Hoop la stall

After what happened in Amsterdam last week, Foul Play is beginning to suspect Martin O’Neill of commissioning professional portraits of all the Bhoys managers to precede him, from Liam Brady to Dr Jozef Venglos, and storing them carefully in his attic.

The Ajax experience was like a 90-minute optical illusion for those of us who, in a European context, have forever associated the green and white hoops with nothing but miserable failure (and yes, I am aware that Celtic were clad in their change strip last Wednesday, but you know what I mean).

It is true that Ajax’s current team is frighteningly callow; that some of their younger players are in dire need of a good meal, by the look of them; and that they were always going to find it hard going against muscle-bound mullockers like Johan Mjallby and Chris Sutton. In boxing terms, this was like putting Barry McGuigan in with Nigel Benn.

It is also true that this win gives us little clue as to Celtic’s chances of tussling with the Bayerns and Barcelonas, and emerging with their internal organs and their self-esteem intact.

But really, who gives a good goddamn? Celtic are into the Champions League for the first time ever, they are visibly growing into a genuinely good team, nobody will particularly want to draw them in the group stages, and that would do for now, you’d think.

Not that O’Neill’s latest feat of managerial wizardry will increase the chances of him staying where he is beyond 2003. Those Man United rumours simply refuse to die a peaceful death, and the Ajax result will hardly throw them off the scent.

Faced with the loss of Celtic’s first truly great manager since Billy McNeill, the board’s (understandable) response has been to throw some £2m worth of shares at him, in the hope that he will eschew United and remain at the club of his forefathers. Wrap the green flag around him, boys. Do it now. Do it for Ireland, by Jaysus.

What made the Ajax result so thrilling, apart from the knowledge that Celtic have just helped themselves to about £12 million of UEFA’s money, was that it represented their first remotely impressive European feat in, literally, an age. Fittingly enough, Celtic’s last win over a decent continental side occurred against Ajax themselves, 19 years ago.

Celtic have not even been consistently losing to good teams whenever they play in Europe. In this regard, they lag miles behind even Rangers, who (due to the law of averages as much as anything else) have kicked the arses of several good European teams over the past few years.

The Huns’ overall European record represents a decidedly horrific return on the untold millions that David Murray has thrown at the club, but they do at least tend to avoid disgracing themselves at the hands of village teams like NK Maribor and FC Haka.

However, Celtic’s time-honoured way of doing it, before O’Neill got his hands on them, was to battle away to an honourable defeat in the away leg, against a meat-and-potatoes outfit like Olympique Lyonnais or Hamburg.

An away goal was, of course, out of the question, and a key player like John Collins or Jorge Cadete could always be relied upon to get a needless last-minute booking to rule them out of the second leg.

Two weeks later, the Celtic Park faithful would be still settling into their seats when the opposition invariably killed the tie stone dead after about ten minutes with a well-timed away goal of their own.

Even when the Celts managed to defeat somebody, they could be relied upon to do it in the most higgledy-piggledy manner imaginable, as with the win over Tirol Innsbruck in the UEFA Cup a few years back.

The circumstances of that one are too convoluted (and, frankly, too outlandish) to relate here. Suffice to say that Craig Burley commented afterwards, with a straight face, “We didn’t feel safe until we got the sixth goal.”

Indeed, like Barbra Streisand, it is the laughter we will remember. How could Foul Play forget the legendary Partizan Belgrade disaster of September ’89, when, with Celtic 5-3 up on the night and winning 6-5 on aggregate in stoppage time, full-back Anton Rogan was spotted racing over to the touchline and retrieving the ball for a throw-in with desperate haste, instead of time-wasting like his life depended on it.

In a not unrelated development, Partizan scored their match-winning away goal a few seconds later.

The silence which resulted at Celtic Park was described by one hack as “like Edvard Munch’s The Scream brought to life, given vocal cords and multiplied by 60,000.”

But the low point, the absolute total nadir, occurred three years ago, when a team containing Larsson, Lambert , McNamara and Burley (but also, unfortunately, Gould, Mahe, Brattbakk, Hannah, Jackson and McKinlay) died roaring at the hands of FC Zürich.

That’s FC Zürich. Not Grasshoppers Zürich, in case there is any confusion about this. That would imply that Celtic had been beaten by a half-decent side containing a couple of internationals who were, like, ‘good at football’.

Celtic couldn’t even win the home leg, thanks to a salmon-like header from Tom Boyd into his own net with seconds to go. Not the first, nor the last, of many.

This is the ghastly context, the prism of piss-awfulness, if you will, through which the Ajax result must be viewed. So it looks like it’s goodbye to all that – at least for as long as O’Neill remains on the premises – and good fucking riddance.