Robbie Savage has been accused, at times, of being anti-Celtic. I don’t think he is. He’s just another EPL idiot who has let his association with the most hyped league in the world blind him to some simple facts, and one of those facts is this; there are about five teams in that league who can compete with Celtic in terms of our stature. The rest are just like the EPL itself; artificial, built on money, destined to collapse in failure.
I used to feel bad writing such stuff. I used to feel like I was doing a disservice to fellow football fans south of the border. But when you’ve been sneered at enough times by the supporters of Hull City (one time champions of what‘s now Football League Division one and two times winners of Football League Third Division North) because they can spend obscene sums of money to hover above the relegation zone then it gets irritating. Fast.
I don’t take Savage’s comments on Celtic personally; he’s a clown, expressing opinions that must sound good in his head and which are lapped up slavishly by a lazy media that has missed some of the biggest stories in the history of the game as they focus on fluff, but hold those opinions up to scrutiny and they melt like a handful of snow.
The smallest club in the EPL will post turnover far in excess of £100 million this coming year. That’s incredible. The league gets seven representatives in Europe, four in the big competition and three in the smaller Europa League. Yet for all their spending power, English clubs have won the Champions League three times in the last sixteen years and the Europa League twice. The clubs they face in those competitions are almost always financially outgunned.
That makes little difference.
English teams are often dispatched without fanfare. In that timeframe only four clubs – Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea have achieved anything of note in the Champions League (Arsenal got to a final but Henrik Larsson made sure they didn’t win it) and it’s probably not a surprise to realise that it was Chelsea and Liverpool who were their Europa League winners. The rest? Absolutely nowhere and this won’t be the year it changes.
Celtic’s record against the pride of England has been excellent over that time.
During the Road to Seville we took care of Blackburn and a very good Liverpool team. We’ve beaten Manchester United. We were overmatched against Arsenal, but at that time most clubs in Europe were. Our performances and results against City were both excellent.
Aside even from our results there’s the performances of Scott Brown, who Savage doubted would get a game for English clubs – much to the chagrin of Chris Sutton – who has officially got the highest passing stats of any player in the Champions League. Brown was much maligned even by a lot of Celtic fans before this season properly got underway – I know because I was one of them – but his turnaround under Rodgers has been extraordinary.
And it’s in light of these facts that Robbie Savage’s arrogance is all the more stupefying, and it’s fitting that with Southampton exiting from the Europa League last night at the hands of a team we scored five against that he should be subject to some slagging, especially in light of his remarks in relation to our performance in Israel. That night he said we were “embarrassing” and confidently stated that we’d not be good enough even to win the English Championship.
You can’t take those kind of comments seriously, especially not from a guy whose contribution to society outside of the sport was a sixth place finish on Strictly Come Dancing. And he broke his own nose performing a “slide to camera” there too. Aside from that, he once held the distinct honour of having been the most booked player in the English top flight’s history. He should grow his hair again and stick to being a bad 80’s rock group lead singer lookalike.
As I said earlier in the piece, I wouldn’t say he was anti-Celtic; in fact, he congratulated us warmly when we went through that night in Israel, but he’s got that arrogance that seems to permeate a lot of people who are involved in the game down south.
This was the year we turned the volume of it down somewhat.
What are the odds that next season we shut them up completely?
In Brendan We Trust.