Tonight’s Champions League showpiece between Arsenal and Barcelona was a good battle, with two very good sides, both trying to play attacking football.
On the night the Spaniards had the quality, as most of us thought they would.
What struck me about the game – and not for the first time watching an EPL club compete on this stage – wasn’t anything that happened on the park but the way the crowd reacted off of it. Only Anfield resembles Celtic Park on a night like this, and even it is a pale imitation of the real thing.
It’s not for nothing that many of those Barcelona players describe our stadium as one of the best they’ve ever played in.
At times tonight, The Emirates was like a morgue where the only sounds you could hear apart from some touchline shouting was the thud of leather on leather.
Every time it showed you a clip of the Arsenal fans there were people sitting in edgy silence.
Where was the passion?
Where was the animation?
Where was the support for their side?
I see this a lot in the EPL as well, but you can give the fans of some of these teams some latitude in this area; the EPL, like the SPL, is played over a lot of matches with only a handful being genuine occasions for getting all the bells and whistles out.
But a Champions League night against one of the best teams on the planet deserves a crowd to match the occasion.
Tonight … what a let down from the home support.
The Barcelona fans made some noise, but then you expect that as they are very like the Celtic fans in their passion for, and appreciation of, the Beautiful Game. It helps to be supporting one of the finest teams ever to play the sport, but you get the impression they wouldn’t care.
Whenever there’s a poll of these things, fans across Europe vote Celtic Park amongst the best atmospheres in the sport. This is to say nothing of the number of players who’ve left Parkhead in absolute awe, and I’m talking about some of the biggest names in football, like Pirlo, Iniesta, Messi and others.
It’s that which helped turn us into such a formidable European force a few years back, and the sounds of Parkhead rocking to that victory over Barca a couple of years back will live forever in the memories of those who were there.
Not so much in London this evening.
I’m not going to sit here and say that a rollicking atmosphere would have been the difference tonight between a home win and Barcelona strolling on into the next round. But you would have thought the Gunners fans would have raised the roof and let the Catalans know they were in a game.
Celtic Park would have been a cauldron of noise and the fans would have kept on singing no matter the score line, as the small contingent of our supporters did in the Nou Camp the last time we visited there, and got our 6-1 dismantling.
This is what makes our club special, and when we get back onto the Champions League stage whatever happens on the park, we’re going to show the pretenders from London and elsewhere how you get behind a team, and how much power the 12th man really has.