The players would have had a light training session at Lennoxtown today as muscles continue to refill after Wednesday night’s exertions. Expectations of Celtic in the Champions League are not high, and were exceptionally low when this group was drawn, but even so, these games have a huge financial, physical and even emotional impact on every area of the club.
One argument suggests the last thing we need is a cup semi-final four days after a Champions League outing. An alternative thought is that this is the perfect game for Celtic right now. Memories linger of sitting stressfully at Fir Park days after Celtic beat the reigning European Champions, Milan, as (subsequently liquidated) Grenta held onto a lead until the 87th minute.
While playing (subsequently liquidated) Rangers away 64 hours after winning a Uefa Cup semi-final 1200 miles from home in 2003 proved to be the perfect game to instil steel into the legs.
With what passes as a fully fit squad, Brendan has choices to make for Sunday. Did Patrick Roberts do enough off the bench against Borussia to justify a start? Perhaps. He’s a player who owes us one at Hamden too.
Callum McGregor will also fancy his chances ahead of Nir Bitton, who didn’t have a great Scottish Cup semi-final against the same opponents in April.
It would be a huge surprise if Moussa Dembele didn’t start as the lone forward, despite Leigh Griffiths itching to get on alongside him. Brendan will not change formation for this game, while Moussa will fancy his chances against a defence he punished to ruthlessly last month.
For me, our two most important players on Sunday will be Scott Sinclair and Tom Rogic. They are the epitome of the modern footballer, strong, skilful, intelligent and difficult to defend against. If we can get them on the ball often enough we’ll score a lot of goals.
Pretty much every Celtic fan I know expects Mark Warburton to have learned a lesson from his Celtic Park whipping and for him to deploy a more defensively-minded team this time. My Newco pals don’t expect this to happen. Warburton hasn’t varied his game-plan since arriving at the club and is apparently reluctant to start experimenting now.
He took his team to Hampden to face Celtic against similarly long odds last season. Within minutes we knew we were in a game, and despite the clear chasm between the teams, it was Newco who faced Hibs in the Scottish Cup final.
A repeat of the 5-1 win at Celtic Park is possible, but you’ve seen enough football to know that nothing can be taken for granted on Sunday. Remember that Newco came close to levelling that 5-1 game at 2-2 early in the second half, and the latter part of their collapse came after going down to 10 men.
I’m off later to meet those from the Tyneside No. 1 and friends, who have walked (yes, WALKED), from Merthyr Tydfil and will reach Doherty’s Bar in Hamilton this afternoon. They’ve pretty much walked a marathon a day for 13 days and will make the final journey to Celtic Park tomorrow.
This herculean effort has been made to mark the memory of Jonathan Thomas, who aged 30 lost his biggest fight one year ago tomorrow.
We’re lucky as Celtic fans that we get to meet and read about people who do these things in our name. It’ll take you 2 minutes to let them know how inspiring they are here.
It’s also worth marking the events in Aberfan, the village a few miles from Merthyr Tydfil which was visited by unimaginable tragedy 50 years ago today.
John Humphrys: What we owe the people of Aberfan 50 years after tragedy struck the village, and why it shows authority must be challenged. pic.twitter.com/OdjyaAGTsQ
— BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) October 21, 2016
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D.D.
Are you going to play “The Tourist” at Glastonbury watching Radiohead then over to Jersey where I hope there is ” No Surprises”.
Sorry ! That’s the best I could come up with at this time of night.
THE EXILED TIM on 21ST OCTOBER 2016 11:01 PM
Clunks
The Clintons, just goes to show the americans and the rest of us get what we deserve, to vote for the likes of them we deserve everything we get, and will get, another war is a coming for sure, but enough of reality, the site I have my shop on was a victim of a DoS attack today, it took down a heap of stuff, twitter, PayPal and so on, it’s back up now but am confused so I am, went on one of the forums to see what the reaction was and more than half of them reckoned their service wasn’t down, strange when the main server was down, but these are the ones I am refering to :-)
HH
—————-
Noticed that the http://www.celticfc.net website now has a redirect something along the lines of
“Cloudfare protecting ddos attacks”
Glad to see the powerful Peter Lawell is ahead of the USA in terms of internet security!! :)
Todays DDOS attack in the USA was targeted at a company called Dyn who do internet DNS. If your DNS name was not delegated to any internet Dyn servers you wouldnt have noticed.
Or is the USA less likely to get ddos attacks than Celtic are from the zombies!
Night all.
Enjoy.
In my opinion it’s been a really good blog today.
Hail Hail to all.
A wee Tune.
The fabulous Angelique and Carlos Santana Band
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlTSaLnD0PI
Mates son got taken shopping by his sister and her new man his family.
It was a nice thing done by his sister to treat his son to a wee day out.
Her new mans family are all rankers fans.
The were talking about how good the rankers were when my mates son coughled loudly and mumbled “zombies”
Wish I was there,,,,,,
JNP
Certainly don’t be telling Paddy I said that! :-)
Interesting reading your analysis of Tony Watt and GMS.
I remember watching Tony at Inverness playing for us and thinking that he could be the next Frank McAvennie. GMS never struck me as anything special.
Fingers crossed for Paddy I’m sure he wouldn’t forget his uncle HT if it came to tickets :-)
Personally I think the Dyn attack today was the NSA shooting itself in the foot just like the Stuxnet virus. Probably used the election putin jiggerpokery to try a change in “production”.
AN earlier post referred to Shir Shean Connery calling it “Sheltic Park” (before he defected to the deid club).
SO let’s drop all this mid-Atlantic nonsense. It is Parkhead.
Dallas
My Mother in Law is fitba daft. A huge Celtic and Man City fan since childhood. She cheered all 6 goals in our match wi MC, much to the bemusement of my two sons, who were watching the match in their granny’s. :)
H.T.
I have to reply to that before sleep time.
I don’t think you would ever have to worry about tickets. You would always be sorted.
He offered me his ticket for Sunday, you won’t be surprised to know I declined.
Hail Hail.
Celtic Mac
I guess you are just full of pish. No explanation of your earlier assertion. Tired now and off to bed.
Night all and Hail! Hail!
Just caught up on today’s hot topic
Well as a wee bhoys from Greenock I attended at Parkhead for the first time in March 1962 – Parkhead it was and it remained until the late 80’s/ early 90’s – I know always use Celtic Park or Paradise but we can’t do a Stalin on the use of Parkhead because some folk don’t think it’s fashionable.
Flaredtrooserscsc
Was always Parkhead.
Fergus was insistent that the press always used the term Celtic Park….so, on this occasion, not the fault of the media. He would always correct any journalist interviewing him who said Parkhead.
I have converted from saying Parkhead to Celtic Park just because you can’t say the word Celtic often enough!!!!!
PS… someone earlier suggested the Willie Malley song was sung in the seventies. I’m fairly sure it was even written then.
HH
Mags
I am a bit of a numpty at the best of times, and especially when it comes to computers, so can you please enlighten me on how someone wouldn’t have noticed that they couldn’t get on to a site cos the main server was down.
I have a shop, two shops on Etsy, they use Dyn as a host and it was down today, I couldn’t get online for some time, yet a host of people reckoned they could, that mi amigo is way over the top of my head, the server is down yet they got online, as I said earlier…..but i’m sure you can enlighten me :-)
HH
glendalystonsils on 21st October 2016 11:18 pm
Do you have the bheasht in your shights william?
You do?
Well shoot the f****r!
Since the old world looks to be going doowally with evil I have chosen from this day forth to wear a flower in my hair as a sign of peace. I will attend my old barbers and place said flower on the floor once a week in memory of hairy days.
Has Cornflake Tim been on today? :-)
MWD
TET
Might have been their cache they were looking at.
MWD
Being brought up in parkhead it was Cellic park for us,oh and the Chapel
;)))
HH
JIMMYNOTPAUL @ 11:02 PM,
Thanks for that, I’d a feeling it was older than that but Couldn’t find any reference other than it was written by… David Cameron… Cough Cough.
As I’ve seen Charlie & the Bhoys quite a few times and have chatted to them, there was a distinct lack of that Old Etonian Swagger about them.
So guess C&tBs updated an old Celtic song… would be interesting to hear an original.
Hail Hail
JNP
This Paranoid Android could use an Airbag to fill my Iron Lung.
Karma Police arriving and I am Climbing Up The Walls.
Feel Lucky not Let Down.
OK Computer was a game changer for Radiohead and me. :)
MWD
I would doubt it going by they way they were talking, I didn’t have a cache to look at, the main server was down for many hours, it took out Twitter, PayPal, Etsy, Netflik, CNN and a host of other sites.
HH
JNP
Almore got mine.
THE EXILED TIM on 21st October 2016 11:29 pm
The server was not down. It was probably fine. The service TO GET TO the server was down. Its this service called DNS that was attacked today. There are many DNS providers on the internet. Dyn is one. A big one. One of the assumptions of the original internet is that it is free and everyone had the same open minded objective to share data and information. Many institutions most notably governments and corporations despise this idea. Unfortunately, one of the original kind minded services on the internet that is supposed to be sacrosanct to technicians is DNS which means that the service is designed to answer every request because it is considered reasonable. If you start asking these servers a million times a second for the same answer you get a DDOS attack.
On the subject of “St Gregorys”,Ronnie Glavin was in my class.His brother Junior was like a head prefect then.
Ronnie was still a good mate up until we were around 21.Teachers.Jimmy Miller was Maths.Feeney,a big Cantona lookalike,taught French.We had a guy nicknamed Job The Winetester,looked like a mad Frankie Howard.Barney Mc Conville,taught me Econonics,best teacher I ever had.Was Mc Getterick,the Science teacher not a cracking wee blond female.
Only for anyone that has an interest.
Good evening
Haven’t lurked or posted for yonks due to “reloaded”issues.
I hope we knock the shit out of Dignity FC on Sunday.
Back to comatose. HH
MARGARET MCGILL on 21ST OCTOBER 2016 11:30 PM
I’m a bit shaken by that, But not shtirred.
Mags
I sort of knew you would enlighten me….but how come I and many ohters couldn’t get online when others reckoned they could….were they going via a different DNS ?
And I agree that the NSA was prob responsible.
HH
Weefra
Good to see you posting.
MWD
Weefra
Thought you were in Barlinnie or worse. :))
Great to see back mi amigo.
HH
TURKEYBHOY on 21ST OCTOBER 2016 11:41 PM
I think there are a few |Greg’s bhoys on here. When were you there? I left in 67.
WeeFra
So do I
HH
THE EXILED TIM on 21st October 2016 11:44 pm
TET. Yes. Its all client server. Youre the client and where you want to go to is the server. DNS is needed both ways. If any DNS provider in the client-> server -> back to client is DDOS’d it looks like you cannot log on.
MWD
I’ve always thought you suited that pink carnation between your arse cheeks :-)
glendalystonsils on 21st October 2016 11:44 pm
I’m a bit shtirred by that but shurely not shaken. :)
Fra
Welcome son.
MWD/DD
Hi ghuys, WTF were you two on Saturday. Spoiled my day not meeting up at the corner. Lol. Hope you are both well. HH