Tomorrow we will contest the League Cup Final against Aberdeen, and our fans will be hoping to see a little bit of history made. Should we win it will be the 100th trophy in our magnificent history. At the helm right now we have a fine man, and he is backed by an able board of directors, presiding over a team which is as settled as I’ve ever seen one at Celtic Park.
If we win the League Cup we will bring it back to Parkhead for the next home game, and every player on the pitch will have taken a place in the Book of Celtic, forever. That is a huge incentive for every single one of them.
We have one Hell of a history at our club, and it’s a huge privilege to know we are here for a moment like this. Other clubs might claim more honours, but few have one with more honour, and certainly not the one that used to inhabit the other side of Glasgow.
We will have triumphed in spite of existing in the same sphere as a club that cheated, doped and depended on the largesse of banks and a helping hand from the refs. 100 trophies, in a country whose football association isn’t exactly our friend, and where a large part of the population hates our guts?
That’s an incredible achievement by any standard you judge it on.
The Scottish press can say what it likes about devalued titles because Rangers isn’t there; they are oddly silent on the nearly twenty years of financial doping and outright cheating which nullified even the idea of a fair competition.
They glorify those years, and ignore the facts that are now in the public domain. For their nine in a row we were a pale imitation of what we are now. No-one ever mentions that either, or that our financial performance outstripped theirs in each of them.
Theirs is a world record, they tell us. Repeatedly. Loudly. Even if they still existed, how many of those trophies carries a slight taint? Even the first title was “shared” with Dumbarton; when they talk about the quest for 55 what they are really talking about is title 54 and a half, but that never finds its way into the discourse somehow. Sevco has no top flight titles; Rangers didn’t get to a clean 54. We’re currently sitting on number 47; by the time we reach our ten in a row goal we’ll be very near to overtaking that number.
100 trophies in our illustrious existence.
Untainted. Won clean.
By a club that has been built, brick by brick, into the biggest in the country and one of the most famous in the world. There have been lean years and bad times along the way. We’ve suffered hardships and endured heartache. We’ve come through tragedy and triumph to get here. This is the club of our parents and our grandparents and theirs before them; what an honour it is to carry the torch through this moment, and what an immense responsibility we have in passing it on.
None of us will be here to see trophy 200. That’s just the way it goes. But the club itself will certainly get there, and it won’t take us as long to reach that milestone as it did to reach this one. Because we are the last remaining superpower, the biggest club in the land, and if we leave one mark on Celtic in our time here it’s that we were here for this, and from Fergus onwards this was a club we built as a Family, as a collective, as a joint endeavour.
Tomorrow is special. Celtic is special.
This will be 100 trophies in 128 years.
No other (surviving) club anywhere can boast such a proud record.