It’s all eyes on Wednesday night now for Celtic and the everyone involved with the club cannot wait to embrace our first knockout round tie in the UEFA Champions League for 12 years…
The stage is set for a classic encounter between the Celts and another of European football’s top sides in what should be a superb spectacle.
Vincent Kompany’s team roll into town with a litany of top tier talent. The likes of Olise, Gnabry, Musiala, Sane, Coman and of course, Harry Kane, will grace the field at Celtic Park and Brendan Rodgers and his men will have the opportunity to show just how far we’ve come since that 7-1 humbling by Bayern’s fellow Bundesliga side, Borussia Dortmund.
That night in the group phase was a sobering experience for the club as we saw the gulf in class between two teams of very differing financial levels. Celtic admittedly played just about as poor as they could and Dortmund, in typical German fashion, were utterly ruthless in front of goal that evening in the Signal Iduna Park. A rather sharp and acute wake up call for the players that were on the pitch that night as to the level which is required to be successful at this level.
Rodgers rallied his troops though and went on to bring back respectability with a point away in Bergamo, which was then followed up with a scintillating performance at home to RB Leipzig. His team were phenomenal that evening and the Irishman has conceded that they will need to find those levels again if we are to take anything from Munich over these two legs. It won’t be an easy task by any stretch, but Rodgers believes we can still hurt Kompany’s men.
Speaking after his side’s 5-0 demolition of Raith Rovers at the weekend, he said: “I don’t have any doubt that we can hurt Bayern. We’ve got goals in us, we’ve shown that at all levels. We can score goals. They’ve obviously got threats but it’s the knock-out stages of the Champions League. Every team has big quality and I’ve been up against some of these teams, so I know how they play.
“Vincent Kompany will have played against my teams at Swansea, Leicester and Liverpool so he’ll know how my teams work. It’s going to be a fantastic game and I’ll look forward to it. It’s my job to convince the players that we can get a positive result.”
The boss has pointed to the games we have performed really well in over the course of the tournament so far and added that with the energy from a rocking Paradise under the lights, we can make life extremely difficult for Bayern. He said: “We’ve shown it, and can take confidence from our qualification to get to this point over the course of eight games in the Champions League. We’ve shown the template of playing at home against RB Leipzig and away against Atalanta and that combination of both can get us results
“We know we’re up against some fantastic players and a team who is top of a top league, high on confidence. But in here on Wednesday night, it will be super-charged. There will be 60,000 souls with us and we can take energy from that. We’ll look to make it really difficult for Bayern and see where the game takes us.”
Paul Gillespie
