Has A Section Of The Celtic Support Become Too Spoiled By Success?

Last week, as I was surveying the landscape after our European defeat, a defeat which even more than the St Mirren one brought us all down to earth a little, I was amazed to see the reactions of some in our support to what was the kind of European reversal some of us have become painfully accustomed to.

Over the weekend, even though we won, some of these same people were stamping their feet in anger over a game we won but where they thought the manager and some of the players had shown nothing to be encouraged by.

And I realised something; a lot of our fans can’t handle defeat.

In part, this is understandable.

Because a lot of our fans are too young to really remember anything else.

I am not holding this against them; I envy them their great experiences, although I shared them.

I wish I’d grown up watching nothing but untrammelled Celtic success. I wish I’d seen only our nine titles in a row.

Unfortunately I wasn’t born in that sort of era.

I saw Ibrox winning everything; that was my football upbringing. I saw the Rangers nine in a row. I saw us go seven years without a trophy. I saw us finishing fourth in the league. Imagine that. Fourth.

This generation has never seen anything like it.

One season without any success at all – albeit in the one season we could least afford that – and they were ready to storm the barricades.

Every defeat for these guys is a crisis.

Every mistake by a player and they want to kick that guy into the reserves where he can rot until someone does something worse.

They will never have seen the truly awful players my generation endured.

They will never see us sign a Willie Falconer, a player the manager (Lou Macari, Jesus wept) freely admitted wasn’t that great but all we could afford, or a Wayne Biggins.

They will never experience the rollercoaster thrill of watching a truly awful central defence … their criticism of Welsh-Jenz could only have come from fans who never experienced The Sieve.

There was a season where Pat McGinley, a midfield signing from Hibs, was our top scorer.

They think European embarrassment comes from losing in Germany?

We lost in Switzerland, 5-1, in the Nightmare In Neuchatel, in the UEFA Cup back in 1991, a night that is still seared on the memory of every fan who attended the game.

A brilliant writer on this site, Paul Cassidy, put together a series of pieces for us on what he called The Dark Days.

Every fan of the current generation needs to read those, and because I firmly believe that this is required reading I’m going to release them all – one at a time – over the course of the day.

Just to remind people who’ve forgotten, or never knew, what bad looks like.

We lived through those days, somehow.

To us, these are the sunlit uplands we were promised.

These are the glory days.

I cannot understand anyone who doesn’t take pleasure in them. That’s not these guys … but they never learned to cope with the lows either, because they grew up with nothing but success.

Believe me, those lows were much worse than anything we’re going to see from this side.