affectionate handle for our culturally destitute mathematics inquisitor who had the appearance of a badly deformed tumchy and the sensitivity of a flatulent cadaver, would often gave us a little present.
The present in this case was a never to be forgotten cherished memory of the skin-ripping state approved birching with a two foot length of regularly exercised, vinegar dipped, forked tongued, leather harbinger of institutionally approved barbarism – the belt.
As an aside (as if most of this verbage that I write has any relevance to God, Life, and Celtic) his generosity with these presents must have had Andrew Carnegie spinning in jealousy.
With a logic that defied that of a low intelligence tumour, he would not only bestow this gift upon ‘he who transgressed’ but would also shower, with a great deal of feigned reluctance, an equal present upon everyone else, boy or girl, in the class , with the hilarious character forming justification that all our parents would be up in arms if they thought that one pupil was favoured with a present while everyone else was left wanting!
‘Civilised my erse’, though admittedly to us young braves of the teenage revolution of the enlightened sixties, much more preferable than a hundred lines and being kept in!
This was my first introduction to the Marxist concept of collective responsibility. If wan got it wrang we all paid!
And we never cried!
Ah the marvels of a Catholic schooling! A mix of ten commandments, Christian love, sadistic child haters, all flavoured with an atmosphere of black burning shame and guilt.
Anyway even in the midst of the probable perverted pleasure that he (and many other pillars of the mortar board society) wallowed in, like all coins of life there were two sides, and to mix metaphors the silver lining was that even now I am wary of a flying duster taking a hairy lump out of my head.
I still chant that maxim – the figures never lie!
How we interpret them may!
The causes for them being as they are may also be shrouded in questions!
Even their extrapolation into the future state of the nation may be up for grabs!
But the bare facts of how much was invested, how much was spent on wages, transfers, loans, debts etc etc are there for all to see.
Some of the arguments on here don’t seem to recognise this simple truth. The audited accounts are in fact our club’s revealed truth.
You are entitled to treat them as a blanket of obfuscation knitted by a cabal of hand-wringing Walter Mittys who run board meetings based upon the evil intentions of Dr Strangelove.
However, if your beef is rooted in the mythical reality of Hogwarts and you don’t believe the P&L, the debits and credits, or the balance sheet then there is really no discussion to be had unless it is around how Celtic Football Club is another Enron or WorldCom in the making.
The way that some on here argue with basic facts without demonstrating an understanding for instance of the essential difference between buying shares (the money goes to the previous shareholder) and underwriting a rights or additional share issue (the money goes to the institution i.e Celtic), totally undermines any case of commenting on the financial position and history of how we got here, where we came from, and most importantly the financial options that lie ahead of us!
You can shout it through a megaphone, you can put it in capitals, italics, big letters, ariel, times new roman, or surround the words with marching friggen ants. It doesn’t matter how often you say that we didn’t invest after Seville and that the board didn’t back MON.!
Yes we did! Yes they did!
The figures don’t lie!
For God’s sake read them!
Now you may want us to have invested more and risked more, and oh goodness gracious me, I may even agree with you, but (and I accept that hindsight is a marvellous skill) I really wish that all those millions we did invest in enhancing current contracts (cos that’s where it went) had proved to be more effective. I can see a lot of areas which might have made that investment give us a much better football return, but for the life of me I can’t see how I can blame the board!
Believe me, I want to blame someone and I really don’t fancy the bone-begging options that currently are sitting with their paws in the air just now!
That would be a sacrilege!
So I think I will consign it to the jigsaw of history that someone else can put together!
I am pretty sure that all of you who disagree with Paul on the meaning and his analysis of the accounts are not only wrong but should have a fearful glance over their shoulder to make sure that the erstwhile and totally unbeloved ‘Chung’ of my nightmares has indeed shed his mortal coil and is not bearing down upon you, nostrils flaring, gown flapping like an avenging black angel of death, with nuclear duster about to be launched in the direction of the nearest unprotected acne ridden head!
Hopefully he can now do no more than watch in ever mounting unrequited anger from whatever big classroom in the sky or more probably and (may God forgive me) hopefully ‘below’, he now peddles his reign of terror.
We are now at the dawn of a new era and one that I believe promises, (a phrase that both Paul67 and James Forest have used on the unique CelticQuickNews site), a New Celtic.
Well NEW at least to those of you who didn’t have the life enriching experience of the stagnant late fifties and early sixties being suddenly nourished into an era of unbridled success through an injection of skill, style, ambition, and vision of as Carlsberg didn’t say ‘ Carlsberg don’t do Nine in a rows but if we did………..’.
So for me if you’ll pardon the plagiarism it is simply ‘Back to the Future’.
We want a team that excites through not just victories but with a swagger, a gallusness, and a natural élan that is not just a surface mirage but is at the heart and soul of every fibre of our being.
We want to go to games with an expectation of highs and lows of a team that front foot, back, foot, left foot, right foot, head arms and legs gives everything so that when we get back to the pub, home, garden, cardboard box, or doorway, all we want to do is re-live every moment every move, shot, tackle and goal that was served up before us.
We also want the regular pleasure of sticking it right up those charlatans from down Govan way.
It has started.
As of today I believe we will regularly invest in refreshing the team with able and motivated players.
We will also do this in a way that maintains our debt or our profit at a level which satisfies the bankers and the investors.
And why will all this happen?
Well the ingredients of a fast-flowing entertaining team are there. As the season moves on, the season tickets that have not been taken up will not matter a jot, because the available tickets will be bought by non-season ticket holders who want to see the re-birth of a dream.
Nakamura, Zurawski, Beattie, Maloney, Lawson, Kennedy, Boruc, Marshall, Gardyne, O’Dea, Quinn, Mcgeady, Wallace, Petrov.
These are our future.
The world will want to be part of this phenomenon, this most beautiful of teams which play the most beautiful of games.
See in that moment just before you drift off from consciousness to the land of dreams, a million Green and White scarves circling the world! White faces, yellow faces, black faces, and brown faces, every accent you can imagine all led by the raucous passion of a Scottish heart and the lilting eloquence of an Irish soul.
Our team, our club, our being will never be made real by a financial plan and big bank account. The truth is the other way around. Get that bit of magic into the team, into the support and into the management and the accounts will take care of themselves.
Invest your faith in them and invest it and your support in Gordon Strachan. It will be repaid in diamond nights and golden days!
Remember that first MON season.. Remember that treble. Remember that day against St Mirren and Tommy Johnston’s cack-footed goal.
Remember the East End of Glasgow that day, which even the astonishing pilgrimage of Seville could not match in intensity.
Oh you don’t believe me!
Go on! Make an effort because I would much rather go forward with the belief that it will happen and then be disappointed and then believe again, rather than live in a dark dungeon of permanent misery and fear.
When I sing and shout, when I cheer and embrace, when I look around all those green and white crystal balls of certainty who inhabit the seats of the Celtic end and who sing from beginning to end, that’s what I feel and reach out with unfailing optimism and expectation to grasp!.
That will do me!
Keep disputing, keep arguing, but……..
I know that not one of you will ever forget the dream!
See you against the Bairns tomorrow!
In the cataclysmic event that we forgot, ignored, or played fast and loose with this 11th Commandment, old ‘Chung’, our not-quite affectionate handle for our culturally destitute mathematics inquisitor who had the appearance of a badly deformed tumchy and the sensitivity of a flatulent cadaver, would often gave us a little present.
The present in this case was a never to be forgotten cherished memory of the skin-ripping state approved birching with a two foot length of regularly exercised, vinegar dipped, forked tongued, leather harbinger of institutionally approved barbarism – the belt.
As an aside (as if most of this verbage that I write has any relevance to God, Life, and Celtic) his generosity with these presents must have had Andrew Carnegie spinning in jealousy.
With a logic that defied that of a low intelligence tumour, he would not only bestow this gift upon ‘he who transgressed’ but would also shower, with a great deal of feigned reluctance, an equal present upon everyone else, boy or girl, in the class , with the hilarious character forming justification that all our parents would be up in arms if they thought that one pupil was favoured with a present while everyone else was left wanting!
‘Civilised my erse’, though admittedly to us young braves of the teenage revolution of the enlightened sixties, much more preferable than a hundred lines and being kept in!
This was my first introduction to the Marxist concept of collective responsibility. If wan got it wrang we all paid!
And we never cried!
Ah the marvels of a Catholic schooling! A mix of ten commandments, Christian love, sadistic child haters, all flavoured with an atmosphere of black burning shame and guilt.
Anyway even in the midst of the probable perverted pleasure that he (and many other pillars of the mortar board society) wallowed in, like all coins of life there were two sides, and to mix metaphors the silver lining was that even now I am wary of a flying duster taking a hairy lump out of my head.
I still chant that maxim – the figures never lie!
How we interpret them may!
The causes for them being as they are may also be shrouded in questions!
Even their extrapolation into the future state of the nation may be up for grabs!
But the bare facts of how much was invested, how much was spent on wages, transfers, loans, debts etc etc are there for all to see.
Some of the arguments on here don’t seem to recognise this simple truth. The audited accounts are in fact our club’s revealed truth.
You are entitled to treat them as a blanket of obfuscation knitted by a cabal of hand-wringing Walter Mittys who run board meetings based upon the evil intentions of Dr Strangelove.
However, if your beef is rooted in the mythical reality of Hogwarts and you don’t believe the P&L, the debits and credits, or the balance sheet then there is really no discussion to be had unless it is around how Celtic Football Club is another Enron or WorldCom in the making.
The way that some on here argue with basic facts without demonstrating an understanding for instance of the essential difference between buying shares (the money goes to the previous shareholder) and underwriting a rights or additional share issue (the money goes to the institution i.e Celtic), totally undermines any case of commenting on the financial position and history of how we got here, where we came from, and most importantly the financial options that lie ahead of us!
You can shout it through a megaphone, you can put it in capitals, italics, big letters, ariel, times new roman, or surround the words with marching friggen ants. It doesn’t matter how often you say that we didn’t invest after Seville and that the board didn’t back MON.!
Yes we did! Yes they did!
The figures don’t lie!
For God’s sake read them!
Now you may want us to have invested more and risked more, and oh goodness gracious me, I may even agree with you, but (and I accept that hindsight is a marvellous skill) I really wish that all those millions we did invest in enhancing current contracts (cos that’s where it went) had proved to be more effective. I can see a lot of areas which might have made that investment give us a much better football return, but for the life of me I can’t see how I can blame the board!
Believe me, I want to blame someone and I really don’t fancy the bone-begging options that currently are sitting with their paws in the air just now!
That would be a sacrilege!
So I think I will consign it to the jigsaw of history that someone else can put together!
I am pretty sure that all of you who disagree with Paul on the meaning and his analysis of the accounts are not only wrong but should have a fearful glance over their shoulder to make sure that the erstwhile and totally unbeloved ‘Chung’ of my nightmares has indeed shed his mortal coil and is not bearing down upon you, nostrils flaring, gown flapping like an avenging black angel of death, with nuclear duster about to be launched in the direction of the nearest unprotected acne ridden head!
Hopefully he can now do no more than watch in ever mounting unrequited anger from whatever big classroom in the sky or more probably and (may God forgive me) hopefully ‘below’, he now peddles his reign of terror.
We are now at the dawn of a new era and one that I believe promises, (a phrase that both Paul67 and James Forest have used on the unique CelticQuickNews site), a New Celtic.
Well NEW at least to those of you who didn’t have the life enriching experience of the stagnant late fifties and early sixties being suddenly nourished into an era of unbridled success through an injection of skill, style, ambition, and vision of as Carlsberg didn’t say ‘ Carlsberg don’t do Nine in a rows but if we did………..’.
So for me if you’ll pardon the plagiarism it is simply ‘Back to the Future’.
We want a team that excites through not just victories but with a swagger, a gallusness, and a natural élan that is not just a surface mirage but is at the heart and soul of every fibre of our being.
We want to go to games with an expectation of highs and lows of a team that front foot, back, foot, left foot, right foot, head arms and legs gives everything so that when we get back to the pub, home, garden, cardboard box, or doorway, all we want to do is re-live every moment every move, shot, tackle and goal that was served up before us.
We also want the regular pleasure of sticking it right up those charlatans from down Govan way.
It has started.
As of today I believe we will regularly invest in refreshing the team with able and motivated players.
We will also do this in a way that maintains our debt or our profit at a level which satisfies the bankers and the investors.
And why will all this happen?
Well the ingredients of a fast-flowing entertaining team are there. As the season moves on, the season tickets that have not been taken up will not matter a jot, because the available tickets will be bought by non-season ticket holders who want to see the re-birth of a dream.
Nakamura, Zurawski, Beattie, Maloney, Lawson, Kennedy, Boruc, Marshall, Gardyne, O’Dea, Quinn, Mcgeady, Wallace, Petrov.
These are our future.
The world will want to be part of this phenomenon, this most beautiful of teams which play the most beautiful of games.
See in that moment just before you drift off from consciousness to the land of dreams, a million Green and White scarves circling the world! White faces, yellow faces, black faces, and brown faces, every accent you can imagine all led by the raucous passion of a Scottish heart and the lilting eloquence of an Irish soul.
Our team, our club, our being will never be made real by a financial plan and big bank account. The truth is the other way around. Get that bit of magic into the team, into the support and into the management and the accounts will take care of themselves.
Invest your faith in them and invest it and your support in Gordon Strachan. It will be repaid in diamond nights and golden days!
Remember that first MON season.. Remember that treble. Remember that day against St Mirren and Tommy Johnston’s cack-footed goal.
Remember the East End of Glasgow that day, which even the astonishing pilgrimage of Seville could not match in intensity.
Oh you don’t believe me!
Go on! Make an effort because I would much rather go forward with the belief that it will happen and then be disappointed and then believe again, rather than live in a dark dungeon of permanent misery and fear.
When I sing and shout, when I cheer and embrace, when I look around all those green and white crystal balls of certainty who inhabit the seats of the Celtic end and who sing from beginning to end, that’s what I feel and reach out with unfailing optimism and expectation to grasp!.
That will do me!
Keep disputing, keep arguing, but……..
I know that not one of you will ever forget the dream!
See you against the Bairns tomorrow!
Friday, July 29, 2005
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?
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?
Friday, July 22, 2005
The resurrection of Estadio
The delicate but brilliantly white lace curtains emblazoned with a vivid aerial view of Celtic Park, gently fluttered as a magical breeze disturbed the stale air of the long sealed shrine to all of Timdom! As the atmospheric disturbance dissipated, its essence lingered in a mist of emerald, silver and gold wisps of stars spinning, darting and sparkling within an initially enticing but insubstantial outline eventually materialising as that of a beautiful pale skinned and red-headed enigmatically smiling colleen. For a brief moment she stood there arms crossed with one hand on each shoulder, dressed in tantalisingly torn but figure hugging peasant raiment.
In an instant her eyes flashed open and as they sparkled with the same intensity and enchantment as the stars from which she emerged, the wee smasher, glowing from neck to ankle in a pulsating green and white - glided across the room with the consummate grace of Henrik ghosting by Bert Kontermann.
She leaned lovingly over the comatose but tossing and troubled ugly frog lying on the tear stained Celtic co-ordinated matching quilt and pillowslip, and proceeded to plant a right smacker on the said frog’s kisser!
In a flash the unrhythmic writhing subsided and the painful contortions of his bulbous lips evaporated as he began to rouse from his curse induced slumber. The gentle breath of the sylph-like but well proportioned and tenderly giving re-incarnation of a young Maureen O’hara, turned the sleeping amphibian from an ugly wart covered creature of slime and smelly dank water into a muscle ripplingly handsome example of Celticus Superior.
At last the spiritual manacles of that damned spell cast by the evil ‘Steelmanus Macdonaldus’ had been lifted and once more our handsome paragon and champion of ‘Paradise in excellsis’ – that’s me by the way - was ready to strive with ambition, hope, skill and strength to recover the lost treasures of the Trebleus Scottius!
The Return of Estadio (Episode 1)
Once more does the eternal triangle of football’s metamorphosis from the cast-off smelly remnants of the old season, through the hibernating twilight of the close season, into the dazzlingly dressed-to-kill, freshly washed, ironed and glad-rag clad new cornucopia of thrust and parry, complete its vitally re-invigorating cycle.
On what turned out to be last Thursday 14th July, I slowly unwound from my seven week long self-pitying exile from a nasty world where dementedly smiling and unbearably triumphalist followers of that other mob roamed the streets of our Dear Green Place. For those seven weeks, locked away in my Rangers-free womb and darkened shrine to the great heroes of the Celtic past present and hopefully future (my spare bedroom!), I had adopted an ever-comforting attitude of a thumb-sucking foetus.
As the veil of unconsciousness slowly evaporated, I threw back the (by now in need of a good wash and general fumigation) Huddle printed continental quilt. Through bleary eye I had a quick look at my Hoopy bedside clock which had ominously stopped…… at 15.40 on Sunday 22nd May 2005.
I rubbed the stickiness and blur from my vision and struck out in a vain petted temper to try and vanquish the demons administering that throbbing dull ache left by Motherwell’s parting mugging administered on that fateful day. To be fair, that throbbing has significantly subsided from the excruciating mental torture that I felt as that Aussie quisling McDonald, thrust his metaphorical steel-toe-capped winkle-pickers right up my unsuspecting jacksy!
Stretching out a manly ‘Tiocfaid ar la’ tattooed arm (with matching Gold Plated ‘Fields of Athenry’ engraved chronometer), I switched on my tasteful ‘four leaf-clover’ am/fm radio and was only too pleased to hear from the stunted guttural utterances of Radio Tcheuchter, that it was the 14th July 2005. This meant that firstly I hadn’t overslept and missed a complete year and even more importantly that I had avoided the manic swaggering of the anally retentive degenerates on the 12th.
But unless I was sadly mistaken there was much more for those of us who had been struck down by catatonic impact of the last few minutes at Fir Park.
The words filled me with the nervous ecstasy and anticipation as he apparently revealed that wonder of wonders, Celtic through our beloved chairman and renowned soft-touch and philanthropist Dermot (here have the shirt off my back) Desmond, had actually landed in that magic fairy land of the EPL.
I turned to my constantly faithful sleeping compadre, my Celtic-pyjama clad mascot, (whom I have imaginatively named ‘Hoopy’), clutched him to my heaving bosom, pondered on the exciting journeys and adventures that lay before us and regaled him with hysterical predictions of wending our way to the four corners of perfidious Albion and laying waste to and vanquishing the challenge of mere pretenders and upstarts to the throne of both TGFITW and TGCITW.
Cups in my experience never have runneth over with quite such a metaphorical flourish as my own cup (Celtic Badge branded mug actually – mind you that description could equally be applied to me) did on that newborn Thursday morning.
And then it got even better not only were we taking on the aristocrats of Fulham (okay I know, but bear with me for indeed it doth get even dafter) in the premiership but the minions of the netherworld had been accepted with open arms into the cold Calvinist desert that is the league of Northern Ireland and were opening their own season with a bully-off (or should that be a billy-off) against their wee brithers – Linfield!
But the Gods are indeed disloyal, treacherous, base, low, deceitful, disloyal, lying, and untrue, (I would have used perfidious there but I’ve already employed it a couple of paragraphs above) and were having a good old laugh up there on Mount Olympus as, just as my ecstacy was approaching Sevillian proportions, Kheredine explained that he was only referring to the pre-hostility phoney war of pre-season friendlies..
Woe upon woe and shattered dreams and ambitions whirled around my room like diahorreaic pigeons as my previously much cherished foam filled companion was hurled with some force into the far corner of the room knocking over my ‘V for victory’ bedside reading lamp, and my head slumped back onto my ‘Celtic Park’ imprinted single pillowcase!
I lay there immobile but with a certain subtle masculinity, smoothing the wrinkles on my now post-sell by date and definitely non-chic Umbro sponsored Champions league group ‘F’ ‘clinging and soft-to-the touch’ night-shirt, and readied myself in pregnant expectation of another fun-filled assault on fortress SPL.
Having girded my mental loins (which in keeping with the rest of this nonsense I have given the pet name of ‘Lisbon Loins’) to this return to reality, I enthusiastically and urgently sat upright and then even more urgently but with significantly less enthusiasm (in fact none at all) crashed back to the pillow as my ‘Celtic Cross’ emblazoned night-cap, unfortunately accompanied by my skull, met suddenly with the hardwood frame of the upper bunk bed which I, in my intervening seven week coma had forgotten was there.
Stifling a complete thesaurus of sweary words, and ignoring the expanding red stain on my pillow which I must admit leant a rather ‘romantic’ sepia tone to the lush and green swards of the Paradise Print, I swung my hunky legs over the side of the lower bunk, pulled on my ‘Hoopy Slippers’ and ‘Bobo’s gonna-get-ye’ dressing grown and strode manfully towards the en-suite ‘Jinky’ monogrammed loo and prepared once more to face the world.
It was then that the first of many weird and wonderful transformations caught my one good –eye (the other eye being blacked out by my split Tri-colour/Saltire etched eye-patch ).
The elegantly papered walls resplendent in their almost life-size representation of the ‘Huddle’ had changed. Some of the long-serving bums had simply disappeared, some had been replaced with new younger and more energetic bums, some had simply left honourable gaps like RAF squadrons acknowledging their mates shot down over the skies of blighty during WW2, some had begun to fade but not yet gone and some had begun to appear but not yet fully materialised.
The same with the team picture as faces black and white were replaced with faces black and white and yellow, from north south west and east; in the case of the yellow ones they appeared to be radiantly healthy exemplars of the Japanese and Chinese races rather than jaundiced pasty faces more usually associated with the environs and rat runs of Bridgeton.
Most astonishing of all was the transformation of my picture of St Martin from a wee dark headed Irish curmudgeon, to a wee red headed Scottish curmudgeon accompanied by the apparent change of name to St Rachan!!!!!!!
Quickly rummaging around in my ‘Celtic view edition of everything you wanted to know about Saints but were afraid to ask’ I was disappointed to find that no mention was made of St Rachan. I quickly reasoned that he must be a new saint perhaps even the canonized name and reincarnation of the lately departed John Paul II.
This had all the potential of an inspired appointment, an ex-goalkeeping Saint with recent experience of the Vatican, a history of miracles, obviously a Celtic supporter of the old school, and with a direct hot line to the ultimate Chairman of the Board.
I whistled happily to myself as having showered and shaved, I lavished my honed body with lotions and potions perfumed with that racy but subtle ‘essence of Tim’.
As I skipped athletically back to my boudoir, I sneakily grabbing an admiring but justified glance of my handsome profile as I passed my ‘Welcome to Ireland’ full length mirror. I threw on my new Nike Tick replica home shirt which contrary to other experiences was delivered on time , adjusted my Jimmy Johnstone wrist band, swept back my golden flowing locks reminiscent of Frank McAvenney in his heyday, popped on my green and white Seville shades with multiple pin holes so that I could see where I was goin and with little snatch of ‘ here we go again, were on the road again……..’, I headed off to Glasgow airport, Easyjet, and my appointment with the Eight Bells in Fulham and the start of
‘Bhoys on tour 2005/2006 – Give us our feckin Treble Back’.
To be continued once I can find a new supplier of Magic Mushrooms
In an instant her eyes flashed open and as they sparkled with the same intensity and enchantment as the stars from which she emerged, the wee smasher, glowing from neck to ankle in a pulsating green and white - glided across the room with the consummate grace of Henrik ghosting by Bert Kontermann.
She leaned lovingly over the comatose but tossing and troubled ugly frog lying on the tear stained Celtic co-ordinated matching quilt and pillowslip, and proceeded to plant a right smacker on the said frog’s kisser!
In a flash the unrhythmic writhing subsided and the painful contortions of his bulbous lips evaporated as he began to rouse from his curse induced slumber. The gentle breath of the sylph-like but well proportioned and tenderly giving re-incarnation of a young Maureen O’hara, turned the sleeping amphibian from an ugly wart covered creature of slime and smelly dank water into a muscle ripplingly handsome example of Celticus Superior.
At last the spiritual manacles of that damned spell cast by the evil ‘Steelmanus Macdonaldus’ had been lifted and once more our handsome paragon and champion of ‘Paradise in excellsis’ – that’s me by the way - was ready to strive with ambition, hope, skill and strength to recover the lost treasures of the Trebleus Scottius!
The Return of Estadio (Episode 1)
Once more does the eternal triangle of football’s metamorphosis from the cast-off smelly remnants of the old season, through the hibernating twilight of the close season, into the dazzlingly dressed-to-kill, freshly washed, ironed and glad-rag clad new cornucopia of thrust and parry, complete its vitally re-invigorating cycle.
On what turned out to be last Thursday 14th July, I slowly unwound from my seven week long self-pitying exile from a nasty world where dementedly smiling and unbearably triumphalist followers of that other mob roamed the streets of our Dear Green Place. For those seven weeks, locked away in my Rangers-free womb and darkened shrine to the great heroes of the Celtic past present and hopefully future (my spare bedroom!), I had adopted an ever-comforting attitude of a thumb-sucking foetus.
As the veil of unconsciousness slowly evaporated, I threw back the (by now in need of a good wash and general fumigation) Huddle printed continental quilt. Through bleary eye I had a quick look at my Hoopy bedside clock which had ominously stopped…… at 15.40 on Sunday 22nd May 2005.
I rubbed the stickiness and blur from my vision and struck out in a vain petted temper to try and vanquish the demons administering that throbbing dull ache left by Motherwell’s parting mugging administered on that fateful day. To be fair, that throbbing has significantly subsided from the excruciating mental torture that I felt as that Aussie quisling McDonald, thrust his metaphorical steel-toe-capped winkle-pickers right up my unsuspecting jacksy!
Stretching out a manly ‘Tiocfaid ar la’ tattooed arm (with matching Gold Plated ‘Fields of Athenry’ engraved chronometer), I switched on my tasteful ‘four leaf-clover’ am/fm radio and was only too pleased to hear from the stunted guttural utterances of Radio Tcheuchter, that it was the 14th July 2005. This meant that firstly I hadn’t overslept and missed a complete year and even more importantly that I had avoided the manic swaggering of the anally retentive degenerates on the 12th.
But unless I was sadly mistaken there was much more for those of us who had been struck down by catatonic impact of the last few minutes at Fir Park.
The words filled me with the nervous ecstasy and anticipation as he apparently revealed that wonder of wonders, Celtic through our beloved chairman and renowned soft-touch and philanthropist Dermot (here have the shirt off my back) Desmond, had actually landed in that magic fairy land of the EPL.
I turned to my constantly faithful sleeping compadre, my Celtic-pyjama clad mascot, (whom I have imaginatively named ‘Hoopy’), clutched him to my heaving bosom, pondered on the exciting journeys and adventures that lay before us and regaled him with hysterical predictions of wending our way to the four corners of perfidious Albion and laying waste to and vanquishing the challenge of mere pretenders and upstarts to the throne of both TGFITW and TGCITW.
Cups in my experience never have runneth over with quite such a metaphorical flourish as my own cup (Celtic Badge branded mug actually – mind you that description could equally be applied to me) did on that newborn Thursday morning.
And then it got even better not only were we taking on the aristocrats of Fulham (okay I know, but bear with me for indeed it doth get even dafter) in the premiership but the minions of the netherworld had been accepted with open arms into the cold Calvinist desert that is the league of Northern Ireland and were opening their own season with a bully-off (or should that be a billy-off) against their wee brithers – Linfield!
But the Gods are indeed disloyal, treacherous, base, low, deceitful, disloyal, lying, and untrue, (I would have used perfidious there but I’ve already employed it a couple of paragraphs above) and were having a good old laugh up there on Mount Olympus as, just as my ecstacy was approaching Sevillian proportions, Kheredine explained that he was only referring to the pre-hostility phoney war of pre-season friendlies..
Woe upon woe and shattered dreams and ambitions whirled around my room like diahorreaic pigeons as my previously much cherished foam filled companion was hurled with some force into the far corner of the room knocking over my ‘V for victory’ bedside reading lamp, and my head slumped back onto my ‘Celtic Park’ imprinted single pillowcase!
I lay there immobile but with a certain subtle masculinity, smoothing the wrinkles on my now post-sell by date and definitely non-chic Umbro sponsored Champions league group ‘F’ ‘clinging and soft-to-the touch’ night-shirt, and readied myself in pregnant expectation of another fun-filled assault on fortress SPL.
Having girded my mental loins (which in keeping with the rest of this nonsense I have given the pet name of ‘Lisbon Loins’) to this return to reality, I enthusiastically and urgently sat upright and then even more urgently but with significantly less enthusiasm (in fact none at all) crashed back to the pillow as my ‘Celtic Cross’ emblazoned night-cap, unfortunately accompanied by my skull, met suddenly with the hardwood frame of the upper bunk bed which I, in my intervening seven week coma had forgotten was there.
Stifling a complete thesaurus of sweary words, and ignoring the expanding red stain on my pillow which I must admit leant a rather ‘romantic’ sepia tone to the lush and green swards of the Paradise Print, I swung my hunky legs over the side of the lower bunk, pulled on my ‘Hoopy Slippers’ and ‘Bobo’s gonna-get-ye’ dressing grown and strode manfully towards the en-suite ‘Jinky’ monogrammed loo and prepared once more to face the world.
It was then that the first of many weird and wonderful transformations caught my one good –eye (the other eye being blacked out by my split Tri-colour/Saltire etched eye-patch ).
The elegantly papered walls resplendent in their almost life-size representation of the ‘Huddle’ had changed. Some of the long-serving bums had simply disappeared, some had been replaced with new younger and more energetic bums, some had simply left honourable gaps like RAF squadrons acknowledging their mates shot down over the skies of blighty during WW2, some had begun to fade but not yet gone and some had begun to appear but not yet fully materialised.
The same with the team picture as faces black and white were replaced with faces black and white and yellow, from north south west and east; in the case of the yellow ones they appeared to be radiantly healthy exemplars of the Japanese and Chinese races rather than jaundiced pasty faces more usually associated with the environs and rat runs of Bridgeton.
Most astonishing of all was the transformation of my picture of St Martin from a wee dark headed Irish curmudgeon, to a wee red headed Scottish curmudgeon accompanied by the apparent change of name to St Rachan!!!!!!!
Quickly rummaging around in my ‘Celtic view edition of everything you wanted to know about Saints but were afraid to ask’ I was disappointed to find that no mention was made of St Rachan. I quickly reasoned that he must be a new saint perhaps even the canonized name and reincarnation of the lately departed John Paul II.
This had all the potential of an inspired appointment, an ex-goalkeeping Saint with recent experience of the Vatican, a history of miracles, obviously a Celtic supporter of the old school, and with a direct hot line to the ultimate Chairman of the Board.
I whistled happily to myself as having showered and shaved, I lavished my honed body with lotions and potions perfumed with that racy but subtle ‘essence of Tim’.
As I skipped athletically back to my boudoir, I sneakily grabbing an admiring but justified glance of my handsome profile as I passed my ‘Welcome to Ireland’ full length mirror. I threw on my new Nike Tick replica home shirt which contrary to other experiences was delivered on time , adjusted my Jimmy Johnstone wrist band, swept back my golden flowing locks reminiscent of Frank McAvenney in his heyday, popped on my green and white Seville shades with multiple pin holes so that I could see where I was goin and with little snatch of ‘ here we go again, were on the road again……..’, I headed off to Glasgow airport, Easyjet, and my appointment with the Eight Bells in Fulham and the start of
‘Bhoys on tour 2005/2006 – Give us our feckin Treble Back’.
To be continued once I can find a new supplier of Magic Mushrooms
Friday, June 03, 2005
Mammon's evil eye
Over the past few days, particularly on the excellent Paul67 Celticquicknews site, the potential for Celtics involvement through a 'market driven' investment venture in a hiqh quality, high value league of the future, has been considered in some detail.
The simple aphorism that 'History repeats itself first in tragedy and then in farce' causes me major concerns.
To the world of the high stakes gambler, the bawling traders and sharp-suited finance backers and those with an entrepreneurs gambling spirit, who see little beauty in the world unless it involves balance sheets, debit and credit accounts, and profits and losses, the potential fruition of the myriad of investment vehicles, marketing opportunities, media coups, share-price booms, tax breaks and revenue returns driven by Mammon’s boiler room must seem like the chance of another drink to an expectant alcoholic.
Let’s be totally honest here. The club, the tradition, the history, or even the throat sticking concept of ‘brand’ matters nothing to these creatures of the preferential share issue, dividend, and option trading unless it comes with a price and a margin attached.
They are interested in one thing and that is money, because that money gives them standing and power, and while that may be engine of a capitalist society of which we are all willingly or otherwise an integral part, it can never be a solid foundation for the aesthetic and non-material impulses which give life and sustenance to the concept of a locally based, nationally organised, universally recognised team based sport such as Association Football.
And it can definitely never be the motivation or beating heart of Celtic FC.
Hell-mend them! This club is not their plaything, this club is not a tax avoidance scheme or souped-up ‘cash converter’ which will fund another suit, another holiday, another Ferrari, or another school term of over-priced fees to the already financially bloated on the back of a deception which will lead to the corrupt mutation of the life-sustaining plasma of dedicated supporters’ emotional investment and dreams, into a sad utilitarian and soulless financial derivative.
I say these things, not because I don’t want investment!
I crave investment more than the smoker in denial craves the longed-for contented drag of a B&H.
But like that Smoker-in-denial, (2 years, 8 months and 27days since my last one), the stimulus I crave must not be one that lies about its apparent rejuvenating effect and contented afterglow; it must not be one that on that first rush of pleasure pushes me in a headlong rush to the nearest tobacconists and the probable loss of my independence and relative health to an ever increasing need for more and more.
My fear is that the possible outcome that Paul has suggested, unless harnessed by a vision agreed by all parties of where we want to get to and what we want to be, holds dangers that may undermine everything that we hold as important.
If I truly believed that the potential map for the Johnny-come-lately football oligarchs could be walked with no taint or compromise to the history or future of the ideals at the centre of Celtic FC, then I would happily let them wend their weary way through the back-room deals and funny hand-shakes with only a passing thought for their limited grasp on what really makes our club what it truly is.
But, at least for the moment this happy outcome is simply not the case, because there is no single agreed outcome which will satisfy the financial and emotional needs of everyone involved.
We seem to be imagining a future which fits each of our own desires by working back from an end point and adjusting the motives of the financial gurus to manufacture a path which will lead us to that objective.
But even that objective needs to be viewed with a supersized barrowload of suspicion.
Potentially Celtic (and for want of a better word – Rangers) will be beamed to a new world of top class clubs, paying top-class money, to top-class players, while providing the top-class football that we would currently give my missus’s eye teeth for.
Hold yer horses there! Do we really believe that once this never-never land is achieved and all our clubs are up to the eyes in debt, that these financial sugar-daddies are going to sit back the and say?
‘well that’s us happy, cause we’ve made the fan’s happy and we’ve got a nice little cartel going here – no need for any more change’.
I apologise to those of a sensitive nature but ‘Utter Bollocks!’
Not least of all relegation is always a nasty monster lurking just beyond the horizon! And as we know from what has happened south of the river Tweed, the pressures and stresses and strains have led to a complete change in the culture of football and the consequences of having a bad season.
Even without this, what we are talking about is swimming with eternally underfed sharks.
When are they wealthy enough, when are they satisfied, when are they powerful enough?
They are driven by a motivation that few can comprehend!
They constantly need more and more and that can only happen through destroying the status quo and destroying stability. Whether that is by changing rules, changing names, or changing locations, it will happen.
We are sitting here around our this cyber table, debating so eloquently the rationale, the causes, the drivers, and the results of what may or may not be happening but we have not attempted to determine what ‘end’ is that we so desperately crave.
And this end must not only the best one for Celtic but also the best one for football, for uniquely in the business world, our football teams are not and can never be individual autonomous businesses competing with each other for financial dominance.
We need each other to survive, we need the Albion Rovers, the Hartlepools, The Wrexhams. We used to need the Accrington Stanley’s, the Third Lanarks, The Bradford Park Avenues, but we allowed the game to change and we set in motion a bandwagon when we allowed football to lose site of its essential mantra so eloquently espoused by Martin O’Neil.
‘This game is about those who play, and those who pay!’
I don’t know what the answer is to all our ambitions and hopes, but what I do know is that being driven down one path on the pack of the blinkered motivations of one small but financially powerful group is a recipe for schism and split and ultimate decay of the foundations upon which we all exist through our team.
We will only progress and thrive in a way that meets the needs of everyone by making sure that each of our objectives are compatible and the route-map that is planned is acceptable to all.
‘….those who play, and those who pay’
We’ll always have football because we’ll always have those who play.
We’ll only have professional football if we have ‘those who pay’
That’s us by the way!
And if you don’t think there is anything we can do about where this game goes I suggest you think on this.
Without football Sky Television, for all Murdoch’s money and ostensible power, would have died. We let that monster loose and untamed it has spawned so many ill-begotten offspring.
Less than twenty years on the rate of change has been so great fuelled by the blood-money from competing television organisations and soaked up by ever more power hungry clubs to pay ever more money crazed players that the game, the clubs, the players and in some cases the fans are unrecognisable.
If unthinkingly we simply acquiesce and allow another mammon driven coup, then in another twenty years I hate to think what we will be in for.
We are more powerful as fans than you could imagine.
As a first step, tomorrow I am going to join the Celtic Trust
I leave us all with this simple caution.
Be wary about what we wish for, it may be granted!
Bon Voyage
Estadio
The simple aphorism that 'History repeats itself first in tragedy and then in farce' causes me major concerns.
To the world of the high stakes gambler, the bawling traders and sharp-suited finance backers and those with an entrepreneurs gambling spirit, who see little beauty in the world unless it involves balance sheets, debit and credit accounts, and profits and losses, the potential fruition of the myriad of investment vehicles, marketing opportunities, media coups, share-price booms, tax breaks and revenue returns driven by Mammon’s boiler room must seem like the chance of another drink to an expectant alcoholic.
Let’s be totally honest here. The club, the tradition, the history, or even the throat sticking concept of ‘brand’ matters nothing to these creatures of the preferential share issue, dividend, and option trading unless it comes with a price and a margin attached.
They are interested in one thing and that is money, because that money gives them standing and power, and while that may be engine of a capitalist society of which we are all willingly or otherwise an integral part, it can never be a solid foundation for the aesthetic and non-material impulses which give life and sustenance to the concept of a locally based, nationally organised, universally recognised team based sport such as Association Football.
And it can definitely never be the motivation or beating heart of Celtic FC.
Hell-mend them! This club is not their plaything, this club is not a tax avoidance scheme or souped-up ‘cash converter’ which will fund another suit, another holiday, another Ferrari, or another school term of over-priced fees to the already financially bloated on the back of a deception which will lead to the corrupt mutation of the life-sustaining plasma of dedicated supporters’ emotional investment and dreams, into a sad utilitarian and soulless financial derivative.
I say these things, not because I don’t want investment!
I crave investment more than the smoker in denial craves the longed-for contented drag of a B&H.
But like that Smoker-in-denial, (2 years, 8 months and 27days since my last one), the stimulus I crave must not be one that lies about its apparent rejuvenating effect and contented afterglow; it must not be one that on that first rush of pleasure pushes me in a headlong rush to the nearest tobacconists and the probable loss of my independence and relative health to an ever increasing need for more and more.
My fear is that the possible outcome that Paul has suggested, unless harnessed by a vision agreed by all parties of where we want to get to and what we want to be, holds dangers that may undermine everything that we hold as important.
If I truly believed that the potential map for the Johnny-come-lately football oligarchs could be walked with no taint or compromise to the history or future of the ideals at the centre of Celtic FC, then I would happily let them wend their weary way through the back-room deals and funny hand-shakes with only a passing thought for their limited grasp on what really makes our club what it truly is.
But, at least for the moment this happy outcome is simply not the case, because there is no single agreed outcome which will satisfy the financial and emotional needs of everyone involved.
We seem to be imagining a future which fits each of our own desires by working back from an end point and adjusting the motives of the financial gurus to manufacture a path which will lead us to that objective.
But even that objective needs to be viewed with a supersized barrowload of suspicion.
Potentially Celtic (and for want of a better word – Rangers) will be beamed to a new world of top class clubs, paying top-class money, to top-class players, while providing the top-class football that we would currently give my missus’s eye teeth for.
Hold yer horses there! Do we really believe that once this never-never land is achieved and all our clubs are up to the eyes in debt, that these financial sugar-daddies are going to sit back the and say?
‘well that’s us happy, cause we’ve made the fan’s happy and we’ve got a nice little cartel going here – no need for any more change’.
I apologise to those of a sensitive nature but ‘Utter Bollocks!’
Not least of all relegation is always a nasty monster lurking just beyond the horizon! And as we know from what has happened south of the river Tweed, the pressures and stresses and strains have led to a complete change in the culture of football and the consequences of having a bad season.
Even without this, what we are talking about is swimming with eternally underfed sharks.
When are they wealthy enough, when are they satisfied, when are they powerful enough?
They are driven by a motivation that few can comprehend!
They constantly need more and more and that can only happen through destroying the status quo and destroying stability. Whether that is by changing rules, changing names, or changing locations, it will happen.
We are sitting here around our this cyber table, debating so eloquently the rationale, the causes, the drivers, and the results of what may or may not be happening but we have not attempted to determine what ‘end’ is that we so desperately crave.
And this end must not only the best one for Celtic but also the best one for football, for uniquely in the business world, our football teams are not and can never be individual autonomous businesses competing with each other for financial dominance.
We need each other to survive, we need the Albion Rovers, the Hartlepools, The Wrexhams. We used to need the Accrington Stanley’s, the Third Lanarks, The Bradford Park Avenues, but we allowed the game to change and we set in motion a bandwagon when we allowed football to lose site of its essential mantra so eloquently espoused by Martin O’Neil.
‘This game is about those who play, and those who pay!’
I don’t know what the answer is to all our ambitions and hopes, but what I do know is that being driven down one path on the pack of the blinkered motivations of one small but financially powerful group is a recipe for schism and split and ultimate decay of the foundations upon which we all exist through our team.
We will only progress and thrive in a way that meets the needs of everyone by making sure that each of our objectives are compatible and the route-map that is planned is acceptable to all.
‘….those who play, and those who pay’
We’ll always have football because we’ll always have those who play.
We’ll only have professional football if we have ‘those who pay’
That’s us by the way!
And if you don’t think there is anything we can do about where this game goes I suggest you think on this.
Without football Sky Television, for all Murdoch’s money and ostensible power, would have died. We let that monster loose and untamed it has spawned so many ill-begotten offspring.
Less than twenty years on the rate of change has been so great fuelled by the blood-money from competing television organisations and soaked up by ever more power hungry clubs to pay ever more money crazed players that the game, the clubs, the players and in some cases the fans are unrecognisable.
If unthinkingly we simply acquiesce and allow another mammon driven coup, then in another twenty years I hate to think what we will be in for.
We are more powerful as fans than you could imagine.
As a first step, tomorrow I am going to join the Celtic Trust
I leave us all with this simple caution.
Be wary about what we wish for, it may be granted!
Bon Voyage
Estadio
Thursday, June 02, 2005
In defence of CQN
And as I read with wandering thoughts of what the coming years would hold,
Lost in dreams of CQN as ambitious visions did unfold,
Like me I’m sure that most of you who post our inner hopes and prayers
Ignore those sad and stunted folk whose lives seem lost in woes and cares
who hope that ill befall each one who states our wishes on this site
instead of joining in the fun they sadly spout their verbal (I wonder what rhymes with site).
So behind me get you evil hordes who hide your cloven foot with shoe,
Go mix some toads and frogs with spit, get up the close and sniff your glue,
Then pray to him who owns your souls who’s made your brains turn into slurry,
From Beelzebub, you’re Satan’s spawn, so say Seig-heil to Mr Murray.
Lost in dreams of CQN as ambitious visions did unfold,
Like me I’m sure that most of you who post our inner hopes and prayers
Ignore those sad and stunted folk whose lives seem lost in woes and cares
who hope that ill befall each one who states our wishes on this site
instead of joining in the fun they sadly spout their verbal (I wonder what rhymes with site).
So behind me get you evil hordes who hide your cloven foot with shoe,
Go mix some toads and frogs with spit, get up the close and sniff your glue,
Then pray to him who owns your souls who’s made your brains turn into slurry,
From Beelzebub, you’re Satan’s spawn, so say Seig-heil to Mr Murray.
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Martin fairwell
Remember night-time’s shadows fleeing from the light,
Remember worn and hooded eyes given back their sight,
Remember hearts that craved a time of dreams that might come true
Remember when our MON arrived and said to me and you.
I will do what’s in my gift
I’ll do what’s in my power
To bring some glory to our club
Cometh the man so cometh the hour.
Remember Petta seeing off Fernando’s flailing kicks
Remember Sutton’s piercing strikes and Petrov’s box of tricks
Remember Henrik’s goals of gold and vanquished foreign foes
Remember Thommo, Hartson too as they dealt their stinging blows.
I will do what’s in my gift
I’ll do what’s in my power
To bring some glory to our club
Cometh the man so cometh the hour.
Remember Basle’s ashes from which our Phoenix flew
Remember Blackburn, Vigo, and Stuttgart holding true
Remember down in Scouseland when glory fed our soul
Remember Boavista and that startling winning goal!
I will do what’s in my gift
I’ll do what’s in my power
To bring some glory to our club
Cometh the man so cometh the hour.
But most of all remember, a man of iron will
A man who gave us with our team that vision called Seville,
A man who bent for no-one, who raised our name in lights
Our man, our Mon, our manager, with you we scaled the heights!
I will do what’s in my gift
I’ll do what’s in my power
To bring some glory to club
Cometh the man so cometh the hour.
Thankyou Martin!
Remember worn and hooded eyes given back their sight,
Remember hearts that craved a time of dreams that might come true
Remember when our MON arrived and said to me and you.
I will do what’s in my gift
I’ll do what’s in my power
To bring some glory to our club
Cometh the man so cometh the hour.
Remember Petta seeing off Fernando’s flailing kicks
Remember Sutton’s piercing strikes and Petrov’s box of tricks
Remember Henrik’s goals of gold and vanquished foreign foes
Remember Thommo, Hartson too as they dealt their stinging blows.
I will do what’s in my gift
I’ll do what’s in my power
To bring some glory to our club
Cometh the man so cometh the hour.
Remember Basle’s ashes from which our Phoenix flew
Remember Blackburn, Vigo, and Stuttgart holding true
Remember down in Scouseland when glory fed our soul
Remember Boavista and that startling winning goal!
I will do what’s in my gift
I’ll do what’s in my power
To bring some glory to our club
Cometh the man so cometh the hour.
But most of all remember, a man of iron will
A man who gave us with our team that vision called Seville,
A man who bent for no-one, who raised our name in lights
Our man, our Mon, our manager, with you we scaled the heights!
I will do what’s in my gift
I’ll do what’s in my power
To bring some glory to club
Cometh the man so cometh the hour.
Thankyou Martin!
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Walking back to happiness
Tuesday at last and here in the Gorbals, if not exactly sunny, at least it is starting to look fairly bright and dry.
I’m not sure exactly what I will do today, but I definitely need to stay away from any more Guinness as the horrors of Sunday’s events were magnified a thousand times by the panic stricken paranoia and neurosis of alcoholic cold turkey.
Big T and James have just passed by my front window, probably heading up the shops for a paper. I bought myself a paper this morning, although I did take the coward’s way out since it was the Scottish sport avoiding Guardian. Still as someone somewhere once said, ‘even the longest journey starts with the first step.’
And that is exactly what I am going to do, take that first step.
My favourite walk along Ballater Street, down along the Clyde at Glasgow Green football club, back up onto the Dunn Street and cut across onto Nuneaton Street.
Just around the street’s elbow, there it is!
Paradise! Celtic Park!
This holy ground of ours is a bit special you know. It has a personality of its own. It beckons and welcomes you almost waving to you to come in and feel good. It smiles at me as each step takes me closer and it reminds me of through it’s own memories of the many great and wondrous games and players who have adorned that glorious rectangle of God’s sod.
My hearty will beat slightly faster as I near that monument to football history, and I will again hear in my mind’s ear the call of the crowds, the songs of the faithful, the roar of anticipation, and the crescendo of triumph that have been such a great companion and comfort through more years than I care to remember.
I will think of Willie Maley, Jimmy Quinn, Johnny Thompson, Jimmy McGrory, Charlie Tully, Jock Stein, Billy McNeil, Jimmy Johnstone, Paul McStay, Henrik Larsson, and oh so many other legendary players of the past. But more than that I will think of those to come, perhaps the Aiden McGeadys, Ross Wallaces, Scott Cuthberts, or Rocco Quinns.
I can see them next season or the season after that turning, twisting, passing and playing in that archetypal Celtic Way. I can see them playing for the children of today, tomorrow, and for generations still to come, when I will be sitting (hopefully) on a cloud above playing my harp and drinking a heavenly Guinness.
‘Silly old git’ I hear you say!
For writing it down? Aye your probably right, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
So I’m off now and guess what, the sun has come out!
It’s great to be a Tim
I’m not sure exactly what I will do today, but I definitely need to stay away from any more Guinness as the horrors of Sunday’s events were magnified a thousand times by the panic stricken paranoia and neurosis of alcoholic cold turkey.
Big T and James have just passed by my front window, probably heading up the shops for a paper. I bought myself a paper this morning, although I did take the coward’s way out since it was the Scottish sport avoiding Guardian. Still as someone somewhere once said, ‘even the longest journey starts with the first step.’
And that is exactly what I am going to do, take that first step.
My favourite walk along Ballater Street, down along the Clyde at Glasgow Green football club, back up onto the Dunn Street and cut across onto Nuneaton Street.
Just around the street’s elbow, there it is!
Paradise! Celtic Park!
This holy ground of ours is a bit special you know. It has a personality of its own. It beckons and welcomes you almost waving to you to come in and feel good. It smiles at me as each step takes me closer and it reminds me of through it’s own memories of the many great and wondrous games and players who have adorned that glorious rectangle of God’s sod.
My hearty will beat slightly faster as I near that monument to football history, and I will again hear in my mind’s ear the call of the crowds, the songs of the faithful, the roar of anticipation, and the crescendo of triumph that have been such a great companion and comfort through more years than I care to remember.
I will think of Willie Maley, Jimmy Quinn, Johnny Thompson, Jimmy McGrory, Charlie Tully, Jock Stein, Billy McNeil, Jimmy Johnstone, Paul McStay, Henrik Larsson, and oh so many other legendary players of the past. But more than that I will think of those to come, perhaps the Aiden McGeadys, Ross Wallaces, Scott Cuthberts, or Rocco Quinns.
I can see them next season or the season after that turning, twisting, passing and playing in that archetypal Celtic Way. I can see them playing for the children of today, tomorrow, and for generations still to come, when I will be sitting (hopefully) on a cloud above playing my harp and drinking a heavenly Guinness.
‘Silly old git’ I hear you say!
For writing it down? Aye your probably right, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
So I’m off now and guess what, the sun has come out!
It’s great to be a Tim
Monday, May 23, 2005
Forward with hope
A sense of detachment is the dominant feeling this morning. I’m really only going through the motions of the very basics that keep body and soul together and doing the absolutely mandatory work related activities which will ensure that if nothing else I will still be able to afford my season book for the coming year.
‘We are Celtic supporters faithful through and through……………’
I left the Gorbals yesterday at just gone 12.00, the sky was a light azure and the sun was beaming down.
As I turned onto the M74 the atmosphere became dark, dank, doomladen, and a feeling of foreboding crept upon me as I switched on the windscreen wipers and switched off the beechgrove potting shed.
Having parked up at about 12.30, just a short walk from the ground the weather relented and cleared and once again the green and white favours of the Celtic diaspora regained there freshness as they glistened and sparkled ,and the songs of hope and glory resounded and echoed through the courts and alleys of the oddly beige coloured multi-story flats.
‘We don’t care if we win lose or draw……….’
And then the skies opened again and the rain came down not so much in stair-rods, but more in a primordial flood reminiscent of Noah and his ark. Cats and dogs, rats and mice, sparrows and pigeons all flew around in pairs looking for sanctuary from the deluge while that more resilient species the greater green white and gold Celticus Timus draped in declarative banners literally walked on water and defiantly continued on our expectant odyssey.
‘This land is your land, this land is my land……….’
The south stand at Fir Park was a throwback to those terraces of yore as we stood, swayed, sang, and huddled throughout the game. Just on the half hour we scored through our best player on the day and took what any observer would admit was a well deserved lead. Worryingly however as the game proceeded we missed chance after chance. As each one was spurned and the news of the score-line filtered through from Easter road, two things started to happen. Firstly that paranoia that always accompanies a game refereed by Hugh Dallas started to encroach on my thoughts, and secondly an edginess bordering on panic began to infect the vast majority of the team.
Chris dropped back from patrolling the hole to almost a libero role and we allowed Motherwell to rain in crosses and shots. There was always a chance that one break would come their way and the race was on to beat the clock.
‘For ever and ever we’ll follow the bhoys…………………’
I won’t dwell on the events of the last few minutes other than to say how unsurprised I was at the outcome. We’ve played like this for the majority of the season and the hearts and lungs of a group of Celtic heroes who will forever have a special place in my heart, finally succumbed.
Martin came down and waved to us. Robbo cried. And I stood and applauded, a lump as large as Stan Petrov’s heart welling up in my throat and my eyes brimming with a moist and stinging sadness.
‘By a lonely harbour wall she watched the last star falling…………………..’
It was now that our own mettle and true measure of being Celtic supporters was tested and with only a few exceptions we came up to the mark.
Those who left in disgust at something or other, well good riddance to you.
Those few who kicked and broke the seats, shame on you and don’t come back.
But to those who stayed and clapped and cried with our team, who felt part of our team, who were as one with our team, those who will be there next week at Hampden, those who sang with me in Sharkey’s last night, those who continue to hope and laugh and sing dream, as I promised I raised a drink to all you last night and without doubt you are not only the best fans in the world but undoubtedly
‘You’ll never walk alone…………..’
C’mon the hoops
‘We are Celtic supporters faithful through and through……………’
I left the Gorbals yesterday at just gone 12.00, the sky was a light azure and the sun was beaming down.
As I turned onto the M74 the atmosphere became dark, dank, doomladen, and a feeling of foreboding crept upon me as I switched on the windscreen wipers and switched off the beechgrove potting shed.
Having parked up at about 12.30, just a short walk from the ground the weather relented and cleared and once again the green and white favours of the Celtic diaspora regained there freshness as they glistened and sparkled ,and the songs of hope and glory resounded and echoed through the courts and alleys of the oddly beige coloured multi-story flats.
‘We don’t care if we win lose or draw……….’
And then the skies opened again and the rain came down not so much in stair-rods, but more in a primordial flood reminiscent of Noah and his ark. Cats and dogs, rats and mice, sparrows and pigeons all flew around in pairs looking for sanctuary from the deluge while that more resilient species the greater green white and gold Celticus Timus draped in declarative banners literally walked on water and defiantly continued on our expectant odyssey.
‘This land is your land, this land is my land……….’
The south stand at Fir Park was a throwback to those terraces of yore as we stood, swayed, sang, and huddled throughout the game. Just on the half hour we scored through our best player on the day and took what any observer would admit was a well deserved lead. Worryingly however as the game proceeded we missed chance after chance. As each one was spurned and the news of the score-line filtered through from Easter road, two things started to happen. Firstly that paranoia that always accompanies a game refereed by Hugh Dallas started to encroach on my thoughts, and secondly an edginess bordering on panic began to infect the vast majority of the team.
Chris dropped back from patrolling the hole to almost a libero role and we allowed Motherwell to rain in crosses and shots. There was always a chance that one break would come their way and the race was on to beat the clock.
‘For ever and ever we’ll follow the bhoys…………………’
I won’t dwell on the events of the last few minutes other than to say how unsurprised I was at the outcome. We’ve played like this for the majority of the season and the hearts and lungs of a group of Celtic heroes who will forever have a special place in my heart, finally succumbed.
Martin came down and waved to us. Robbo cried. And I stood and applauded, a lump as large as Stan Petrov’s heart welling up in my throat and my eyes brimming with a moist and stinging sadness.
‘By a lonely harbour wall she watched the last star falling…………………..’
It was now that our own mettle and true measure of being Celtic supporters was tested and with only a few exceptions we came up to the mark.
Those who left in disgust at something or other, well good riddance to you.
Those few who kicked and broke the seats, shame on you and don’t come back.
But to those who stayed and clapped and cried with our team, who felt part of our team, who were as one with our team, those who will be there next week at Hampden, those who sang with me in Sharkey’s last night, those who continue to hope and laugh and sing dream, as I promised I raised a drink to all you last night and without doubt you are not only the best fans in the world but undoubtedly
‘You’ll never walk alone…………..’
C’mon the hoops
Monday, May 02, 2005
Another turning point?
I originally submitted this to the Celticquicknews blog run by Paul67 just after we had beaten Hibs at Easter road in one of our best performances of the season to date.
Following Saturday's debacle I suppose that we can either view what happened at Easter road as a false dawn or as a harbinger of what our team, our manager, supported by all of us are still capable of.
I'll take the positive view because to wring our collective hands in anticipation of failure is simply not acceptable nor is it the Celtic way!
Anyway to the post!
"It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment that both my real enjoyment of football returned and our team’s attitude and approach to the game conjured up flickering reflections in my mind’s eye of hooped clad heroes of years now gone.
I suppose it goes back to the depressive aftermath of the poverty stricken, ambitionless, desert of desire that was the 20th February 2005.
Like the surviving pilot emerging from the crashed and burned out mangled wreckage of a once graceful, sleek, supersonic machine of beauty we simply had one objective and that was to get back into the air again in an attempt to recapture however forlornly the exhilaration of soaring amongst the eagles rather than grubbing around in the inelegant company of flightless blue and white clad dodos.
And so it was that Paul, Tony, and I approached the Excelsior stadium in Airdrie on the evening of the 22nd February with the aim to reclaim ‘something or anything’ back into our hearts which would kick-start the purgative process of erasing the painfully recent memories; namely that the ‘Boys from Barrowfield’ would see off the ‘Murray Park Minions’.
That evening, apart from actually enjoying the childish but enduring experience again of witnessing our targeted insults being heard (and hilariously at times being reacted to) by each adversary in blue, we witnessed a long cherished phenomenon of a Celtic team not so much just playing slick one-two type football that I recalled from my own youth in the sixties and seventies, but playing it in a way that capitalised upon rather than constrained their own strengths, with the welcome by-product that for most of the game we forgot about the freezing breath, and numb bums on the hard and icy plastic seats.
And more than that, I watched as they played with a smile on their faces, each and every one. Marshall, O’Dea, Juninho, Sylla, Wallace, Maloney, and the two outstanding players of that night, Fernandez and McManus, supported, cajoled, encouraged and led by the timeless Paul Lambert.
(By the way, what a great name is Rocco Quinn. To me it is the sort of name that beats a full-back all on its very own. I hope he makes it because it is also surely a name that requires a special and personal tribute song!)
Anyway, that night the likes of Rae, Namouchi and Malcolm could do little else than chase their own shadows , and reserve game though it may have been, it warmed a little the cockles of my heart and fuelled a few embers of hope for the future.
The feelings of emptiness returned a few days later in the soulless first half against Clyde at Broadwood. The Wee Brazilian was playing, but disappointingly for me (a lone voice among the Celtic Diaspora I admit) neither Fernandez nor Maloney had been given a chance, albeit that Shaun was on the bench. Once again I could have sworn that the ball and the ground must have gone through some form of metaphysical divorce such was the absence of any relationship.
Up the ball would go, and back it would come, up it would go and back it would come. Clyde scored, and by some streak of good fortune the referee (who was abysmal to both sides on the day) had decided to blow far too early and we were reprieved. Oh we scored in the later stages of that first half where Big Stan nodded one in, but to be honest my eyes kept wandering to Shaun on the bench, David Fernandez standing watching at the corner flag, and most disturbingly to the postcard green and white capped Campsie hills.
And then something happened. Big Chris took a knock and went over on his ankle, and at half time on came Wee Shaun, and as if by magic I became involved again in that involuntary habit of every real football fan, of not only watching but taking muscle-twitchingly part in every movement, pass, turn, trap, chase, tackle, shot and goal. Once again I witnessed what I had always been brought up to expect was my rightful inheritance – A Celtic football team playing football the ‘Celtic Way’.
First division opposition! It doesn’t matter. The difference between the first and second halves was as wide as the gap at the one end of the neat but incomplete stadium.
And so to the next game, Dundee the visitors; and a sudden return to the huffing and puffing unproductive efforts that have frustrated us over the recent months!
Or was it?
Having removed the negative motes from my eyes before the game, what I actually witnessed was indeed a return to the favoured individuals, but I also experienced the seeds of a complete change in style just starting to germinate. I observed players deliberately foreswearing the potential and (say it quietly) potentially productive long-ball in favour of the shorter ground-hugging forward pass to feet, the ball being held up back to goal while awaiting the supporting diagonal thrust from mid-field in anticipation of a return pass, the wide-swept change of direction behind the back line to meet the incessantly creative runs of players desperate for the ball, the desperate lunging defensive blanket of a tremulously stubborn Dundee defence and mostly I believe that I saw a team following deliberately and perseveringly, the strategy and tactics of a manager questioned and hurt not only by results but also by some of the untrusting barbed arrows fired by many of us who have memories shorter than that of a particularly dense goldfish.
Many and most times that evening the moves and ambitions, the thought and strategies just didn’t work and at half-time the potential for a disastrously unfruitful stalemate probably blinded most of the onlookers to what was going on.
We got through that night thanks to Stan P and Big Bobo, but I believed that what we had witnessed had been a sea-change in approach which was and is to set us up for the games to come, the most pressing of which was Hibs. Just remember how they had outplayed us at Celtic Park in December.
But let’s be honest, most punters didn’t. Why that was the case is a subject for another time, but that evening while having a drink back in Sharkey’s I was more upbeat than most.
And so to Hibs and the real difference between that game and the Dundee game?
The passes started to come off, the runs through a little more familiarity were anticipated, the passes were sharper, the confidence was higher, the bandwagon began to roll, and although Chris got injured again, this time it was as a cog in a well oiled fighter-plane which had us frustrated top-guns back in the air again. On came Aiden and if anything it got better. (selfishly I was delighted to see David F coming on. Whether he does make it or not I don’t know, but believe me this boy can play a bit).
Three going-on six– one.
And then Dunfermline at Celtic Park. Our game plan remained the same and to all those who have criticised the first half performance please remember a few things.
Firstly the Pars game plan also remained the same – the same as Dundee’s that is, even then against a back six verging on nine at times we should have scored more, so the approach was still making chances!
Secondly, we believed in ourselves and those of us stuck in the crowd but actually still even in the autumn of our years, wanting to be on the park seemed to sense that!
Thirdly Aiden McGeady was breathtaking throughout, Craig Bellamy and Stan Petrov were merely brilliant!
And finally we used Aiden McGeady, Ross Wallace, Craig Beattie, and David F was on the bench.
Let’s get behind our team, our manager, but most of all our club. Let’s rekindle the fires of hope for the future from the flashing sparks of the past few weeks, and come what may let’s see if we can persuade through our own actions and support the likes of Craig Bellamy to realise that any where else would simply be a step down. That’s WE as in US. The Celtic supporters, The TGFITW! We as a support CAN do this and notwithstanding all the money that flows from our own seemingly bottomless pockets to the corporate coffers, this would be quite simply the biggest contribution we could make to Celtic’s future.
Let’s make Craig Bellamy and every other player feel part of this club, part of it’s future, part of it’s success, and that we are there with them ‘win lose or draw’.
I think we’ve got a lot to look forward to. I know that whatever happens, starting in Inverness on Wednesday, I’ll be there if at all possible.
The future’s bright, it’s Green and White!
(And if you are listening God to the these ravings of a senile madman, please can you show Thommo where he mislaid his form! Amen)"
Following Saturday's debacle I suppose that we can either view what happened at Easter road as a false dawn or as a harbinger of what our team, our manager, supported by all of us are still capable of.
I'll take the positive view because to wring our collective hands in anticipation of failure is simply not acceptable nor is it the Celtic way!
Anyway to the post!
"It is hard to pinpoint the exact moment that both my real enjoyment of football returned and our team’s attitude and approach to the game conjured up flickering reflections in my mind’s eye of hooped clad heroes of years now gone.
I suppose it goes back to the depressive aftermath of the poverty stricken, ambitionless, desert of desire that was the 20th February 2005.
Like the surviving pilot emerging from the crashed and burned out mangled wreckage of a once graceful, sleek, supersonic machine of beauty we simply had one objective and that was to get back into the air again in an attempt to recapture however forlornly the exhilaration of soaring amongst the eagles rather than grubbing around in the inelegant company of flightless blue and white clad dodos.
And so it was that Paul, Tony, and I approached the Excelsior stadium in Airdrie on the evening of the 22nd February with the aim to reclaim ‘something or anything’ back into our hearts which would kick-start the purgative process of erasing the painfully recent memories; namely that the ‘Boys from Barrowfield’ would see off the ‘Murray Park Minions’.
That evening, apart from actually enjoying the childish but enduring experience again of witnessing our targeted insults being heard (and hilariously at times being reacted to) by each adversary in blue, we witnessed a long cherished phenomenon of a Celtic team not so much just playing slick one-two type football that I recalled from my own youth in the sixties and seventies, but playing it in a way that capitalised upon rather than constrained their own strengths, with the welcome by-product that for most of the game we forgot about the freezing breath, and numb bums on the hard and icy plastic seats.
And more than that, I watched as they played with a smile on their faces, each and every one. Marshall, O’Dea, Juninho, Sylla, Wallace, Maloney, and the two outstanding players of that night, Fernandez and McManus, supported, cajoled, encouraged and led by the timeless Paul Lambert.
(By the way, what a great name is Rocco Quinn. To me it is the sort of name that beats a full-back all on its very own. I hope he makes it because it is also surely a name that requires a special and personal tribute song!)
Anyway, that night the likes of Rae, Namouchi and Malcolm could do little else than chase their own shadows , and reserve game though it may have been, it warmed a little the cockles of my heart and fuelled a few embers of hope for the future.
The feelings of emptiness returned a few days later in the soulless first half against Clyde at Broadwood. The Wee Brazilian was playing, but disappointingly for me (a lone voice among the Celtic Diaspora I admit) neither Fernandez nor Maloney had been given a chance, albeit that Shaun was on the bench. Once again I could have sworn that the ball and the ground must have gone through some form of metaphysical divorce such was the absence of any relationship.
Up the ball would go, and back it would come, up it would go and back it would come. Clyde scored, and by some streak of good fortune the referee (who was abysmal to both sides on the day) had decided to blow far too early and we were reprieved. Oh we scored in the later stages of that first half where Big Stan nodded one in, but to be honest my eyes kept wandering to Shaun on the bench, David Fernandez standing watching at the corner flag, and most disturbingly to the postcard green and white capped Campsie hills.
And then something happened. Big Chris took a knock and went over on his ankle, and at half time on came Wee Shaun, and as if by magic I became involved again in that involuntary habit of every real football fan, of not only watching but taking muscle-twitchingly part in every movement, pass, turn, trap, chase, tackle, shot and goal. Once again I witnessed what I had always been brought up to expect was my rightful inheritance – A Celtic football team playing football the ‘Celtic Way’.
First division opposition! It doesn’t matter. The difference between the first and second halves was as wide as the gap at the one end of the neat but incomplete stadium.
And so to the next game, Dundee the visitors; and a sudden return to the huffing and puffing unproductive efforts that have frustrated us over the recent months!
Or was it?
Having removed the negative motes from my eyes before the game, what I actually witnessed was indeed a return to the favoured individuals, but I also experienced the seeds of a complete change in style just starting to germinate. I observed players deliberately foreswearing the potential and (say it quietly) potentially productive long-ball in favour of the shorter ground-hugging forward pass to feet, the ball being held up back to goal while awaiting the supporting diagonal thrust from mid-field in anticipation of a return pass, the wide-swept change of direction behind the back line to meet the incessantly creative runs of players desperate for the ball, the desperate lunging defensive blanket of a tremulously stubborn Dundee defence and mostly I believe that I saw a team following deliberately and perseveringly, the strategy and tactics of a manager questioned and hurt not only by results but also by some of the untrusting barbed arrows fired by many of us who have memories shorter than that of a particularly dense goldfish.
Many and most times that evening the moves and ambitions, the thought and strategies just didn’t work and at half-time the potential for a disastrously unfruitful stalemate probably blinded most of the onlookers to what was going on.
We got through that night thanks to Stan P and Big Bobo, but I believed that what we had witnessed had been a sea-change in approach which was and is to set us up for the games to come, the most pressing of which was Hibs. Just remember how they had outplayed us at Celtic Park in December.
But let’s be honest, most punters didn’t. Why that was the case is a subject for another time, but that evening while having a drink back in Sharkey’s I was more upbeat than most.
And so to Hibs and the real difference between that game and the Dundee game?
The passes started to come off, the runs through a little more familiarity were anticipated, the passes were sharper, the confidence was higher, the bandwagon began to roll, and although Chris got injured again, this time it was as a cog in a well oiled fighter-plane which had us frustrated top-guns back in the air again. On came Aiden and if anything it got better. (selfishly I was delighted to see David F coming on. Whether he does make it or not I don’t know, but believe me this boy can play a bit).
Three going-on six– one.
And then Dunfermline at Celtic Park. Our game plan remained the same and to all those who have criticised the first half performance please remember a few things.
Firstly the Pars game plan also remained the same – the same as Dundee’s that is, even then against a back six verging on nine at times we should have scored more, so the approach was still making chances!
Secondly, we believed in ourselves and those of us stuck in the crowd but actually still even in the autumn of our years, wanting to be on the park seemed to sense that!
Thirdly Aiden McGeady was breathtaking throughout, Craig Bellamy and Stan Petrov were merely brilliant!
And finally we used Aiden McGeady, Ross Wallace, Craig Beattie, and David F was on the bench.
Let’s get behind our team, our manager, but most of all our club. Let’s rekindle the fires of hope for the future from the flashing sparks of the past few weeks, and come what may let’s see if we can persuade through our own actions and support the likes of Craig Bellamy to realise that any where else would simply be a step down. That’s WE as in US. The Celtic supporters, The TGFITW! We as a support CAN do this and notwithstanding all the money that flows from our own seemingly bottomless pockets to the corporate coffers, this would be quite simply the biggest contribution we could make to Celtic’s future.
Let’s make Craig Bellamy and every other player feel part of this club, part of it’s future, part of it’s success, and that we are there with them ‘win lose or draw’.
I think we’ve got a lot to look forward to. I know that whatever happens, starting in Inverness on Wednesday, I’ll be there if at all possible.
The future’s bright, it’s Green and White!
(And if you are listening God to the these ravings of a senile madman, please can you show Thommo where he mislaid his form! Amen)"
Sunday, May 01, 2005
Shambollocks and my part in our downfall
Breakfast this morning consisted of two reheated Gregg’s pies which were left in the microwave last night, and a newly heated sausage roll! I really couldn’t be arsed with all the eggs and bacon nonsense. The coffee sits near my PC as I try to fathom out the perfidious path that led to the utter mince that was laid out on the green and frankly not so pleasant east end of Glasgow yesterday.
I will drink some of that coffee only once I have had my say.
Firstly I am not one of the sad ‘Boo Bhoy’ clones who with each passing (even if the passes sometimes go astray) game seem to be procreating on a dangerously scary scale.
I have never booed a player in the hoops, an official of the club, not even Barnes and Dalglish, and have never contemplated going to the Forge to meander aimlessly around Big W or B&Q rather than experience the adrenalin rush of pleasure and pain, hopes and fears, victory and defeat that lies in wait home or away, on the haemorrhoid inducing cold plastic seats of whatever ground we happen to playing.
This Celtic is not simply a ‘Club’. The players and the officials are not ‘them’ and the fans are not ‘us’. This ‘Celtic’ is not an institution, or a limited company, or a financial commodity, or an investment in bricks and mortar, flesh and blood that one day will yield a percentage return on a material investment.
This ‘Celtic’ is all of us! It is our heart and soul, our dreams and ambitions, our laughter and tears. Without us there is no Celtic and without Celtic there is no ‘us’.
Oh there are many, no doubt some reading this, who will think this is nothing more than the emotional claptrap of a rapid descent into the early onset of nostalgic senility!
Well let me just give you a small exemplar of my rationale.
Yesterday evening I and approximately 10 other people in my direct company spent nigh on 90% of our time talking, analysing, debating and even singing about that afternoons events at Celtic Park. As the Guinness flowed and the points were made and positions taken, agreements reached or arguments solidified, no quarter was easily given. And all because the lady loved Milk Tray! Sorry I meant and all because we all loved Celtic and not just wanted the best but because we all ‘wanted’ to want the best. That is where love begins.
Extrapolate that amount of time into a lifetimes scale and then tell me that that we do not share an invisible, mysterious and life enhancing aura that is ‘Celtic’.
The other great thing about being a Celtic supporter is the ‘Special Fish Supper’.
Estadios’ household on the day of the game is probably no different to that of any other daft Celtic worshipping fanatic.
The tried and trusted routine must be followed.
The sequence of shite, shower and shave,; the donning of white socks, clean freshly pressed Celtic Huddle Boxer shorts, faded denims, leather laced deck shoes, home or away top, and for home games a couple of pints in Sharkey’s and a 37and a half minute walk to the ground along Ballater street through Glasgow Green Football centre and up Nuneaton street, has to be adhered to.
Post match the routine is less important but usually consists of getting back to Sharkey’s, discussing the highs and lows of the game, drinking more Guinness than is good for 10 men, being threatened with an anti social behaviour order by Isa for singing too loud and too often, and all topped of by my ‘Victory Celebrating Special Fish Supper’ from Anne’s Fry in Crown street in the Gorbals.
Yesterday I didn’t have my ‘Victory Celebrating Special Fish supper’!
And why did that happen, why did we not win. Let me enlighten you.
I suppose I could put it down to the fact that we threw Aiden, Ross, Craig, and Shaun into the team and expected it to gel immediately.
Perhaps it was a contributed to by persevering with Thommo when he has had one of his own self confessed poorest seasons.
Perhaps it was down to a defence that can’t consistently defend because big Stan has to repeatedly cover for for an increasingly fragile Bobo.
Perhaps even it was down to Joos who looks more comfortable breaking forward from midfield in randomly glorious but vain attempts to atone for his failure to display the basics of fullback play.
Could it even be down to moving Stan P from his central driving role into a second tier defensive support player?
Could it be that the number of formation and tactical adjustments yesterday simply left all the players confused?
Or heaven forbid could it be that all these things occurred on the same day and that our Manager (for whom I have the greatest admiration for his dragging of us out of the gutter of 1990s despondency, and will yield to no-one in that) has in fact NOT taken us as far as he can, but that WE have taken HIM as far as we can.
Most of this season we have sat, stood, shouted, swore and chanted as with one or two notable exceptions a fairly unpalatable fare was laid before us. With little or no professional knowledge we have quietly sighed when the opportunity to transfuse the side with new blood was not taken, when the chance to rest Thommo was missed, when we failed to play to our footballing strengths, and when safety first became a stifling and corrosive fearful tactic.
If so many of us witness this and agree, then we are all either complete fools and need to be put right, or perhaps we have a point and someone needs to talk to our coaching and managerial staff.
Or perhaps it is because I got a lift to the ground yesterday rather than walking. That’s it! Of course.
Sorry Martin, Sorry Bhoys and Ghirls, Sorry world it is all down to me. I broke my routine and we got gubbed by the Hibees.
Anyway, I’ll be there next Saturday and at Motherwell. I won’t be at Tynecastle because I didn’t get a ticket. I’ll also be there next season and everyone after it that the Lord and my life-limiting- diet allows me to .
I still won’t boo, I’ll be there for the full ninety minutes and injury time, and I will still go through my match day routine.
Here’s to the oldest white sock wearing Celtic supporting fanatic in the Universe and even more
…………….Here’s to a lot more Special fish suppers
I will drink some of that coffee only once I have had my say.
Firstly I am not one of the sad ‘Boo Bhoy’ clones who with each passing (even if the passes sometimes go astray) game seem to be procreating on a dangerously scary scale.
I have never booed a player in the hoops, an official of the club, not even Barnes and Dalglish, and have never contemplated going to the Forge to meander aimlessly around Big W or B&Q rather than experience the adrenalin rush of pleasure and pain, hopes and fears, victory and defeat that lies in wait home or away, on the haemorrhoid inducing cold plastic seats of whatever ground we happen to playing.
This Celtic is not simply a ‘Club’. The players and the officials are not ‘them’ and the fans are not ‘us’. This ‘Celtic’ is not an institution, or a limited company, or a financial commodity, or an investment in bricks and mortar, flesh and blood that one day will yield a percentage return on a material investment.
This ‘Celtic’ is all of us! It is our heart and soul, our dreams and ambitions, our laughter and tears. Without us there is no Celtic and without Celtic there is no ‘us’.
Oh there are many, no doubt some reading this, who will think this is nothing more than the emotional claptrap of a rapid descent into the early onset of nostalgic senility!
Well let me just give you a small exemplar of my rationale.
Yesterday evening I and approximately 10 other people in my direct company spent nigh on 90% of our time talking, analysing, debating and even singing about that afternoons events at Celtic Park. As the Guinness flowed and the points were made and positions taken, agreements reached or arguments solidified, no quarter was easily given. And all because the lady loved Milk Tray! Sorry I meant and all because we all loved Celtic and not just wanted the best but because we all ‘wanted’ to want the best. That is where love begins.
Extrapolate that amount of time into a lifetimes scale and then tell me that that we do not share an invisible, mysterious and life enhancing aura that is ‘Celtic’.
The other great thing about being a Celtic supporter is the ‘Special Fish Supper’.
Estadios’ household on the day of the game is probably no different to that of any other daft Celtic worshipping fanatic.
The tried and trusted routine must be followed.
The sequence of shite, shower and shave,; the donning of white socks, clean freshly pressed Celtic Huddle Boxer shorts, faded denims, leather laced deck shoes, home or away top, and for home games a couple of pints in Sharkey’s and a 37and a half minute walk to the ground along Ballater street through Glasgow Green Football centre and up Nuneaton street, has to be adhered to.
Post match the routine is less important but usually consists of getting back to Sharkey’s, discussing the highs and lows of the game, drinking more Guinness than is good for 10 men, being threatened with an anti social behaviour order by Isa for singing too loud and too often, and all topped of by my ‘Victory Celebrating Special Fish Supper’ from Anne’s Fry in Crown street in the Gorbals.
Yesterday I didn’t have my ‘Victory Celebrating Special Fish supper’!
And why did that happen, why did we not win. Let me enlighten you.
I suppose I could put it down to the fact that we threw Aiden, Ross, Craig, and Shaun into the team and expected it to gel immediately.
Perhaps it was a contributed to by persevering with Thommo when he has had one of his own self confessed poorest seasons.
Perhaps it was down to a defence that can’t consistently defend because big Stan has to repeatedly cover for for an increasingly fragile Bobo.
Perhaps even it was down to Joos who looks more comfortable breaking forward from midfield in randomly glorious but vain attempts to atone for his failure to display the basics of fullback play.
Could it even be down to moving Stan P from his central driving role into a second tier defensive support player?
Could it be that the number of formation and tactical adjustments yesterday simply left all the players confused?
Or heaven forbid could it be that all these things occurred on the same day and that our Manager (for whom I have the greatest admiration for his dragging of us out of the gutter of 1990s despondency, and will yield to no-one in that) has in fact NOT taken us as far as he can, but that WE have taken HIM as far as we can.
Most of this season we have sat, stood, shouted, swore and chanted as with one or two notable exceptions a fairly unpalatable fare was laid before us. With little or no professional knowledge we have quietly sighed when the opportunity to transfuse the side with new blood was not taken, when the chance to rest Thommo was missed, when we failed to play to our footballing strengths, and when safety first became a stifling and corrosive fearful tactic.
If so many of us witness this and agree, then we are all either complete fools and need to be put right, or perhaps we have a point and someone needs to talk to our coaching and managerial staff.
Or perhaps it is because I got a lift to the ground yesterday rather than walking. That’s it! Of course.
Sorry Martin, Sorry Bhoys and Ghirls, Sorry world it is all down to me. I broke my routine and we got gubbed by the Hibees.
Anyway, I’ll be there next Saturday and at Motherwell. I won’t be at Tynecastle because I didn’t get a ticket. I’ll also be there next season and everyone after it that the Lord and my life-limiting- diet allows me to .
I still won’t boo, I’ll be there for the full ninety minutes and injury time, and I will still go through my match day routine.
Here’s to the oldest white sock wearing Celtic supporting fanatic in the Universe and even more
…………….Here’s to a lot more Special fish suppers
Monday, February 28, 2005
A missed opportunity.
An extract from The BBC Charter : :
.....to provide sound and television programmes of information, education and entertainment.......
I suppose I could read all sorts of clandestine motivations or institutional conspiracy theories into the travesty of investigative journalism that was broadcast last night under the laughable disguise of ‘Panorama’.
I suppose I could highlight to a great extent my own prejudices both conscious and subconscious in reaching my conclusion of a deliberately warped and unbalanced analysis of a cultural and historic thread which has shaped and fashioned many of the features both good and bad, which comprise the sociological hinterland of this small corner of God’s sod.
The above however would only be relevant if I had come out of the viewing and listening experience with even a modicum of additional illumination of the historic maelstroms which have resulted in many of the symptomatic experiences portrayed and pandered to BBC Scotland’s nasty little bigot’s guide to 800 years of oppressed Celtic (with a hard c) identity.
Where oh where was the definition of sectarianism, where was the distillation of the overlaps between unionism, republicanism, the catholic church, the orange order, the Irish famine, the mass exodus from Ireland, the inhumane treatment of all by the British governments down through the years, the bussing of majorities into the six counties of the north, the honourable and dishonourable intentions of those on all sides of the argument.
Where was the examination of the post reformation and pre-Irish influx institutional sectarianism and barbarity that was perpetrated on Scotlands native born Catholics.
Where was the attempt, to try and look at the causes and draw positive conclusions on where to go in future.
Where was the evocation of the spirit of those who travelled on that ‘floating bridge’ of boats of ‘heads and faces’ from a country where decaying corpses littered a land of hoplessness but where millions of tons of potatoes either rotted on the quayside in Dublin, or were shipped to the feed the landed gentry and their subjects in Jerusalem’s green and pleasant land.
Where were the views of the the calvanists, Knox, the Carsons and Connellys, the Pearces, and the Devaleras, the Paisleys and the Glasses, the H-blocks, the dirty protestors, the hunger strikers and the millions who sacrificed a quiet life for their chose cause.
Why why why was that cause so important and why did it find a fertile soil in the western environs of Scotland. How did so many strands of history which touched everyone irrespective of religion, race, gender, or colour result in a tapestry that became a Catholic and Protestant polarisation. Why was all this ignorantly depicted as the preserve of two football clubs in my home city.
Where was the cause and effect of each clubs historic identification with the community that claimed fealty?
Where was the honest analysis that apportioned causes, blame, and responsibility.
The answer is simple, it was nowhere to be seen, and all we got was a tabloid (or do we need to use the term ‘compact’ now) piece of populist nonsense which was only not deliberately Machiavellian because those producing it are obviously not clever enough to stage manage their desired message.
But the damage in many parts of these isles, though not easy to gauge, is as if the superficiality and damning populism was deliberate.
Because it was ‘Panorama’, many will believe that it was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Because it was said at all (remember the Sun and the damning of Liverpool supporters) many will have had there own ill-informed prejudices further fuelled, and as a consequence the quest to find an answer has been ill-served.
I know that many will say that the programme was never going to be able to cover such a subject with any serious degree of rigour, and any considered viewpoint would agree with this.
Simply put then the answer was not to deal with it at all in the medium employed. To pretend to be treating such an encyclopaedic question with all the sensationalism of a page 3 hack resulted unsurprisingly in ....page 3.
So to go back to the BBC charter, I am afraid it definitely didn’t inform, it certainly didn’t educate, and in so far as entertainment goes well I suppose I did laugh at it quite a bit.
.....to provide sound and television programmes of information, education and entertainment.......
I suppose I could read all sorts of clandestine motivations or institutional conspiracy theories into the travesty of investigative journalism that was broadcast last night under the laughable disguise of ‘Panorama’.
I suppose I could highlight to a great extent my own prejudices both conscious and subconscious in reaching my conclusion of a deliberately warped and unbalanced analysis of a cultural and historic thread which has shaped and fashioned many of the features both good and bad, which comprise the sociological hinterland of this small corner of God’s sod.
The above however would only be relevant if I had come out of the viewing and listening experience with even a modicum of additional illumination of the historic maelstroms which have resulted in many of the symptomatic experiences portrayed and pandered to BBC Scotland’s nasty little bigot’s guide to 800 years of oppressed Celtic (with a hard c) identity.
Where oh where was the definition of sectarianism, where was the distillation of the overlaps between unionism, republicanism, the catholic church, the orange order, the Irish famine, the mass exodus from Ireland, the inhumane treatment of all by the British governments down through the years, the bussing of majorities into the six counties of the north, the honourable and dishonourable intentions of those on all sides of the argument.
Where was the examination of the post reformation and pre-Irish influx institutional sectarianism and barbarity that was perpetrated on Scotlands native born Catholics.
Where was the attempt, to try and look at the causes and draw positive conclusions on where to go in future.
Where was the evocation of the spirit of those who travelled on that ‘floating bridge’ of boats of ‘heads and faces’ from a country where decaying corpses littered a land of hoplessness but where millions of tons of potatoes either rotted on the quayside in Dublin, or were shipped to the feed the landed gentry and their subjects in Jerusalem’s green and pleasant land.
Where were the views of the the calvanists, Knox, the Carsons and Connellys, the Pearces, and the Devaleras, the Paisleys and the Glasses, the H-blocks, the dirty protestors, the hunger strikers and the millions who sacrificed a quiet life for their chose cause.
Why why why was that cause so important and why did it find a fertile soil in the western environs of Scotland. How did so many strands of history which touched everyone irrespective of religion, race, gender, or colour result in a tapestry that became a Catholic and Protestant polarisation. Why was all this ignorantly depicted as the preserve of two football clubs in my home city.
Where was the cause and effect of each clubs historic identification with the community that claimed fealty?
Where was the honest analysis that apportioned causes, blame, and responsibility.
The answer is simple, it was nowhere to be seen, and all we got was a tabloid (or do we need to use the term ‘compact’ now) piece of populist nonsense which was only not deliberately Machiavellian because those producing it are obviously not clever enough to stage manage their desired message.
But the damage in many parts of these isles, though not easy to gauge, is as if the superficiality and damning populism was deliberate.
Because it was ‘Panorama’, many will believe that it was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Because it was said at all (remember the Sun and the damning of Liverpool supporters) many will have had there own ill-informed prejudices further fuelled, and as a consequence the quest to find an answer has been ill-served.
I know that many will say that the programme was never going to be able to cover such a subject with any serious degree of rigour, and any considered viewpoint would agree with this.
Simply put then the answer was not to deal with it at all in the medium employed. To pretend to be treating such an encyclopaedic question with all the sensationalism of a page 3 hack resulted unsurprisingly in ....page 3.
So to go back to the BBC charter, I am afraid it definitely didn’t inform, it certainly didn’t educate, and in so far as entertainment goes well I suppose I did laugh at it quite a bit.
Saturday, May 24, 2003
2003 - a Spain Odyssey
Good old Helen of Troy! Renowned from classical times as the face that launched a thousand ships. A mere thousand ships…what a puny effort!
36 years ago the simple word ‘Lisbon’ launched ships, and trains, and boats, and planes, and cars, and bikes, and an armada of every type of vessel possible as well as generating a million stories upon which, had Homer been around at the time, he would surely have based both his Iliad and Odyssey.
The simple reality of that word ‘Lisbon’ in the pantheon of followers of Celtic Football Club is remarkable enough in its basic truths and will, as long as there are Celtic supporters with memories, hearts and an instinctive devotion and identity with what is lovingly called ‘The History’, with apologies to Mr Spock, ‘live long and prosper’.
However, the legend that is ever nourished by the reality of Lisbon, and in kind like all good legends, enhances and glorifies the virtues of that reality, will not only live, breath and thrive, it will also as it has done for the last 36 years, grow in stature, impact, reverence and not least in the multiplication of the numbers who both attended or just believed they attended the Estadio Nacional on that 25th day of May 1967.
Even for those who were too young or not born at the time, our ancestral tree is apparently populated on every branch with hosts of forebears whose common denominator was the completion of by hook or by crook and fair means or foul, that journey and the invasion of Portugal’s fair capital all those years ago.
Much mockery is spread on these tales and claims. To the annoyance and frustration of a multitude of emotional eunuchs the fact that with each advancing year the acclaim, recognition and commemoration continues to both exist and grow, seems to be preposterous, and ridicule is poured on the ever burgeoning numbers who have the simple desire to not only state but truly want to believe that ‘I was there’.
These people who mock are soulless creatures of the night with no recognition what the essence of ‘The History’ actually means. It is they who deserve to be pitied and ridiculed. It is they who live as Scarfe-like disfigured caricatures of stereotypes, who persist in swaggering up and down streets throughout the world in July dressed like night railway workers in their fluorescent halters, proclaiming their allegiance and fealty to King William of Orange, the apprentice boys, and The Battle of the Boyne, not from 36 years ago, not even 136 years ago, but 313 years ago.
And unlike the simple and naïve self-deception of the ever more ubiquitous claim that ‘I was there’, there is an evil motivation, a destructive and stunted intellect, a castrated heart, and a sub-human despair upon which feeds the bigoted and fetid putrefaction known as orangeism and its homunculus-in-arms - inhumane bigotry.
Let them come and ask and examine the reality of the much more profound truth and the redemptive quality of man’s capability of demonstrating humanity to his fellow man that lies behind that inconsequential self-deception of ‘I was there’. Let them examine why so many wanted to be there; let them truly with both open mind and open heart try to really understand and recognise the benevolence and welcome comfort provided by ‘The History’.
A ‘History’ that was rooted in poverty and despair, nurtured by hope, belief and achievement; that flowered in a realisation of identity and commonweal and has prospered ever since in the simple innate belief in man’s capability and desire to strive and sacrifice for the sake of others.
Sentimental? Perhaps! Romantic? Yes! Dramatic? Undoubtedly! True? Indisputably! Desirable……….? Well, I dread the outcome of the stark alternative.
And the beating heart and graceful soul at the centre of all of this is Celtic Football Club, pumping through the arteries’ of every conscientious supporter the story and the message, the hopes and the dreams, or simply ‘The History’.
And it is because of that ‘History’ that 12,000 fans were drawn to Lisbon. It is because of that History that 30,000 fans think they went to Lisbon. Most importantly it is because of that History that 80,000 fans DID go to Seville.
So what is this phenomenon that was set in train all those years ago by Brother Walfrid.
What is this ‘History’ that we want to be part of?
It is more than just a club, more than just a team, more than just a bunch of unrivalled supporters, more even than the events great and tragic, the personalities magnificent and mundane, the seasons prosperous and barren, the tears joyful and jerking.
The ‘History’ has a meaning that is given substance by our identification with it. This substance is the essential and at times ephemeral virtue that made people like Jock Stein, Danny McGrain, Tommy Gemmell, Willie Wallace, Ronnie Simpson discard the taunts and arrows of hatred that came their way because they played for Celtic Football Club, because they were regarded as traitors and turn-coats. These were underrated men who were more than footballers.
Through them and through Brother Walfrid and through the thousands upon thousands of heads and faces that crowded the floating bridge between Scotland and Ireland in the years following the famine whose lives were enriched and in many cases saved, irrespective of creed or colour by the actions of Celtic Football Club, this ‘History’ is real and solid. Even in those where that knowledge may lie unrecognised, it is through this that they were either born or chose to join the Celtic family. It is this that makes ‘The History’. It is through this that thousands upon thousands of us live out our hopes and our dreams. And like all hopes and dreams, they are not necessarily fulfilled, but that does not make them any less real.
I have been lucky; I have had that hope and dream three times. Lisbon, Milan, and now Seville. In the case of Lisbon and Milan I wasn’t there. I had acquaintances and friends who were and I am utterly and unashamedly jealous.
So when Seville came around, it would have taken something special to have stopped me from getting there. But I didn’t just want to get there – after all the spirit of Lisbon like (as the song goes) ‘the name Albert Kidd lingered on’.
I didn’t want to plan it in the sense of just flying in seeing the game and flying out. I wanted something haphazard about it. I wanted a degree of difficulty. I wanted something more than just a game. I wanted a pilgrimage, I wanted an Odyssey, and I wanted a one of those dreams that just for once would come so true.
Degree of difficulty, you’ve got to be joking. Comparatively mine was a piece of cake.
Admittedly I cut it fine getting to London and only picking my Spanish rail tickets up on the Saturday in Hammersmith 4 minutes before the RENFE offices shut for the weekend. Yes I flew to Barca, lost my phone, camera, and reading glasses, slept on streets, in Barcelona, Madrid, Seville and Valencia. Didn’t get a ticket and watched on a big screen in Plaza Triana with approximately 30,000 others, eventually made my way back, etc etc
But my tales fall into insignificance in comparison with the true devotees. Those whose cars and vans broke down in Perpignon, and Montpellier. The hitchhiker who had got the train to Paris and somehow had ended up in Barcelona. The Croatian from Zagreb I met on the Madrid train; he was on crutches recovering from a bust leg which was still plastered up. He had a Celtic shirt on but could only say three words in English (which to be fair is three words more than I can say in Serbo-Croat, but there again I don’t travel two thousand miles to watch Dynamo Zagreb). By the way he knew all the songs, so we sang together and drank together and I think I also taught him a few more words.
Remember Goldfinger and the scene where Pussy Galore and her flying school spray the knock out gas and the streets end up with bodies everywhere. Well I think they flew over Seville in those glorious nights before and after the Final.
They could have used Seville as a mock up exercise of the aftermath of a nuclear war. 80,000 and one arrest (the rumour was it was for being sober!).
The Cathedral has and will probably never again see anything like it. There was a continuous Mass (as in Holy) being celebrated in one of the 4 chapels. I spent some time in the Cathedral as I had found that at the back of the Sacristy was a private toilet and washroom. It was very unchristian like of me not to tell anyone else about it.
Each Mass was filled to overflowing by a constantly replenished queue of green and white clad communicants. Wafers were undoubtedly in big demand!
And still they kept coming, crowding into every square and avenue, every bar and restaurant, some with tickets most without, some with hotel rooms, most without. I personally had the luxury of getting a couple of hours in one of those cashpoint lobbies. But I didn’t want to sleep. I walked and walked, along the banks of the Alphonse Canal, stepping over hooped bodies. I strolled along the edge of the Rio Guadalquivir stopping almost every 10 yards to marvel at the parties that just kept going on and on. Every Spanish bar as far as the eye could see stayed open and was full to overflowing. The only bars that seemed to close were the Irish ones – Flaherty’s and Trinity. Still they were open early for breakfast – that’s breakfast as in ‘a Pint of Guinness and something to wash it down with’
Thousands upon thousands upon thousands just kept flooding into the town. For two unforgettable unmissable days and nights Spanish became the second language of Seville. And what a city, what a people.
And what’s more with some sort of remarkable serendipity I bumped into Tony and Gary with whom I occasionally share a glass or two in Sharkey’s!
I could go on and on and on and at some time or other I probably will!
But to sum up….I think the only words that could approach doing it justice are those of St Martin himself
Astonishing! Simply Astonishing!…….
And all caused by something equally if not more astonishing ….‘The History’.
2003 - A Spain Odyssey
36 years ago the simple word ‘Lisbon’ launched ships, and trains, and boats, and planes, and cars, and bikes, and an armada of every type of vessel possible as well as generating a million stories upon which, had Homer been around at the time, he would surely have based both his Iliad and Odyssey.
The simple reality of that word ‘Lisbon’ in the pantheon of followers of Celtic Football Club is remarkable enough in its basic truths and will, as long as there are Celtic supporters with memories, hearts and an instinctive devotion and identity with what is lovingly called ‘The History’, with apologies to Mr Spock, ‘live long and prosper’.
However, the legend that is ever nourished by the reality of Lisbon, and in kind like all good legends, enhances and glorifies the virtues of that reality, will not only live, breath and thrive, it will also as it has done for the last 36 years, grow in stature, impact, reverence and not least in the multiplication of the numbers who both attended or just believed they attended the Estadio Nacional on that 25th day of May 1967.
Even for those who were too young or not born at the time, our ancestral tree is apparently populated on every branch with hosts of forebears whose common denominator was the completion of by hook or by crook and fair means or foul, that journey and the invasion of Portugal’s fair capital all those years ago.
Much mockery is spread on these tales and claims. To the annoyance and frustration of a multitude of emotional eunuchs the fact that with each advancing year the acclaim, recognition and commemoration continues to both exist and grow, seems to be preposterous, and ridicule is poured on the ever burgeoning numbers who have the simple desire to not only state but truly want to believe that ‘I was there’.
These people who mock are soulless creatures of the night with no recognition what the essence of ‘The History’ actually means. It is they who deserve to be pitied and ridiculed. It is they who live as Scarfe-like disfigured caricatures of stereotypes, who persist in swaggering up and down streets throughout the world in July dressed like night railway workers in their fluorescent halters, proclaiming their allegiance and fealty to King William of Orange, the apprentice boys, and The Battle of the Boyne, not from 36 years ago, not even 136 years ago, but 313 years ago.
And unlike the simple and naïve self-deception of the ever more ubiquitous claim that ‘I was there’, there is an evil motivation, a destructive and stunted intellect, a castrated heart, and a sub-human despair upon which feeds the bigoted and fetid putrefaction known as orangeism and its homunculus-in-arms - inhumane bigotry.
Let them come and ask and examine the reality of the much more profound truth and the redemptive quality of man’s capability of demonstrating humanity to his fellow man that lies behind that inconsequential self-deception of ‘I was there’. Let them examine why so many wanted to be there; let them truly with both open mind and open heart try to really understand and recognise the benevolence and welcome comfort provided by ‘The History’.
A ‘History’ that was rooted in poverty and despair, nurtured by hope, belief and achievement; that flowered in a realisation of identity and commonweal and has prospered ever since in the simple innate belief in man’s capability and desire to strive and sacrifice for the sake of others.
Sentimental? Perhaps! Romantic? Yes! Dramatic? Undoubtedly! True? Indisputably! Desirable……….? Well, I dread the outcome of the stark alternative.
And the beating heart and graceful soul at the centre of all of this is Celtic Football Club, pumping through the arteries’ of every conscientious supporter the story and the message, the hopes and the dreams, or simply ‘The History’.
And it is because of that ‘History’ that 12,000 fans were drawn to Lisbon. It is because of that History that 30,000 fans think they went to Lisbon. Most importantly it is because of that History that 80,000 fans DID go to Seville.
So what is this phenomenon that was set in train all those years ago by Brother Walfrid.
What is this ‘History’ that we want to be part of?
It is more than just a club, more than just a team, more than just a bunch of unrivalled supporters, more even than the events great and tragic, the personalities magnificent and mundane, the seasons prosperous and barren, the tears joyful and jerking.
The ‘History’ has a meaning that is given substance by our identification with it. This substance is the essential and at times ephemeral virtue that made people like Jock Stein, Danny McGrain, Tommy Gemmell, Willie Wallace, Ronnie Simpson discard the taunts and arrows of hatred that came their way because they played for Celtic Football Club, because they were regarded as traitors and turn-coats. These were underrated men who were more than footballers.
Through them and through Brother Walfrid and through the thousands upon thousands of heads and faces that crowded the floating bridge between Scotland and Ireland in the years following the famine whose lives were enriched and in many cases saved, irrespective of creed or colour by the actions of Celtic Football Club, this ‘History’ is real and solid. Even in those where that knowledge may lie unrecognised, it is through this that they were either born or chose to join the Celtic family. It is this that makes ‘The History’. It is through this that thousands upon thousands of us live out our hopes and our dreams. And like all hopes and dreams, they are not necessarily fulfilled, but that does not make them any less real.
I have been lucky; I have had that hope and dream three times. Lisbon, Milan, and now Seville. In the case of Lisbon and Milan I wasn’t there. I had acquaintances and friends who were and I am utterly and unashamedly jealous.
So when Seville came around, it would have taken something special to have stopped me from getting there. But I didn’t just want to get there – after all the spirit of Lisbon like (as the song goes) ‘the name Albert Kidd lingered on’.
I didn’t want to plan it in the sense of just flying in seeing the game and flying out. I wanted something haphazard about it. I wanted a degree of difficulty. I wanted something more than just a game. I wanted a pilgrimage, I wanted an Odyssey, and I wanted a one of those dreams that just for once would come so true.
Degree of difficulty, you’ve got to be joking. Comparatively mine was a piece of cake.
Admittedly I cut it fine getting to London and only picking my Spanish rail tickets up on the Saturday in Hammersmith 4 minutes before the RENFE offices shut for the weekend. Yes I flew to Barca, lost my phone, camera, and reading glasses, slept on streets, in Barcelona, Madrid, Seville and Valencia. Didn’t get a ticket and watched on a big screen in Plaza Triana with approximately 30,000 others, eventually made my way back, etc etc
But my tales fall into insignificance in comparison with the true devotees. Those whose cars and vans broke down in Perpignon, and Montpellier. The hitchhiker who had got the train to Paris and somehow had ended up in Barcelona. The Croatian from Zagreb I met on the Madrid train; he was on crutches recovering from a bust leg which was still plastered up. He had a Celtic shirt on but could only say three words in English (which to be fair is three words more than I can say in Serbo-Croat, but there again I don’t travel two thousand miles to watch Dynamo Zagreb). By the way he knew all the songs, so we sang together and drank together and I think I also taught him a few more words.
Remember Goldfinger and the scene where Pussy Galore and her flying school spray the knock out gas and the streets end up with bodies everywhere. Well I think they flew over Seville in those glorious nights before and after the Final.
They could have used Seville as a mock up exercise of the aftermath of a nuclear war. 80,000 and one arrest (the rumour was it was for being sober!).
The Cathedral has and will probably never again see anything like it. There was a continuous Mass (as in Holy) being celebrated in one of the 4 chapels. I spent some time in the Cathedral as I had found that at the back of the Sacristy was a private toilet and washroom. It was very unchristian like of me not to tell anyone else about it.
Each Mass was filled to overflowing by a constantly replenished queue of green and white clad communicants. Wafers were undoubtedly in big demand!
And still they kept coming, crowding into every square and avenue, every bar and restaurant, some with tickets most without, some with hotel rooms, most without. I personally had the luxury of getting a couple of hours in one of those cashpoint lobbies. But I didn’t want to sleep. I walked and walked, along the banks of the Alphonse Canal, stepping over hooped bodies. I strolled along the edge of the Rio Guadalquivir stopping almost every 10 yards to marvel at the parties that just kept going on and on. Every Spanish bar as far as the eye could see stayed open and was full to overflowing. The only bars that seemed to close were the Irish ones – Flaherty’s and Trinity. Still they were open early for breakfast – that’s breakfast as in ‘a Pint of Guinness and something to wash it down with’
Thousands upon thousands upon thousands just kept flooding into the town. For two unforgettable unmissable days and nights Spanish became the second language of Seville. And what a city, what a people.
And what’s more with some sort of remarkable serendipity I bumped into Tony and Gary with whom I occasionally share a glass or two in Sharkey’s!
I could go on and on and on and at some time or other I probably will!
But to sum up….I think the only words that could approach doing it justice are those of St Martin himself
Astonishing! Simply Astonishing!…….
And all caused by something equally if not more astonishing ….‘The History’.
2003 - A Spain Odyssey
or
(You’ll be marking your Lotto, while we’re getting Blotto)
From north and south, from east and west, by boat and train and plane,
By car and foot, by barge and bike, we made our way to Spain,
We moved by day, we moved by night, by land and sea and air,
We hitched, we hiked, we thumbed, we stowed, somehow we all got there.
Flight after flight descended in the blazing Spanish sun,
Not one or two or three or four, but thousands on each run,
A tidal wave of Bhoys and Ghirls, a flush of living green,
Coursed through the streets like streams in spate to flood the sun drenched scene.
As every train sped on each track, it’s whistle blown on high,
It warned the world the Tim Malloys had drunk the buffets dry,
We came from every sovereign land and every nation state,
We came with Celtic in our hearts, we came to face our fate.
From Hong Kong, Hobart, New York too, Karachi, and Lahore,
From Melbourne, Perth, Johannesburg, from north to southern shore,
We came from right we came from left we came from up and down,
From every street and every lane we filled the whole damn town,
From ‘Catedral y Giralda’ to Rio Guadalquivir,
We drank the red, we drank the white, sambuca, stout, and beer,
From Santa Juste to Santa Cruz through to Real Alcazar,
Appeared just like the Gallowgate, each inn a Celtic bar.
What of the game? Well such is life, the facts for all to see
Were that The Celts scored only two, and those cheating bastards ..Three!
But though we lost, each Bhoy in green - a hero every one,
Proved once again that when in Hoops, these colours never run!
A flood of tears I saw that night, from wean to OAP,
But tears that sprung from bursting pride, I know ’cos one was me,
And singing voices once again resounded till the sun
Arose and seen the Celtic hosts and thought ‘What if they’d won!’
We came, we saw, we conquered hearts, we left without the prize,
But left with something dearer still, with smiles and sparkling eyes,
And though we lost the final there, ‘twas not a bitter pill,
We’ll ne’er forget that shining jewel, we’ll ne’er forget Seville.
(You’ll be marking your Lotto, while we’re getting Blotto)
From north and south, from east and west, by boat and train and plane,
By car and foot, by barge and bike, we made our way to Spain,
We moved by day, we moved by night, by land and sea and air,
We hitched, we hiked, we thumbed, we stowed, somehow we all got there.
Flight after flight descended in the blazing Spanish sun,
Not one or two or three or four, but thousands on each run,
A tidal wave of Bhoys and Ghirls, a flush of living green,
Coursed through the streets like streams in spate to flood the sun drenched scene.
As every train sped on each track, it’s whistle blown on high,
It warned the world the Tim Malloys had drunk the buffets dry,
We came from every sovereign land and every nation state,
We came with Celtic in our hearts, we came to face our fate.
From Hong Kong, Hobart, New York too, Karachi, and Lahore,
From Melbourne, Perth, Johannesburg, from north to southern shore,
We came from right we came from left we came from up and down,
From every street and every lane we filled the whole damn town,
From ‘Catedral y Giralda’ to Rio Guadalquivir,
We drank the red, we drank the white, sambuca, stout, and beer,
From Santa Juste to Santa Cruz through to Real Alcazar,
Appeared just like the Gallowgate, each inn a Celtic bar.
What of the game? Well such is life, the facts for all to see
Were that The Celts scored only two, and those cheating bastards ..Three!
But though we lost, each Bhoy in green - a hero every one,
Proved once again that when in Hoops, these colours never run!
A flood of tears I saw that night, from wean to OAP,
But tears that sprung from bursting pride, I know ’cos one was me,
And singing voices once again resounded till the sun
Arose and seen the Celtic hosts and thought ‘What if they’d won!’
We came, we saw, we conquered hearts, we left without the prize,
But left with something dearer still, with smiles and sparkling eyes,
And though we lost the final there, ‘twas not a bitter pill,
We’ll ne’er forget that shining jewel, we’ll ne’er forget Seville.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
