I AM USUALLY working on those Sundays when Celtic are involved in a 12.30 kick-off situation and so I always plan to switch off all modes of communication before watching the recording later. It rarely works out like this, though.
You soon find yourself glancing at the scores app as the minutes tick down waiting for the change from 0-0 to 0-1 to tell you that there’s harmony across the universe once more and you can concentrate fully on your job.
Afterwards you seek out the first few responses on your favourite Celtic fans' website before settling down to watch the recording at your leisure. My go-to fans’ forum is Kerrydale Street, where the serious business of discussing Celtic is leavened with a lot of very funny patter. On this site, though, there seems no difference between a draw and a heavy defeat.
Last Sunday, according to the first few people who arrived to comment on the 0-0 draw at Hibs, Celtic were awful and the entire team should be hanging their heads in shame. There were no redeeming features and it was clear that Ange Postecoglou was losing the plot as this was the latest in a series of dodgy performances. With some trepidation I began to watch the recording. How could we be so brilliant and rampant against Rangers and Motherwell and so wretched just two weeks later?
Except, well, we weren’t wretched at all. We dominated possession and created a couple of chances against a very well-organised team who insisted on playing the game with 11 men behind the ball. Hibs had learned from their 3-1 defeat to us earlier in the season when Celtic simply dismantled them in the first half.
Perhaps we could have zipped the ball around a little more quickly and thus unstitch the Hibs blanket, but we were missing our two main strikers and besides, this is still a developing team in the midst of a punishing match schedule.
Nor can you ever turn up at Easter Road and simply assume that you’ll always win. By the end of the day of course we had actually strengthened our position. Motherwell’s unlikely comeback at Ibrox meant that Celtic had negotiated another difficult away fixture with no change in their position.
So where does the disconnect come from between my perception of games like this and that of the young team on Kerrydale Street and other sites?
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I mean, I say ‘young team’ but I don’t really know if that’s the actual age demographic. I just assume that they’re younger than me because they use a lot of abbreviations and locutions that are favoured by my children and younger work colleagues. They also seem quicker on the draw with their smart responses, whereas I’ll have to think about it for a few minutes. And even then I can’t really compete with their whiplash reciprocations.
The most obvious explanation is that my more relaxed observations are merely classic 'Celtic Da’ patter. That I’ve experienced leaner times when you turned up at Parkhead out of a sense of duty rather than in any expectation that we would win comfortably by playing exhilarating football. And that this has made me more philosophical about bad results and uncertain performances.
And for the 122nd time I’ll talk of watching Tony Cascarino and Wayne Biggins struggling to get a tune out of the ball (it’s always Cascarino and Biggins who feature in these gnarly anecdotes). This is quickly followed by us telling them that “it’s all about the pleasure of just following the Hoops” and that victory is merely a pleasant bonus.
In this, of course, we re-write our own personal histories watching Celtic. All those times we nearly had heart attacks and embarrassed our children by the ferocity of our anger at some individual performances.
During the Gordon Strachan era my children thought that Paul Telfer must once have swindled me out of a large sum of money such was the foul-mouthed invective that poured from me when our full-back misplaced a pass.
On one occasion I’d been verbally abusing Telfer for 15 minutes before realising that he was sitting on the bench that day. It was shameful stuff. On mature reflection Telfer worked hard for the team; rarely let us down and played his part in some big wins. I’d simply chosen him to be the designated scapegoat that season.
Another 'Celtic Da’ trope is that the young team don’t know they’re actually living. That having gorged on the astonishing success of the last five years and four trebles (a feat which once would have been considered impossible) they experience something approaching emotional trauma when Celtic encounter threat.
I think though, that a lot of this is patronising. It ignores the fact that people like me are just as irrational and emotionally traumatised in our reactions to defeat. For much of that time we didn’t have social media to channel our outrage. Now, the multi-media platforms effectively act as free group therapy sessions where you can express deep, deep emotions in a safe environment and know that you won’t be judged. This is a good thing.
And there’s another aspect to this. The young team also possess a much more sophisticated knowledge of tactics and team formation than I ever did. They grasp the inverted full-back stuff far more quickly than my addled brain. They sense much more quickly when some tactical nuance is occurring. My tactical awareness rests entirely on “not working hard enough”; "not winning the loose balls”; “not tracking back” and “not getting dead balls past the first man”.
As such they can justify their frustration for a poor performance much more eloquently than I can justify my detached insouciance. I just need to get with the picture, lol 😎.
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