The response to Scott Brown’s SFA citation from Celtic, Neil Lennon, the support and everyone connected with the club has been so overwhelming, I had to check if the Celtic top the Pope held in St Peter’s Square this week had “Brown, 8” on the back (it didn’t).
Celtic will present a litany of precedents with players celebrating in a similar fashion without censure from referees or the Association. I would also expect them to ask Judicial Panel members associated with their opponents last Sunday to excuse themselves from proceedings.
At this stage of his career, with contract talks still on going, the captain deserves this support, although let’s not confuse his stoic resilience for Player of the Year qualifications. That subject is worthy of greater scrutiny.
There is a lot of anger at Steven Gerrard over his antagonistic remarks towards Scott Brown since the weekend, but I think we need to cut the Newco manager some slack.
With the many distractions since Sunday, it may have escaped your notice that Celtic are now further ahead of second placed Newco (13 points) than they were ahead of both Aberdeen (9 points) and Newco (12 points) at the end of last season.
The harsh reality facing Gerrard this week is that he spent significantly more money than Pedro Caixinha but his side is even further adrift from the champions than the team managed by Caixinha and Graeme Murty a year earlier. Caixinha was given 229 days before being sacked. Gerrard now knows his team is doing worse than before he took over. He is not the first to lash out in the face of failure.
This is his first season in management, Caixinha was a manager for 14 years before arriving at Ibrox. He has a long way to go to catch up with the Portuguese’. Gerrard’s feelings of frustration are new. A year from now he will be more accepting of reality, including his own limitations in comparison to Pedro. Nine-in-a-row will not hurt him as much as this season’s eight.
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Brendan Rogers was a great Celtic manager, he was a consummate professional, well, almost.
The wee thing that irked us all was his refusal to condemn the brutal treatment handed out to our players on a weekly basis. We could all see it. Leg breakers on Kieren Tierney. Stamps on Broony. He looked on as our newly signed most expensive player was blatantly scythed down without as much as a foul, then sidelined for weeks, injured.
I honestly don’t know if Neil Lennon is the guy to lead us to the promised land of 10 in a row and European respectability. He is burdened with the Neil Lennon baggage that he wouldn’t have anywhere else on the planet.
But the glaring difference between Brendan Rodgers and Neil Lennon is that NL will always stand up for his players in the face of adversity, instinctively. It’s how he is.
Brendan Rodgers was financially attached to Celtic.
Neil Lennons attachment is fiancial, but it’s also emotional.
It would have been interesting to see BR’s reaction to the past weeks events
OLDTIM67 – Great. See you there. (are children allowed in BV?……otherwise my daughter can look after the wee yin).
Hello again all you you rebels.
DAVID 66
Very sad news about your wee brother, turn the rebs up as loud as they
can go.
H.H Mick
Southside- i think Rodgers would have soft soaped his way round today’s presser,Neil fronted today really well,and he spoke for you and I,I’m guessing? HH
Sevco is Pretty vacant.
Need Big (figuratively) Strong Men to get these 9 Titles.
Need a lot of Hard Work and a lot of Luck as well.
Paradise is the name emblazoned on the Stadium.
Brendan enhanced Celtic – He Left in a shocking way.
Celtic is Flourishing.
2 sides to Every story
One thing is Certain. Celtic is Blessed.
1967 is just Incredible in so many ways.
NEUSTADT-BRAW on 5TH APRIL 2019 10:41 PM
Brilliant
I am doing my bit to make that go viral.
“Fix Fitba’ Empty Hampden.”
Whats goin’ on?
Scaniel 11.11pm
Food served in the BV so I think children accompanied by adults should be ok if you order some chips , defo no donkeys most pubs in the town have their own resident donkeys :-)
Hope we’re not wearing our Gilets Jaunes at the Livi game.
GFTB,
Not going to the Rez Party (I don’t think).
Looking for good pressing this game from the forward players.
Timo and Ods Together Mega excitement.
Scottie held the ball too long for me and the way I like ma fitba.
Together
Oh Yeah.
Petec 12.16am
Metro late 90s…
Ultra sonicly good, once the wee yin appeared Celtic, dance music and illegal substances ceased :-)
Different life different priorities
Hope you enjoyed Sunday, nothing better than the hoops winning at Celtic Park when the sun is shining ?
I had to go to Work after the first half against St Mirren.
Callum was playing very well…. back up to speed+.
Aberdeen are a very tough nut to crack and IMO it is 60/40 in our favour.
Sorry – Livi – no injuries would be good.
GFTB,
Aidan got a bet up last week.
16/1 Morelos to get sent off. I need to tell him there are no…….
He will hear it from his Granda this weekend.
Fantazia
CELTIC
is
CELTIC
Petec 12.46am
Good pick from young Aidan he wasn’t alone with that bet (not that I bet it) Edouard & Sinclair hat tricks were my bookie donation …
Only gamble what you are prepared to lose (or can get away with :-)
GFTB,
Dave Angel will play his Best ever set @ Ingliston Today – _ ~ I know it.
He was Mega for me @ the Metro in Saltcoats – most had no idea what was being played. ;))
Petec 1.01am
Carl Cox at the Metro was outstanding but for me that’s just tunes :-)
I know even less about music than I do about fitba :-)
I really cannae wait to download all the sets and see what I missed!!!!!
Petec 1.05am
If you are going to see the champions elect tomorrow don’t stay on here all night … am working the morra so I will bid you good night …
my fav metro tune
Forever young
Hail Hail
GerryBhoy
Carl was just Awesome @ the Metro.
Magical so he was. He’s Magical everywhere.
A wee bit like a Club I know so well.
nn CQN
Roberto Hoodinho
We MAGNiFY his Name
Defo nn CQN.
Apols for long post but great article from Oliver Kay in The Times about potential Champions League changes –
It gets crowded in the Billy Wright Stand on match nights at Molineux. On the first-floor landing, outside the executive boxes, fans are drawn to the cabinets that show off memorabilia from Wolverhampton Wanderers’ illustrious past. As well as the shirts and medals, there are front pages of the Sporting Star on the evenings of the club’s FA Cup triumphs in 1949 (“It’s ours!”) and 1960 (“Ours again”). On Tuesday night, in the week that Wolves bid to reach their first final since 1960, those exhibits were attracting quite a crowd.
Other fans found themselves drawn to the artefacts from Wolves’ ventures into Europe in the 1950s — the historic friendly match against Ferenc Puskás’s Honved team in December 1954, which Stan Cullis’s team won 3-2 to be declared unofficial “champions of the world”. A rare dissenting voice at Molineux that evening was the French football writer Gabriel Hanot, who, feeling Wolves’s football to be inferior to that of Real Madrid, proposed in L’Équipe that “a European championship be organised between clubs. Then Wolves really could prove they are the best.”
Wright, left, and Puskas lead the teams out at Molineux in 1954 in a game that Wolves won to become unofficial champions of the world. Such echelons now appear closed off to so-called smaller clubs
Wright, left, and Puskas lead the teams out at Molineux in 1954 in a game that Wolves won to become unofficial champions of the world. Such echelons now appear closed off to so-called smaller clubs.
That was the catalyst for the European Cup, which was launched the following season, with invitations extended to a representative of Europe’s 16 leading nations. The English invitation went to Chelsea, who beat Wolves to the league title in 1954-55, but their involvement was blocked by the FA and the Football League, who, depressingly and not untypically, saw no future in a concept dreamt up by Johnny Foreigner. (Manchester United, under Matt Busby, would defy that veto a year later.) The entrants included Real, AC Milan, PSV Eindhoven and Sporting Lisbon but also, reflecting the era, names that resonate less loudly across Europe these days: Aarhus, Djurgardens, Gwardia Warsaw, Voros Lobogo (now MTK Budapest) and, closer to home, Hibernian.
West Germany were represented by Rot-Weiss Essen (though Saarland, then under French occupation, were represented by Saarbrücken). Bayern Munich? They had just been relegated from the Oberliga Sud and would not even be among the 16 clubs selected to join the Bundesliga in 1963. Paris Saint-Germain? They were not even founded until a merger in 1970 and had only won two French league titles until the transformation that came upon being acquired as a soft-power asset for the Qatari state in 2011.
As Nuno Espírito Santo says several times in every press conference, this is football. Empires rise and empires fall. Wolves fell into financial difficulties in the mid-1980s and were relegated from the old First Division to the Fourth Division in consecutive seasons. They briefly found their way back to the top flight under Sir Jack Hayward’s ownership in 2003 and six years later under Steve Morgan, and now, finally, seventh in the Premier League and looking forward to an FA Cup semi-final tomorrow, they seem genuinely resurgent. The manner of this resurgence — built on the calibre of coach and players they have been able to sign with considerable help from the Gestifute agency, which is part-owned by Wolves’s Chinese owners Fosun International — sits uncomfortably with many of us, but then again so does much else about the modern game. This is football, the 21st-century way.
Whatever the rest of the season has in store, Wolves should be setting their long-term ambitions higher and higher. This season, the Premier League. Next season, the Europa League? Beyond that . . . the Champions League?
Do not bet on it. Even if they or Everton or Leicester City or West Ham United or anyone else can break the mighty stranglehold of the Premier League’s “big six”, never mind force their way into the top four, there are plans afoot to tighten the admissions policy for the Champions League. As detailed in The Times yesterday, the European Club Association (ECA) is lobbying for a revamp that would effectively see the Champions League operate as a closed shop from 2024-25 onwards.
The obvious riposte is to say that the Champions League is already a closed shop — that it is the same clubs who qualify every season, that the later stages are always dominated by the biggest clubs from England, Spain and, to a lesser extent, Germany, Italy and France, even if Ajax’s resurgence this year carries distant echoes of a more meritocratic age — but, if the ECA has its way, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
The three-tier structure proposed by the ECA would result in an elite competition open to 32 clubs, 24 of whom would be retained for the following season regardless of league performance. There would be the threat of relegation to a second tier, but even then there are plans to retain wild-card places, on the basis of past European performance, for big clubs who may not qualify. Great if you are AC Milan or another of the sleeping giants from the Champions League era. Dreadful if you are Celtic or Red Star Belgrade or another of those great clubs who, through no fault of their own, have been left behind by the inequalities of the modern game, or if you are Wolves or any other club hoping to challenge the Champions League elite in their own country.
It was heartening to see the Premier League clubs, as a collective, condemn these proposals yesterday. In a statement, the 20 clubs expressed “significant concerns” about the ECA’s plans and “unanimously agreed it is inappropriate for European football bodies” to threaten such upheaval. Yet there is certainly a feeling at board level among some of the richest Premier League clubs that a new Champions League format, which will guarantee more matches between the most commercially successful teams, is inevitable in the long term. Some feel it desirable.
The European football landscape has been changed dramatically by the elitism that the Champions League has brought, causing vast inequalities between leagues and within leagues. It seems almost impossibly romantic in 2019 that Ajax, four-times European champions, have reached a Champions League quarter-final for the first time in 16 years. The priority for the ECA’s 230 members should be to try to restore some modicum of competitive balance, but no, of course the agenda is dictated by the biggest clubs, who dominate the organisation’s executive structure. They want the supremacy of their elite to be ringfenced, not challenged.
These clubs want guaranteed Champions League qualification, guaranteed matches against each other, guaranteed broadcast, commercial and matchday revenue of a level far beyond that which comes when they have to play against clubs such as Celtic and PSV Eindhoven, never mind AEK Athens and Red Star Belgrade. In the minds of the self-perpetuating elite, those are second-class or third-class clubs, not worthy of the biggest stage or the biggest revenue streams. They can have their own competition, a sideshow, away from the main event.
It is just as well, for the likes of PSG and indeed Chelsea, Manchester City and Atletico Madrid, that the European football landscape was not redrawn like this a decade or two earlier. In fact, it is just as well for Liverpool, Barcelona, Bayern, Juventus and others that it was not a closed shop from the start. Throughout its history, football’s appeal has been increased by the possibility of upward mobility. Access to the biggest competitions and biggest prizes has never been more exclusive than now. To go even further in that direction would be an affront to competition.
Let us not forget what European competition’s appeal is based on: not just excellence but a taste of the exotic. That is what made those floodlit friendlies at Molineux and elsewhere in the 1950s so enthralling, leading to the European Cup as we knew it and then, ultimately, to a Champions League which has brought more games between the biggest clubs, raising the standard of the competition like never before.
But these latest proposals? They stink of entitlement and greed and a total ignorance of what the sport is and what it should be. They are an outrage, particularly to those who know their football history and those, like the fans gathered on that landing at Molineux on Tuesday, who dream of recapturing past glories.
morning bhoys from a sunny Cheshire, COYBIG HH.
Good morning, friends from a dry, cloudy and chilly East Kilbride. Delighted yet again that I get to take my place at 3pm to see The Champions play. But before all that I’ll have another go at the ole ParkRun #201.
Good morning CQN from a mild Garngad
A good 3-0 win today for the bhoys.
Melbourne Mick, I’m off to hospital shortly as my rebel wee brother is fighting like feck, when I get there your advice will be taken, Rebs will be on, and if the Rebs and his 2 brothers are the last thing he sees and hears then I am sure he will love that.????
Hail Hail all and COYBIG
D. :)
David66 on 6th April 2019 8:38 am
Good morning CQN from a mild Garngad
A good 3-0 win today for the bhoys.
Melbourne Mick, I’m off to hospital shortly as my rebel wee brother is fighting like feck, when I get there your advice will be taken, Rebs will be on, and if the Rebs and his 2 brothers are the last thing he sees and hears then I am sure he will love that.????
Hail Hail all and COYBIG
D. :)
————————————————————————————
Hi D
I canny believe the guts and strength your showing on here never mind your young brother.
God blesss you both and the rest of your family and friends.??
Very good article by Oliver Kay
If I could write at all, that is the presentation of reality that I would want us to confront.
Can’t help the feeling that there are 6 or 7 English clubs who are less resolute in their opposition than the Majority vote suggested.
Tonyrome- I have made my piece with the fact that Thomas is going.
Believe me I have cried every day since we got the news, Thomas made wrong choices in life, but he is our brother, and it has been a pleasure knowing him.
Right aff oot
Hail Hail
D. :)
David66
Thoughts and prayers are with Thomas and family
I had been typing out a full prayer to St Jude, but system keeps reloading
So a shortened version
Dear St Jude
You taught us to love the faith handed to us
Life is very difficult for us because of “Thomas”
Help us in our need
And ask God to deliver us from this evil
Amen
Babelsberg
The selection I expect today ( Fitness permitting):
Bain
Lustig, Ajer,Benkovic,Tierney.
Forrest, Brown, McGregor,Christie,Sinclair.
Edouard.
Personally,I would prefer Weah or Hayes over Sinclair and would like to see Burke given one half on the wing as I see no harm in giving Jamesie a rest of sorts.
After the first game of the season, I predicted Livi would go down. It says much about their grit ( and my predicting skills!) that they are in no danger of that at all. Considering their style, I would not be amazed at a very, low-scoring game.
JJ
Goooood Morning CQN ????????? – tbc
Will not be at the game today, I have another very Specail event to attend
Today I get the huge honour and privilege of
Walking my Wee Baby Ghirl, down the Aisle.
Many of you know, have met, or have sponsored and supported Laura, through her many charitable functions – 4 visits to Lourdes with HCPT, funding kids on this trip.
Our visit and funding of an orphanage school in Kenya, and then just last year, her final trip as a single Ghirl ( mind you her husband to be was also there) to Ghana, both teaching and setting up a library in a all Ghirls orphanage school Ghana with Let us Shine, a locally sponsored charity.
So thanks to you all at CQN for supporting Laura and her journey to being a young Lady
Laura, you have been an absolute delight and pleasure Sweetheart
Have a fabulous day
To Stephen and Laura
You Both,
” Will Never Walk Alone”
Hail Hail
NORRIEM on 6TH APRIL 2019 10:03 AM
TELL LAURA I LOVE HER.