Tonight, the Champions League Final will give Celtic fans everywhere pause, on the day after we celebrated another anniversary of that wonderful, defining, afternoon in Lisbon. Tonight is what we aspire to be, a team at the top of the European ladder again.
It is nearly impossible to conceive of it happening in our lifetimes but we keep on dreaming.
It’s the responsibility of everyone at our club to prepare us fully for when the next major changes shake through European football. That they will come is not in the slightest doubt; Peter Lawwell speaks of them enough.
Positioning Celtic for those gigantic reforms is not just in his job description, he sees it as central to everything we do.
Everything we are doing right now is being done for that day. The foundations are being laid for it. The infrastructure is being put in place for it. Peter Lawwell is using his presence on the board at the European Club Association and his influence at UEFA to keep our club in the minds of all the other important leaders. They will not forget us.
From Scotland, we will never reach the Promised Land of a Champions League Final. But a pan-European league is a platform from which we can build the sort of team which can. The money will be there, and especially when people are watching in numbers that start to eat into the TV contracts getting handing out to a certain domestic league.
Celtic thinks ahead. We can watch this game tonight as a pure football spectacle, and think of what might one day be and I think it will be a fantastic match overall.
Sitting in the BT studios, Steven Gerrard will enjoy it as a fan. Right now he’s part of the Liverpool family and basking in the reflected glory of what Jurgen Klopp has been able to pull off here. He gave his career to that club; tonight he is fully entitled to feel close to the action. The stardust of the occasion can get on his suit jacket, and in part because the last time a Liverpool captain held this big cup aloft it was him. And he was imperious that night.
But in five days all of that is ancient history. In five days he’s going to be at Ibrox, and then a whole new chapter of his life starts and it will bear not the least, not the slightest, resemblance to where he is this evening and what he’s doing there. There is no stardust where he’s going, just a pile of ashes. The warmth of the reception he got when he arrived in Kiev and which our papers somehow tried to make a reflection on their favourite club will soon be forgotten as the cold reality starts to set in of exactly what his new fans expect from him.
And with today’s news that he’s gone from wanting Martin Skrtel to chasing free transfer 34 year old James Collins, another hard truth will already be coming home to him, belatedly, sure but too bad; he’d have had a bigger budget and a better chance to win things if he had taken the MK Dons job when it was offered to him a year ago.
He should enjoy tonight. He should enjoy hanging around with the greats, with the big names, in a city teeming with adoring fans and acolytes. In a little over a week he arrives in a wholly different football environment where the biggest name in the club environs is a moaning faced Scot who was banned by the last manager for undermining him.
And the city will be half filled with people who do not wish him well and who’s other half will all too soon hate the sight of him and make that plain in ways that he will not want to share with his wife and kids, who he’s leaving back in England.
Tonight’s as good as it gets for him, and it will never be nearly this good, not even on the periphery of nearly this good, not even remotely in the same universe as this good, again. And the most amazing thing of it is that he still appears to have no clear idea of just what he’s getting into or how the Hell he’s going to cope with it.
Enjoy the game, folks. Talk to you all tomorrow.