Those of us within the 51,000 Celts in the ground that night briefly feared the worst, before the headed goals started raining in at the right end. Four strikes by half-time finished the match and one of the strangest European ties in our long history.
In the meantime, progress was steady in the race to retain the championship. Celts recovered from the concession of early goals to record valuable wins at Easter Road and Pittodrie, the latter yet again with ten men, as the late Tommy Burns saw red for a late tackle on his future Parkhead colleague Gordon Strachan.
Only two further points were dropped, at home to Dundee United and away to Partick Thistle, as the first round of nine games was completed, Celts leading Morton by three points, with Ferguson’s Dons a further point adrift in third. The next fixture would involve a top-two battle at Cappielow and turned in ten first-half minutes, Murdo MacLeod blasting his spot-kick over the bar before Bobby Thomson hit the only goal of the game, to bring the Greenock side back to within a point of the defending champions.
This was a night which would mark the last first-team appearance of 1977 Cup Final penalty hero, Andy Lynch. Signed as a winger from Hearts by Jock Stein in 1973, Hoops-mad ‘Kipper’ moved to left-back two years later, where he provided great service to Celtic for the next four seasons, including a spell as interim captain, in what had long been a problem position.
Two weeks later, I joined the early morning posse in Tollcross, for my first European away game. If my memory serves me correctly, £29 bought an overnight trip with Cross Travel, so together with some of the Cairn Bishopbriggs Division, we headed south for the Irish ferry. In the height of the troubles, the requests to be quiet as we drove through Belfast met with a predictable response, pure bedlam as the full Wolfe Tones repertoire got its scariest-ever rendition. We did eventually make it to Dundalk for the game, my new-found taste for Guinness then discovering a very different version of God’s Drink from that served in Glasgow.
