Today, at Celtic Park, we will take on Standard Liege in a pre-season friendly that ordinarily wouldn’t be about much at all. But this is our first game at Parkhead since the last campaign came to a close, and it wasn’t for nothing that it ended with an open-top bus ride.
What Brendan Rodgers has achieved at Celtic has been monumental. It is of epochal significance for all of us, but especially for people of my generation who didn’t get to see the Lions. This team has gone where even they could not. An Invincible campaign.
Back to back trebles. The kind of success we’ve been dreaming about our whole lives.
And as this season gets underway there is even more history to be made, even more glory to shoot for, even greater things to play for. Eight in a row, leaving us one step shy of equally our greatest ever team on that front. Ten within our grasp, and we won’t stop there either.
This club has solid foundations.
There’s no reason this can’t go on and on.
This week has seen the media churn out nonsense and a lot of euphoria at another club over a scrappy 2-0 win at home against a team one step up from being amateurs. We, on the other hand, secured a 3-0 win away against national champions, in a gruelling encounter played in high heat, our first competitive game of the new campaign. It’s a fantastic result, and shows the maturity and growth of the team who lost 1-0 in Gibraltar a mere two years ago.
And not only did we play well in that game but we experimented with a brand new formation which utilises our two French strikers to great effect … and they will get better together as this season goes on. There is a lot to look forward to at Celtic.
That’s what today is all about. About honouring this team and this manager who have brought us such phenomenally good times. It’s about looking back over the last two years at what they have done, but it’s also about looking forward to what they will do in the future.
Enjoy it folks. We earned it.
It belongs to us.