Bertie Auld summed it up pretty well indeed when he said:
“I think English football got carried away with itself at that time. I was very proud to play in that era with that squad of players and that support. We had a right good pool of players and it was a well-balanced squad and of course, big Jock never let you get too carried away,” Bertie Auld.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Since I’ve been living down here Celtic have beaten Alex Ferguson’s legendary Manchester United team as well as AC Milan and of course Barcelona, yet still as a club we have little respect. Those wins are put down to our support rather than the team we have on the park, as if the support and players aren’t in it together. Even more recently Pep Guardiola’s fine Manchester City couldn’t defeat Celtic home or away, yet we received little respect for it from the press down here.
Pride cometh before the fall after all
I’ll probably never see the day when Celtic win the European Cup but I’m certain we’ll play English teams again and put them in their place. Pride cometh before the fall after all and if the English media have one thing in spades it is vanity.
Yet to quote a favoured English saying I’ve had directed at me on more than one occasion.
‘You want salt with that chip?’
It may well be they have a point.
Niall J
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Good article; I lived in London for 7 years then a couple in Gloucestershire before coming back up the road. I did enjoy life down south and at one point, couldn’t imagine moving back but now I’ve been back 13 years…..I’ll not prattle on about the changes I see when visiting London but I enjoy being near the sea and mountains here. As for fans, some of the Celtic supporter bars were as rowdy in London as up here but like you say, not many sevco fans down south!
I also used to become frustrated at the ignorance towards Scottish football. It was almost an embarrassed afterthought for someone to even be partly praising but mostly it was ‘rubbish league’, ‘farmer’s league’, ‘but it’s not like you have any competition’ etc.
My throwback was ‘Okay, before 1993, was the English league comparable to Italy or Spain?’ Or I’d say ‘Okay, take the 4bn Sky and ITV paid for the premiership. What players could you afford, how would you compete with the European elite’? There was never a definitive answer, because money is the biggest separator. How much did we get for winning the league vs how much did we get for progress in Europe. Money has changed football. I still enjoy watching it but sometimes get more out of lower league games or watching other sports. With Sportscene, I’ll watch our highlights but often skip the rest because, I mean no disrespect to our league but yes, you do see a higher calibre of player down south. But it is all driven by money. And that is the real shame in it all. Look at the premiership, it is dominating even European competitions and as all the big teams are invested in keeping money to themselves, it will just continue. A spending cap would make sense but as that’s unlikely to happen, we just have to keep putting teams from the Premiership in their place. There’s no point explaining it to an ignoramus who doesn’t understand our club or environment up here. But I think we’ll see the apoplectic, perplexed, gazumped, bewildered and complaining start when England fail once again to win a major tournament next year (there is no way they’ll get past Spain, France, Argentina or Brazil, although Brazil aren’t looking too clever either). We will still be in Europe and qualifying for tournaments that some of the farmer’s league utterances could only dream of seeing their team compete in.