Last night, as we know, the Ibrox club lost 2-1 in Poland, a result which made me laugh uproariously and cast further bad light on Derek McInnes and his management style.
In the aftermath, McInnes threw his players under the bus with considerable aplomb. He is brilliant at a handful of things, and finding other people to blame is certainly one of them.
We will come back to McInnes later today because I am nowhere near finished with him yet.
For now, though, let us look at the performances of the other Scottish clubs in Europe last night, because once again they reminded us why this league is not particularly well respected outside its own borders.
Motherwell earned a respectable 1-1 draw in Helsinki and Hibs won 2-1 at home. Neither result is disastrous, but these are levels of opposition against which Scottish clubs should be much more confident, particularly at home.
We are not.
The uncomfortable explanation is that Scottish football simply is not very good.
The malaise affecting the domestic game runs deep, and nobody seems to possess a convincing answer for how we fix it.
There have been renewed calls to increase the number of Scottish players appearing regularly in our teams. It is such a familiar argument that, frankly, I am bored hearing it, although there is a core of truth buried inside it.
Scottish football has done nowhere near enough to make its academy systems productive in a meaningful first-team sense, and every club continues paying the price.
At the same time, the better young players we do produce are increasingly picked off by clubs elsewhere which regard Scotland as a cheap market in which to shop.
That combination is deeply damaging.
We are not producing enough players for our own teams, and when we do produce good ones, richer leagues increasingly recognise their value before Scottish clubs are properly able to benefit from them.
Hearts’ fate last night was not particularly surprising.
A lot of us predicted that Hearts would struggle in Europe this season and that the additional workload might eventually damage their domestic form as well.
They simply are not accustomed to playing the volume of high-intensity football European competition demands.
Fortunately for Hearts in that regard, their European adventure may not last much longer.
Benfica absolutely annihilated them last night.
I watched the match and was mesmerised because it could genuinely have been almost any score Benfica wanted. They took their foot off the accelerator in the second half, and that is probably the only reason we are not discussing cricket-score levels of humiliation.
I do not expect the return leg to be much kinder to Hearts simply because it will be played in front of their own crowd.
They are out.
Then comes another European competition, and with Rapid Vienna waiting should events unfold that way, I think another exit could easily follow.
That would be disastrous financially.
European money would have allowed Hearts to consolidate some of what they have built over the summer. Instead, they may soon be looking at the scale of that rebuild and wondering whether they can sustain it without the additional income they expected.
It is another example of what I wrote about last night.
The gamble which does not pay off.
The player who takes his shot and misses.
The one advantage of leaving Europe early is obvious enough. Hearts would no longer have to worry about Thursday-night football followed immediately by weekend domestic fixtures.
That would give them recovery time which Celtic and potentially the Ibrox club will not have.
Which competition the club across the city eventually ends up playing in remains another matter entirely.
Motherwell and Hibs may struggle to reach the league phase as well.
Both have made relatively heavy weather of this round, and the next one will be tougher. It is entirely possible that neither will be playing European football by the time the league phases begin.
Celtic, at least, knows that European league-phase football of some kind is guaranteed whatever happens in our qualifying tie.
The Ibrox club can still theoretically fall out of Europe altogether, although considering the level of opponent it would face in Conference League qualifying, McInnes would surely be standing on the edge of the abyss should that happen.
Even dropping into the Conference League would represent a serious financial blow.
There is less money available, and although the media would undoubtedly attempt to sell an extended run in that competition as some sort of triumph, it is not where that club wants to be playing.
Nor should anyone convince themselves that it would automatically be a winnable competition. There are good sides in it, and eventually you have to play them.
The very real possibility is that Celtic will once again be left carrying most of Scotland’s European hopes.
Should we reach the Champions League league phase, that would provide a boost to the whole Scottish game.
Not that the whole Scottish game would thank us for it.
There remains a sizeable constituency which thinks Celtic is already too strong domestically and which would probably prefer to see us fail in Europe even when our results contribute to Scotland’s standing.
Personally, I badly want to see clubs from outside Glasgow reach the league stages of European competition.
I want them to receive that revenue. I want them to reinvest it in infrastructure, coaching and squads. I want Scottish clubs to become stronger and more competitive.
That does not include the Ibrox club, obviously, and at the moment it does not include Hearts either while Tony Bloom remains involved after comments for which I still believe Celtic is owed an apology.
But in wider terms, Scottish football desperately needs its clubs to perform better.
Last night was another reminder of how far away we remain.
Our reputation in European terms is already poor, and it is unlikely that anything Celtic or the club across the city accomplishes individually will dramatically change that.
People spent much of last season talking about the strength and competitiveness of the Scottish Premiership.
The media was delighted by the title race.
But European football has a nasty habit of stripping away domestic illusions.
Over the last few weeks, we have had another demonstration of just how low the general standard remains.
And that should bother Celtic supporters for another reason.
We only just scraped over the line in that league last season.
Think about that.
If Scottish football’s representatives are struggling badly against relatively modest European opposition, and Celtic struggled domestically against those same teams, what does that say about the level to which our own club has been allowed to fall?
That is where the responsibility of this board comes back into the discussion.
They lack ambition, and they have allowed the squad to deteriorate to the point where we can no longer look at European qualifiers against competent opposition and assume Celtic will come through them.
There is absolutely no justification for underestimating the Austrians.
They are probably operating at a higher level than many people around Scottish football want to admit, and I would want at least another couple of quality additions before feeling genuinely comfortable about our chances.
That tie will not be easy regardless of what happens in the transfer market between now and then.
Nothing is easy for Scottish clubs in Europe anymore.
That is the reality.
Last night, watching Hearts being dismantled by Benfica, I found it difficult not to think that we might also have been watching a glimpse of Celtic’s future should we reach the biggest stage without properly strengthening.
There are teams in the Champions League capable of doing that to very good opponents when everything clicks for them.
What some of those sides might do to this Celtic squad on a bad night does not really bear thinking about.
At least not without a very stiff drink first.
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I think Motherwell did well last night. I think it’s unfair to call a 1-1 draw away from home against a club that we previously required extra time to get past over 2 legs as making heavy weather of it. But, like you James, I hope to see the Steelmen and Hibs progressing. A home side horror show next week at Ibrox, however, would be *chef’s kiss*
What can you really say about Scottish football, our national team and the consistent failures at bringing through and promoting youth, that doesn’t have you hanging your head in despair !
Our game is indeed a mess, and like our own board, the SFA needs to be completely modernised and changed to try and not only keep up, but now, catch up with other nations that have systems in place that enable talented players to develop and eventually enhance their club and international football.
We can trot out all the usual reasons and/or excuses, like drinking culture, weather, facilities, mentality etc…
Football has progressed way, way beyond the days when Scotland had a plethora of genuine world class players and football was learnt on the streets.
It would be wonderful to hark back to those days of talent but we are where we are, and whilst loads of established nations continue to leave us standing still with their promotion of technically better youngsters, even smaller nations have done the same.
We’ve previously had think tanks to discuss our football …but surely there must be a handful of talented people out there, ex players or whoever, that could come in and start from the bottom and get our game sorted.
We could talk all day on this subject alone, but like our own club, we have to start with people in charge that firstly know what they’re doing, and ultimately, have the skill set to implement those plans and get the requisite results.
Again, like our own club, talk is cheap and action is most certainly required! Our standard of football on the bigger stages is a clear illustration of this !
Of course Scotland is way behind many football nations but teams like cabo verde are an anomaly. Iran, Morrocco, Tunisia are vast nations compared to Scotland. Even Haiti has double the population of Scotland. We made the world cup on merit unlike Denmark, Wales, Ireland, N. Ireland, Poland etc. etc.
Scotland has some decent players but we obviously underperformed at the world cup and the manager quite rightly walked.
The biggest problem in Scotland is the disparity where only Celtic or the Ibrox entity has won the league in over 40 years and nobody else is ever likely to. Hearts going to the last day required all the stars aligned but even so it would have been a seismic event had they won it and never going to come close again.
We dont belong in the UCL and I would be fairly happy playing in the europa rather than prostituting ourselves in the elite competition.
“Iran, Morrocco, Tunisia are vast nations compared to Scotland. Even Haiti has double the population of Scotland.”
The size of a country has very little to do with its success etc. Take New Zealand for example. A country with a near identical population size as Scotland. Yet they almost always have their national rugby team (The All Blacks) in the top 3 teams in world rugby.
Scotland’s football is a shambles. Right from school grass-roots level right up to our governing bodies. There’s so much wrong with Scottish football but the size of our population has very little to do with it.
There are special reasons why New Zealand does so well at rugby for a small nation but we are not talking about rugby.
Regarding traditional footballing nations ie western europe and south America. This is where all the world cup winners have come from. Uruguay is the only small nation to have won the world cup and the last time they won it was 76 years ago. Since then only Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Germany, England, France & Spain have won it. All countries with well over 40 million and some far larger. This is not a coincidence. Yes some small countries have over achieved and done well but none have won it since Uruguay, and generally the best teams come from footballing countries with big populations.
There are no easy games in Europe any more, the three competitions are money spinners and absolutely every club in Europe wants a piece of that pie. Teams we have never heard of are in there competing with the rest, and none of them can be underestimated or dismissed. Apart from teams in the Big Five European Leagues the remainder are much of a muchness, all competing for the small change that is left over in the trough. Spending big money to feed on those crumbs is a major gamble for us but, to reach the Champions League guaranteed riches it is what we have to do. Once there we really are just making up the numbers, but the bonus is that we get be involved in some glamour games.
Is anyone taking into account the usual factor of the European qualifying ties arriving before our clubs have gelled and have barely played a competitive match?
It’s only Hearts who have failed badly. The other three clubs are still very much in it and even sevco’s 2-1 defeat away is normally considered as staying in the tie for the second leg at home. They need one goal at home to take it to extra time.
This article should only have been written after the second legs are complete.
I think it would be better to wait and see how good we are in europe before gloating about the other teams performances. Last season Braga came to CP and walked away with a 2-0 win against us and our “elite manager”. Braga finished over 20 points behind Benfica in the league and I’m guessing nobody on here has ever heard of their rookie manager.