On the morning after Celtic’s 3-3 Champions League draw with a Manchester City side that had won its first 10 matches last season, there was a touch of over-excitement at the sports desk of Herald Towers.
As some of the younger fellows – namely pretty much everyone else – declared it to be one of the greatest results in Scottish football history, fellow old stager Stewart Weir, our head of sport, and I urged restraint.
As, just for starters, we mentioned Celtic’s victory over Inter Milan, Rangers’ defeat of Dynamo Moscow and Aberdeen’s of Real Madrid to win actual European silverware, before referencing Dundee United’s four wins out of four in European ties against Barcelona, Stewart seized upon my use of the word ‘perspective’. Not least as City’s Premier League title challenge collapsed, he was to have some fun with it as a social media hashtag in the weeks that followed.
When, then, driving down the road from Wimbledon on Tuesday evening, I turned on to English-based radio station TalkSport and heard them introduce our deputy head of sport Scott Mullen – a young man born the year I was covering Dundee United’s run which took them to the UEFA Cup final and who had been among those talking up that Celtic draw – it was to hear him talk in extreme terms about a Scottish performance in Europe once again.
This time, though, it was hard to argue with his assessment of a worst ever result while, in the face of some brutal mocking of the entire Scottish football scene by the show’s regulars, he held his own and spoke extremely reasonably in taking his turn to offer some perspective.
To write off all Scottish football on the basis of this latest humiliation for one club would be unfair, he quite rightly contended, in the context of Celtic’s performances home and away against one of the Premier League’s finest and one of the world’s best resourced teams, as well as what was another fine effort when drawing at Borussia Moenchengladbach in between times.
He was teased when he suggested that if Celtic were to be offered a place in the Premier League they would finish mid to top table and offering them that opportunity was pretty much dismissed out of hand by the others in the conversation.
It was, meanwhile, generally agreed that any progression by Celtic’s ‘invincibles’ next season can only be judged on the basis of Champions League performances, such is the scale of their superiority on and off the field over their domestic rivals.
On the face of it, that is reasonable enough, but the issue confronting them in that competition is match fitness at that level. Setting aside the qualifying embarrassment in Gibraltar last year – which would bear comparison with Rangers’ defeat in Luxembourg had they not turned things around in the return leg and might have brought a very different dimension to Brendan Rodgers’ first season in charge – the difficulties Celtic face in Europe were demonstrated by the result which immediately preceded that first draw with Manchester City. In effect, it took the 7-0 humbling in the Camp Nou to get them up to Champions League pace, such is the leap that must be made. But even if Celtic could attract the world’s best players, as things stand they would always enter Champions League campaigns under-prepared.
In broader terms, the hope must be that what has happened to Rangers will, this time, help the less reconstructed elements in Scottish football – notably those who were so swift to dismiss the nutritional philosophy of Ronnie Deila or Hearts’ imaginative appointment of Ian Cathro – to understand that it is time to look at ways of doing things differently, which includes the need for the national game to become more engaged in a multi-sport approach to youth development.
However, it also invites us to consider just what being part of Great Britain is all about. Refusal to countenance allowing Scottish teams access to the biggest competition in the land they inhabit smacks of restraint of trade. That should be challenged if the Scottish game is ever to (with apologies to Rangers supporters) progress.
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