What an occasion for Neil Lennon and Celtic against Shakhter Karagandy in Glasgow. The pressure was huge on Celtic tonight, yet they prevailed once more.
In turning around a 2-0 first-leg deficit with an impassioned 3-0 home win in the Champions League play-off, Celtic once more enhanced their status as a club with lofty ambition and a hint of European elitism about it.
This football institution based in Glasgow's impoverished east end, the first British club to win the European Cup, is back once again in the Champions League group stage. It is where Celtic and their carousing supporters feel they belong.
Everything in this business is relative. Viktor Kumykov's Karagandy are, at best, an ordinary team, so there can be no claims to world-beating about this.
But for Lennon and Celtic, in a difficult age for Scottish footballl, to twice now march into the Champions League over two successive years seems pretty impressive.
Lennon continues to attract doubters - and some criticisms of his style are merited. He can snarl, he can be a loose cannon, he is confrontational.
But the Celtic manager is also thoughtful, robust and inspirational in his work, as is now perfectly plain in Glasgow. Lennon continues to be very good for this club.
Apart from the glory, the finances of making the group-stage also mean everything to Celtic.
In European terms the club is perennially cash-starved merely by belonging to Scottish football, so the guaranteed £17 million of Champions League football - with gate money on top - is mesmerising to a club whose annual income is currently locked at around £51 million.
The Celtic board, probably unfairly, has taken stick from the club's more splenetic supporters for "failing to invest" in the team. Peter Lawwell, the Celtic CEO, contests the charge, but is also storing wealth for a longer-term strategy, including the eventual return of Rangers.
These issues are forever on a knife-edge. Celtic, most believe, have been a highly impressive club in terms of their finances in recent years. Nonetheless, the knives would have been out for the Celtic board had this Karagandy team not been dismissed over the two games.
Celtic were awash with passion and heroism on the night, and their three goals sent a bulging Parkhead into raptures. But the home side were also lucky not to be reduced by a red card in the first half.
This game could have turned disastrously, with Scott Brown, on top of all his other qualities, revealing his self-destructive tendency once more. Celtic were fortunate not to be reduced to 10 men after 40 minutes following their captain's blatant stamp on Gediminas Vicius. The referee, Sven Oddvar Moen, missed the moment.
Over the decades there have been a few special European goals witnessed at Celtic Park, but few will forget the screamer that Kris Commons delivered for Celtic with just seconds remaining of the first half.
From 25 yards Commons sent a precisely weighted missile past Aleksandr Mokin and inside his post to finally break the deadlock. It was a much-needed breakthrough for Celtic, whose pounding of Karagandy had been fruitless. Georgios Samaras, and then James Forrest with three minutes remaining, completed the feat.
This was a night of high drama for Celtic. But these 180 minutes against the Kazaks were made fraught in other ways.
The fact is, Celtic endured these tests without a cemented central defence and, indeed, mixed and matched to slightly desperate effect to try to get it right.
In Kazakhstan last week Lennon placed two new boys, Virgil van Dijk and Steven Mouyokolo, as centre-backs, though it signally failed. In this second-leg the Celtic manager went with Efe Ambrose and Mikael Lustig in these positions, the first being a risk, the latter not noted in the role.
It was a risk Lennon and Celtic could have done without. Something has been lacking in the way the club has handled the departure of Kelvin Wilson and scrambled to fill the void. It left Lennon's team patched-up and improvised for its two most lucrative matches of the season, and at times Celtic's rearguard looked shaky.
There may yet be time and money with which to fix that. In the meantime, with perfect justification, Celtic can once more celebrate continuing success on the journey.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article