This Celtic Team Must Stop Being Defined By The Failures Of Its Predecessors.

In the aftermath of the game on Wednesday, there was a lot of talk about Celtic dreadful away record in Europe. I remember such talk about our away domestic form when we failed to win any of the first three matches on the road last season.

I have always found the idea that a team should be judged on what teams who came before them did or didn’t do to be frankly stupid. The recent history that this club lugs on its shoulders in Europe right now is a weight that it should never have to be bear because it’s not their weight to carry. Those failures belonged to other Celtic sides.

It is high time this one realised that this bag of bricks can be put at the side of the road. That’s part of what is dragging them down right now, this idea that they somehow bear those scars.

Very few of them do. There is no need for this team to feel that it has some responsibility for re-writing history. They started on a new page. They must write their own.

The media loves to put us under pressure for our past sins.

But there is no reason that this side cannot do what other Celtic sides have failed to.

It is preposterous to look back at records set under previous Celtic bosses, when not a member of this team was at Celtic Park, and somehow hold this side accountable for those mistakes and defeats.

And yet I don’t have the slightest doubt that part of the problem this team has is that they feel that on their shoulders. It is simply unfair and un-necessary to burden them with it.

Ange has to get through to these guys that there is no need for a collective inferiority complex.

The commentary team on BT Sport were at great pains to talk, for example, about our record in Germany; we’d one won once in 14 trips there before that game. It was as if these players were the ones who played in all those matches, and they didn’t. Some of them were played before some members of this Celtic team were even bloody born.

Yet these players had made a mere one of those trips, to Leverkusen last year.

Yet the mentality seems to haunt us.

The collective toll of that record seems to be chained to their legs, making a difficult job even harder.

This team clearly need to acquit itself better when it’s on the road, but this is a common failing of teams in Europe; most of them are vastly different sides when they are playing in front of the home crowd.

Besides, the only records they are competing against are their own.

They are the only standard by which this team ought to be judged.

The sins of the fathers must not be paid by the sons. These guys deserve nothing less than to be accountable only for what they do or fail to … not what every Celtic side who ever lost a game in Europe did before them.