Gordon Strachan should not be talking up Celtic’s European record.

I don’t want to go off on one here, but Gordon Strachan should try to keep his mouth shut a little more. I know he likes the sound of his own voice, but some of what comes out of his mouth is the worst kind of nonsense.

He may be trying to make an apology for the Celtic board, I do not know, but his comments about Celtic carrying Scotland in Europe for 40 years sound preposterous. They sound absolutely insulting to those of us who know better.

Europe is where we fall flat on our face.

I am sorry that this is the case, but no Celtic board of directors has been able to get its act together sufficiently in Europe for a long time.

Funnily enough, the manager outside of Martin O’Neill who did the best in Europe wasn’t Brendan Rodgers and wasn’t Ange Postecoglou.

It was Strachan himself. Strachan has an absolutely incredible accomplishment to his name. He qualified out of the Champions League group stages twice, and that is a record he is fully entitled to defend.

But he is still talking crap.

He does not mention the Ibrox club in his discussion, which is of course very deliberate. If he has a well-known disdain for our fans, he certainly has a greater disdain for theirs and for their club. But the fact is that clubs from Ibrox have reached European finals twice since we got to Seville.

I may mock, in particular, the second trip to get there, which I regard as one of the most overhyped achievements in the recent history of the Scottish game. They rode their luck so many times and were one of the least impressive finalists ever to reach a final.

But the fact of it is what it is. The fact of it is real.

To me, Strachan’s words are crazy. You only talk up Celtic’s achievements when they are real achievements, and we have flattered to deceive in Europe for years.

Our European record is nowhere near good enough. So, nobody should be boasting about it. Nobody should be bragging and chest-beating over it because I do not think there is anything worth bragging or chest-beating about.

Strachan had his achievement. I will never knock it. It’s incredible. It was the last time we felt genuinely credible over an extended period. Martin O’Neill had his in getting us to Seville, but he gave us some big nights in Europe beyond that.

I do not know about the full 40 years Strachan is talking about, but I certainly know that outside of those occasions, and a handful of others, like beating Lazio in Rome, Barcelona at Celtic Park, Milan, Juventus and Manchester United, those are little oases in what is otherwise a wasteland.

And I use the term wasteland very deliberately.

Because a lot of that journey has been about waste. It has been about opportunities squandered. Chances not taken.

Strachan talks about our successes in Europe as though we have been swaggering conquerors on the continent. We are now six failures in a row when we have had to qualify for the Champions League through the qualifying rounds. Not since Astana in 2017 have Celtic successfully come through that route.

Six in a row. And the numbers become even less inspiring when you take the record back a decade or more. It is a colossal record of failure, and most of that failure can be traced back to the boardroom. I am not going to pretend that Celtic managers have not had a lot to do with that failure as well.

Strachan himself presided over one of the worst nights in the history of our club.

The nightmare in Bratislava. Nobody would have accused us of being European conquerors then. Had he tried this spiel at the time, he would have been laughed out of the room.

And he should be laughed out of the room now, because even if his specific point that Celtic have carried Scotland’s coefficient for 40 years were accurate, which it is not, especially not across the last 10 or 15 years, it is still not a record I would want to boast about.

Two separate clubs from Ibrox have got to European finals since Seville; the UEFA Cup final in 2008 and the Europa League final in 2022. Those are simply facts.

I know Strachan thinks people on our board of directors walk on water. They have given him enough jobs over the years, and jobs to people in his family as well. I might think they walked on water too if they had been that kind to me and mine.

But this is just stupid. It is a stupid point to make. It is easily challenged by the facts, and it insults every other club in Scotland, many of whom do not have even a fraction of our resources to play with.

The days when Scottish sides were feared around Europe are well and truly over. There are colossal failures at the heart of that.

But the colossal failure at Celtic Park has perhaps been the biggest.

And I want to love Strachan. I do want to love the guy. I have always wanted to love the guy. I have always wanted to have a better, bigger place in my heart for him, because as a Celtic boss he deserves to be better liked.

Had we won ten in a row and invited all the former managers of this club who played a part in laying the foundations back to Celtic Park, although he came before that run, Strachan would still have been there as an honoured guest.

Because he did lay foundations. He did do some of the hard yards. And when he fights for this club, as he so often does, he can be excellent.

But this is an attempt to dress up failure. That is all it is. It is an attempt to justify a record which does not stand up to scrutiny.

And as amusing as it might be for some people that he did not bother mentioning Ibrox, it is a huge embarrassment to us that they have been able to take strides in Europe which we have not. Whatever you think of it, that is a fact.

Some of the European results they have had over the years were excellent, especially compared with ours. More than that, their overall European record across recent years has, in a number of respects, been better than our own.

Yes, I have mocked it. I have ruthlessly mocked it, and I will continue to ruthlessly mock it. They play a different style of football from us, and that style has often happened to be more effective in the European arena. It also helps that they have, at various points over the years, treated budgets, FSR regulations and Financial Fair Play as though they were optional.

But for all of it, we have been the dominant force in Scottish football, which drives them crazy because they cannot understand it.

That is part of the problem. What makes Celtic very effective and efficient domestically does not always translate easily into European football.

That is why you need the right squad. That is why you need tactical flexibility. That is why you need to tool yourself for Europe first and domestic football second. Because if we build a team capable of playing our style effectively in Europe, I have no doubt that Scottish football will be living with Celtic dominance for the rest of my life.

We have just been annihilated on the European stage. A lot of us are very fearful of what is coming next. And I know part of Strachan’s motivation was probably to punch back against the narrative that Celtic are hopeless in Europe.

But that narrative is not based on phantom inventions by the media or anyone else. There are real problems. There has been a real lack from Celtic. The fact is that we simply have not been good enough. There are times when we have looked close.

But those are often the times when the board slams on the brakes because God forbid they should ever see evidence that we could become a European force, lest they actually have to behave like one.

Overall, though, the record has been a series of shameful reversals.

So honestly, I do not know what Strachan is talking about. He has said things which are not defensible with the facts. He has made contentions which do not make sense.

And in trying to punch back against the narrative that Celtic have somehow embarrassed the country, he has constructed a whole different narrative as an answer to it. But that does not help us unless the narrative itself holds water.

In this case, it does not. Our European record is pitiful.

It is not something I would be banging drums about. I regard it as a disgrace, and I think most Celtic fans similarly regard it as a disgrace. There is no amount of spin in the world which is going to make it look better.

And there is no amount of spin in the world which should attempt to make it look better. It is only by confronting the horrible reality of it that we are ever going to be motivated to do something about it.

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