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Celtic Away Days In Europe. The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.

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Away days in Europe.

The very best or the very worst. In the modern age, which is what I want to focus on, there are individual games which stand out as being almost beautiful. There are some that are as ugly as a scowling Sevconite after twelve hours on the bevvy.

I am going to focus on three of each; three good, three bad and three ugly. The reasons for this are simple; there aren’t enough really good ones to do a full article on them. The irony is, one of the good ones will come from this season, and you get no prizes for guessing which.

In the interest of keeping this sane, I am going to make one of the bad ones a night when only the result was bad. The event itself was wholly positive apart from that.

Tomorrow night we have the odds stacked against us. The odds of our own recent history.

The media has already gone over it all a million times, there’s no need for me to do the same. But Brendan has actually improved our away form; that’s a story the media doesn’t like to tell. It’s the one that might prove crucial to where we end up.

The Good: Barcelona, UEFA Cup, March 2004.

This is filed under Good. It should be filed under OMFG How Great Was That? Because it was. One of only two times I ever cried like a baby after a game – the other was Boavista, the night we got the UEFA Cup Final – in a Stirling boozer, I turned to my pal Gemma, hugged her, in tears, and said “We now live in a world where Celtic has knocked Barcelona out of Europe.”

It was that good. It was that big. It was that incredible.

Looking back I still can’t believe we did it that night. It should have been impossible. We had gotten through the first leg despite a ridiculous punch-up in the tunnel where Rab Douglas got himself sent off, and we somehow prevailed 1-0 courtesy of Big Bad John Hartson … nobody really gave us a prayer in the Camp Nou, with big Bobo missing and a kid, literally, in young David Marshall between the sticks. Against Ronaldinho.

Marshall had impressed in the home game … this was a whole different order of magnitude. We worried about how he’d cope with the pressure. Larsson was to say after the game that the kid was too young to even realise he was under any!

All I can say is that Marshall must have had ice water in his veins. That night he put on a nerveless performance that is amongst the very best I’ve ever seen from a Celtic player on such a big stage. The only other comparable display was that of the King himself in Seville on the night of the UEFA Cup Final the season before.

We were, of course, outplayed for much of the night. They had all the possession, created the bulk of the chances. We defended like our lives depended on it – the performance of another young Celt, the brilliant John Kennedy, was central to the display as much as that of Marshall – and we got out alive. Barca were not, then, the soaring, majestic team they were to become a few years down the road but they were a magnificent side just the same.

And that night, we went to their ground and knocked them out of Europe.

It is one of the finest nights I’ve ever had as a Celtic fan.

The Bad: Shakthar Donetsk, Champions League, October 2004.

Just a few months after that spectacular night we were to suffer a calamitous defeat in the Ukraine, on my birthday of all days. I remember that night clearly. We had played well enough in the first half, and might even have taken the lead ourselves, but it was an atrocious second half performance, made worse by two injuries – to Jackie McNamara and big Chris. It virtually guaranteed our elimination from Europe at the Champions League group stages.

In the aftermath, the first signs of tension between Martin and the board; he complained about the “threadbare” nature of our squad and seemed to be hinting at the need to spend more money. If reports later on are to be believed he picked the worst possible time to do that; according to some, Brian Quinn and the Celtic board were locked in talks after that game about the spiralling deficit we had racked up on his watch.

The decision they made that night – that the wage bill would have to be reduced – were to lead to some radical cost cutting under Gordon Strachan … who actually found a way to do more with less, achieving twice what Martin didn’t … getting to the knockout phase of the Champions League.

But that was in the future.

That night was an epic headache and the first major sign that all was not well inside Celtic Park.

The Ugly: Barcelona, Champions League, September 2016

Oh God. Oh dear God.

Brendan has suffered a few of these, but that was easily the worst. Easily. It was a complete collapse on the night, one that will haunt us for years. Our worst ever European away deficit, it was a night when we played the best forward line ever assembled and they made our defence look like kids in a school playground trying to catch the grown ups.

That night was “learn your limits the hard way” and it was astonishing how poor we were. And yes, you have to consider the level of the opposition, but it was Don’t Watch Alone stuff that left us seriously fearful for the rest of the Group games.

The less said about it the better … only one away result in Europe was ever worse.

The Good: Anderlecht, Champions League, September 2017.

Soccer Football – Champions League – R.S.C. Anderlecht vs Celtic – Constant Vanden Stock Stadium, Brussels, Belgium – September 27, 2017 Celtic players celebrate after the match REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

Oh what a night. A rousing, resounding, fantastic Group Stage display which ended in a result that was phenomenal and priceless and beautiful and wonderful. The whole team raised their game to a new level, and Brendan secured one of the best away results we’ve had in the competition. Nobody had seen it coming. No-one had a clue we had it in us.

People want to talk about progress this season? That’s the night to point to, that and the away result against Rosenborg. That’s progress. That’s where we’ve grown as a team from last season, as the first leg result here has demonstrated.

Olivier Ntcham started the game looking shaky, but he grew into the match and ended up turning in a display of the highest quality. Even the injury to Scott Brown did not shake us. Leigh Griffiths got the opener and goals from Roberts and Scott Sinclair sealed the win – only our second ever in the Group Stages. That’s how big a result that was.

It also virtually guaranteed us European football after Christmas.

The defeat at Celtic Park dented our confidence but it did not over-turn that wonderful display in Belgium.

The Bad: Benfica, Champions League, November 2011.

We lost 3-0. The performance was shocking. This game could have made the Ugly but there was something beautiful about it anyway. A lot of our fans made the journey to do the Estadio Nacional pilgrimage; my old man would later write an article for CQN Magazine about that trip, which he said was one of the best he ever took as a Celtic fan.

That, on its own, would have made the whole thing worthwhile for a lot of our supporters, and been more important than the result. But even that was overshadowed by the magnificent gesture from our fans in paying tribute to Benfica’s fallen footballer Miklos Feher, who had died on the pitch during a match.

The unfurling of the banner in Feher’s memory was one of the most awesome pieces of altruism and compassion I’ve ever seen from our support, and that’s saying something. It put what happened on the pitch into some kind of perspective.

Yet for all that, the result was another European away horror show and in particular for Gary Caldwell who endured one of his most torrid nights in a Celtic shirt.

He scored an own goal in the 10th minute and then made a glaring mistake to allow them to score a second twelve minutes later. We were pretty much out of it by half-time but conceded a third with fourteen minutes to go.

Frustration, disappointment … but pride too, in the fans in particular for a gesture which made headlines and won us the praise of FIFA for the second time.

The Ugly: The Nightmare In Neuchatel, UEFA Cup, October 1991.

“The Horror. The Horror ….”

Francis Ford Coppolla could have crafted a new nightmarish vision out of Liam Brady’s worst night as Celtic boss. It was horrendous in every way, one of the worst displays from a Celtic team that there has ever been. There are no words that adequately do it justice.

The Times of London tried to; their summation was simple and brutal.

“Celtic’s worst result in European football saw them prostrated before a Neuchatel side which is marooned in the middle of the Swiss first division. Celtic’s defending was a parody of the art as they were dismantled, principally by Hossam Hassan, scorer of four of the Swiss goals.”

The match haunted Brady from that point onwards, and it lingered in the minds of many of players for years. Tony Cascarino – who was dire beyond belief that night – was so traumatised by the experience he covered it in his autobiography as one of the worst nights of his career.

“It was one of those awful nights when anything that can go wrong does go wrong; and when I wasn’t giving the ball away, I was tripping over myself … “ he wrote. “Liam pulled me off early in the second half. We were hammered 5-1 and the fans had a real go as we walked from the pitch. Liam was incensed in the dressing room. His team had played shamefully. His first managerial signing was making a mockery of him.”

Even thinking about that game brings me out in a cold sweat.

The Good: Liverpool, UEFA Cup, March 2003.

Magnificent. Just magnificent.

One of the best games of football I’ve ever watched as a Celtic fan, and an almost faultless display. Thompson scored with a free kick just before half time and that put us in one hell of a position for the second … but it was John Hartson’s goal with nine minutes left which will be remembered forevermore.

It was the Quarter Finals of the completion. We had drawn at home. Most people thought we were finished. To make it worse we had played in a League Cup Final the weekend before it, where Rangers had beaten us in awful, painful, heart-wrenching circumstances. Hartson himself had missed a penalty kick. All that was forgotten in an instant as he lashed the ball into the net.

That game left its mark on any number of our players that night; Neil Lennon would write extensively on it in his own book, and in particular the team talk Martin O’Neill had given the side, which Lennon, and others, say was the best they ever heard.

“”Everyone, but everyone, had predicted our demise, but at that point Martin showed his mettle. In the dressing room before the match he gave us an unforgettable talk,” Lennon wrote. “I personally do not think we needed much motivation as we were all sure of ourselves and positive that we would compete and get a result. Yet Martin’s words inspired us to even greater heights of determination.

“He looked around the dressing room and pointed out young Shaun Maloney. ‘This is a European quarter-final and this boy is only nineteen, but he might never get this opportunity again.’ He looked around the older guys and added: ‘You guys in your thirties probably won’t get the opportunity again to prove a point, to prove to England and Europe that you deserve respect, and that you are worthy of respect, and that you are worthy of a place in the semi-finals.’ He made his points tellingly in his usual manner and did so in two or three minutes, yet by the time he had finished we were ready to go out and run through brick walls if we needed to.”

That was the attitude we needed that night.

For the second time that season we had faced English opposition. Souness had famous called Blackburn’s first leg performance “men against boys” only for us to shut his stupid, ignorant mouth at Ewood Park … but Liverpool’s performance at Celtic Park had been infinitely better and more deadly … and we beat them as well.

The Bad: Aalborg, Champions League, November 2008.

Awful. Awful beyond words.

A Champions League group game which we should not have lost, never have lost, not in a millions years have lost.

Gordon had worked miracles and taken us to the knockout stages twice; this was the flip side of all the good work, another horrendous European away display which knocked the stuffing out of us and saw us sink out of Europe entirely.

This was game 18 in the Group Stages without a win. Talk about dire. It was the one we all thought would change that, a game against strictly low-rent opposition, a game we should have approached with confidence. But it was a nightmare, the sort of match you look back on with horror later. I remember being numbed that night, literally unable to believe it.

Bad signs had been there though. We had failed to beat them at home, drawing 0-0, on another awful night. Our league form was decent, we would go into the New Year with a good lead over the Ibrox club, but that too would eventually be thrown away.

This was a team dying on its arse, and that night in Denmark you could see the writing on the wall. Gordon had worked a minor miracle the season before, to see us pip the other mob on the last day of the season – I see they are greeting about that again today; pathetic – but there was to be no four in a row. If we had won that title they’d have been gone long before 2012.

That night in Aalborg was seriously awful.

It was a real European low-spot … but not the worst.

That one, hands down, belongs to …

The Ugly: Artmedia Bratislava. Champions League, July 2005.

Brendan Rodgers famously lost his first game as Celtic boss to the Lincoln Red Imps in what I do believe was the worst single 90-minute result in the history of our club. The reason it didn’t generate the sort of reaction that could have wrecked everything was that there was a certain buzz around Brendan and nobody realistically thought we would lose the tie overall.

It is impossible to conceive of a worst start to a new managerial career than that which Gordon Strachan “enjoyed” and which Celtic fans endured in July 2005.

The media has exaggerated beyond belief the idea that Celtic fans ever hated Strachan, but this was a guy about whom there was a scepticism, replacing Martin O’Neill, who had gotten us to a European final and was a club icon.

That guy needed a good start. He needed it badly. He needed it to win over supporters, and what he got instead was a hiding. A real, honest to God hiding and not only that, but it was a first round game and we were very clearly out of Europe barring a miracle.

Gordon had signed a number of players in the close season, and we had all hoped they would hit the ground running. There, in the heat, they were awful.

We were a goal down at half time, and not playing particularly well … the second half left us all shell-shocked.

I watched that game in a Gallowgate boozer with my old man and a few friends and we debated whether or not the manager even had a future on the way home.

Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed and we almost turned the tie around in the second leg – an astonishing home display which gave us a renewed belief – but that night is still seared on our souls.

Tomorrow Night … Which Group Will It Join?

There are games which might have made any of these columns. Lincoln Red Imps almost did. Malmo was shocking. Legia was disgraceful. Equally, our majestic performance against Ajax very nearly got the nod for the Good. Blackburn was special and I thought this season, against Rosenborg, we found a new level, which was echoed in Anderlecht later.

But the real question is where tomorrow night’s game will end up? Will it be good, bad or ugly? Any result where we go through will leave us all over the moon, of course, but a win would be up there with the best results we’ve had away from home in more than 20 years.

We can do it, I really believe that. The first leg display was played with such energy and vigour, and these players so clearly want to test themselves on this stage … a lot will depend on how well we start though. Concede an early goal and it’s a long night.

Score one though … and we’re in dreamland.

We’ll see this time tomorrow.

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