Those of us who are neither prone to hysteria or Sevco fantasists believing that all silverware is created equal know there is nothing to gain from getting carried away over pre-season matches.
To me, they are about fitness and experimentation. Nobody learns anything from them.
Even when your team wins you have to know you might be playing against a team whose manager and players are taking it as a glorified training exercise.
In that regard, all you can hope for is that you see certain players make a real effort to try and impress their managers and that the rest get through the exercise unscathed. In that regard, today wasn’t quite mission accomplished. Taylor took a sore one.
His substitution seemed something more than precautionary, because he tried at first to play on but couldn’t.
It was a pretty hair challenge. In a competitive fixture it would have earned a booking, or you’d hope it would have.
This is the Season Of Ten, so I expected us to get rough-housed like this every week.
It’s one of the things we’re going to have to watch out for.
For all that, it was a pretty decent run-out today, against an SPL team playing the sort of football we’ll have to face every week.
If the players didn’t exactly try and run through walls that’s not exactly surprising; I’d have been more concerned had they shown an inclination to.
Any team trying to get back up to speed after a long time without football has a number of gears it has to go through in the process. This team is going through its. The kick-off is next weekend. We look ready, for the most part, at least in terms of the personnel on hand.
Of course, we do need to get our backsides in gear and bring in a couple of players, but I do fully expect that the goalkeeping situation will be in hand before then and that the only decision to make will be about whether to throw him straight in before he’s fully familiarised himself with the rest of his team-mates.
Other positions need strengthening; we might be able to wait on them.
The other thing to come out of the game today was that the Virtual Season ticket launch was not exactly what you might call flawless.
First, the stream didn’t start for a lot of people.
The switch to YouTube was evidence of some sort of backup plan anyway, and so I’m happy to let the teething troubles of Day One slide.
You expect them.
But the jerky picture when the CelticTV stream did start is more worrisome by far; I am one of those people who gets motions sickness playing certain video games or watching certain things and the game ended with me feeling quite nauseous, and not, as is usually the case, because certain commentators are so bad they make the surface of my brain itch.
This is a necessary, and worthwhile, experiment from Celtic and although we’ve gone for a quality production team I didn’t expect the initial stages of this to go off without a hitch.
Every new piece of technology, every innovation, comes with a few glitches these days and I didn’t believe this would be an exception.
As long as they’re sorted out quickly we should be good.
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