Brendan: The Shock On The Rock … But Normal Service Soon Resumed
There aren’t many football results that actually have their own Wikipedia page, but the Shock Of Gibraltar does.
Looking back on it now, it seems surreal.
At the time I think I was about as angry over a performance as I’d ever been in my life.
Nobody thought it would define the Rodgers era; the guy was way too good a manager to let a setback like this knock him off course, but boy oh boy it was some setback. The Wiki page describes it as one of “the greatest shocks in European football history” and there is zero doubt that this is the case.
It wasn’t even the result that stunk so much, it was the whole display.
A player called Lee Casciaro did the damage; it is probably not a great shock to learn that he was the first ever player to score an international goal for Gibraltar and that it came against Scotland. His strike in the 48th minute ought to have woken us up, but it didn’t and the rest of the game was all about a sense of mounting frustration and anger.
The manager could not have imagined a worse star. He could not have crafted it better if that had been the intention all along; a performance to put all of our rivals at ease and leave them vulnerable to what was to follow.
If you showed people that game and told them that one of the sides involved in it would go on to win a domestic clean sweep without losing a single match there is nobody who would have bet on that team being Celtic, which makes what we did all the more remarkable.
Lee Casciaro himself cheered on every Celtic victory that season.
“It only made what we did look better and better,” he said.
The only game he didn’t cheer on was the second leg, where a 3-0 win at Celtic Park put the world to rights again and started the bandwagon rolling on one of the most incredible seasons we’ve ever witnessed as fans.