…OK, I suppose we have to mention them.
I did a preview for STV on Monday and was asked what my expectations were for last night but had to admit I had zero expectations. This season I hoped we would get into the Champions League group stage, or at least, the Europa League. We remarkably overshot. My real hope for the latter stages of the tournament was that we would exit without taking a hiding.
Technically, 0-3 at home is a bit of a hiding but it doesn’t feel that way for several reasons. The first half was the best football we have seen from a Celtic team in years; far better than either of the performances against Barcelona, and on a par with anything under the Strachan and O’Neill eras. Unlike Barcelona, this match plan was flawed, but it was an honourable flaw.
The “gamble” to play Efe is one which Neil may consider, in time-honoured Celtic tradition, will be inscribed on his gravestone. When you face Juventus you need to take gambles; if they all worked, clearly, they were not gambles. This one didn’t, we learn and move on. The player put on a brave performance and I’m very proud of his achievements this month.
With an away game at the daunting Juventus Stadium to come, many considered that our best chance of qualification would be to win the home game, and we clearly went about our business with the intention of doing just that. Had we faced Juve in the group stage it is possible we would have left fewer spaces at the back. Any watching Barcelona players must have marvelled at how big Celtic Park looked on TV last night compared to their visit two months ago.
We don’t know how good Juventus would have been if we camped in front of our own penalty box, as they did for long periods, but they were a more-than-effective counter-attacking team.
It is hard to pinpoint what we were missing. Georgios Samaras would have played if fit and would have given us the height-dimension up front we lacked without him. He would also have given Gary Hooper the support he badly missed. Charlie Mulgrew’s status as Best Corner Kick Taker in Europe is at risk if he doesn’t take corner kicks until Kris Commons has innumerable tries.
Juve were prepared for the Celtic threat from corners and behaved illegally throughout the game. One of the referees should have had the strength of character to deal with the problem but they were sadly unable.
There were many positives. Emilio is back to his very best. On one occasion in the second half two Juve players were goal-side with only Forster ahead. Emilio made-up the five yard deficit and stopped the attack. His pace, skill and decision-making were first class.
Kris Commons repeatedly took-on a crowd of Juventus players before releasing a team-mate or making space for a crack at goal. He looked like he enjoyed the occasion but didn’t get the clear-cut chance his play deserved.
Lustig and Matthews are both excellent right-sided defenders with pace and skill. Kelvin Wilson did well, as did Efe for long periods. Fraser had little to do all night but had no chance with any of the goals. Victor Wanyama bossed everyone in his vicinity, and this was some vicinity. Roy Keane played 13 games for Celtic and, after an unfortunate debut, I remember thinking “This is what all the fuss is about”. Victor elicits the same sentiment; more on the consequences of this another day.
On Friday 1 March the Lisbon Lions will be at the Kerrydale Suite providing commentary and answering questions on their magnificent European Cup final win in 1967. This has never happened in 46 years since that game, to say it is a unique opportunity fails to tell the whole story.
The event is part of our 125 4 125 campaign – central to reinvigorating the charitable spirit which is part of the club we love. It will be a family occasions, tickets are available at £10 for adults and £5 for children. The night has been organised by several fans working in conjunction with the people at Celtic Charity, so please do your best to support this great occasion. Individual tickets or tables are available, details here.
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starry plough
sadly I think some of this team are for the off but I’m not sure exactly when, how many or to where.
I think Hooper will go this summer and we have a big job on to replace him. I don’t think he will go to Norwich but if there is any truth in the Spurs rumour he will go there.
Should Spurs finish in a position where they don’t get CL football which is entirely possible, we could keep Hooper for our qualifiers and sell him at the end of the window as Spurs play youth players in the Europa league. There are a few English sides who could come in with an offer for Hooper while still allowing Celtic to get the benefit of his goals to get into next season’s CL – which I now see as vital for the club and more importantly for us the fans – the competition really captured the imagination and the league could be rather dull without it.
If Hooper goes anywhere, it’s down there, I think that is a given. He isn’t signing a new contract and he will be on a bosman come January. It would be plain daft to keep a guy who wouldn’t commit to Celtic and lose a decent transfer fee which could be put to good use.
The Wanyama situation is more complex. He is under contract but agents and even the Kenyan FA have been pushing for a move. If he is still a Celtic player come September I would be delighted because I think replacing him would be the most difficult task of all.
Player turnover is normal but given the task in front of Celtic this summer, rebuilding would appear to be on the cards and quite frankly certain areas of the team showed themselves not to be completely without room for improvement.
One thing Gordon Strachan was good at was building new teams – from the MON team to his team 2 and team 3. Neil with John Park for guidance can do that – we’ve already seen Rogic come in and if Gershon impresses we should get him in as well. I feel we need a striker to come through and a creative midfielder (Rogic might be that guy but another wouldn’t hurt). James Forrest is decent to an extent but every year it is the injury problems which hamper his progress. I think Neil should be given a decent amount of cash to spend especially if some players are sold and I think the business should be concluded as soon as possible – the middle of July is our first qualifier.
I’d rather keep everyone and build on what we have but such is the nature of the beast now that clubs like us, the Dutch clubs, the Belgians and the Eastern Europeans all know that our best players will be snapped up by bigger leagues.
It is a sad reflection on modern football.
PARIS — When police arrested Wilson Raj Perumal in Finland, it didn’t take long for him to realize that his criminal buddies had ratted him out.
He’s been exacting revenge ever since – by ratting on them, too.
Since his arrest in 2011, Perumal has been talking to police, prosecutors and journalists about the shadowy world of fixing soccer matches, in which he was an active participant, and the millions of dollars that can be made in betting on them.
The Singaporean was convicted in the Lapland District Court of bribing players in the Finnish league, forgery and trying to flee from officials guarding him, and was sentenced to two years in prison.
Perumal told police that he could be in danger for betraying his former colleagues. But Perumal also reasoned that by fingering him to the Finns, his associates broke the cardinal rule of criminals not cooperating with law enforcement.
“It’s not in my nature to sing like a canary,” he wrote in a letter from jail. “If I had been arrested under normal circumstances, I would have been back in Singapore to serve my time as a guest of the state with my mouth tightly shut.”
European investigators and prosecutors say Perumal has provided an invaluable window into the realm of match-rigging, which is corroding the world’s most popular sport. They say he has revealed who organizes some of the fixing in football, as the sport is known in most countries, and how money is made wagering on outcomes prearranged with players, referees and officials who have been bribed or threatened.
“He’s not the only operating match-fixer of this style or this size in the world, but he’s the first to be really captured in the way he was and now to cooperate the way he is,” said Chris Eaton, who was head of security of FIFA, soccer’s governing body, at the time of Perumal’s arrest.
“He put two and two together and realized he’d been traitored,” Eaton said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It took several days before he decided that it was in his best interests to cooperate.”
Police from Italy investigating dozens of fixed Italian games and a prosecutor looking into 340 suspect games elsewhere in Europe both traveled to Finland to question Perumal as a witness.
One investigator on those trips told the AP that Perumal provided “very good interviews,” that he is still cooperating even after his release from prison in Finland, and that evidence he provided has checked out.
Another investigator told AP that Perumal alerted authorities to two fixes in progress – the matches, the referees – and that his information was “100 percent” right in both cases. That investigator called Perumal “a massive help.”
Both investigators spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss their work publicly. Perumal declined an AP request for an interview.
In court filings, Italian prosecutors described Perumal as their “primary source of evidence” on Tan Seet Eng, also known as Dan Tan, a Singaporean they allege is the leader of the syndicate that fixed matches in Italy. Perumal detailed to authorities how the syndicate is structured, how it places bets, and how it moves bribe-money around the world, they said.
Italian prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for Tan and listed him as the No. 1 suspect in their match-fixing investigation. Prosecutor Roberto Di Martino told the AP there are about 150 people under investigation, including Tan, but none of them has been indicted.
AP could not contact Tan in Singapore. Five phone numbers identified as his by Italian prosecutors were disconnected, and no one answered the door at an apartment the Italians listed as his address.
Perumal told Finnish police that the syndicate has six shareholders – including himself – from Singapore, Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Hungary, and he said they divide up income from gambling on fixed matches. The syndicate places bets mainly in China, Perumal said, according to a transcript of his May 18, 2011, police interview obtained by the AP.
He said the group fixed “tens of matches around the world” – in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Americas – from 2008 to 2010. He estimated the group’s total profits after expenses at “several millions of euros, maybe 5-6 million.”
“Perumal is key, because he provides a view into how it all fit together,” Di Martino told the AP.
Investigators said Perumal has a long history as a match-fixer and a broad array of contacts in soccer. He boasted in a letter from prison: “I can pick up the phone and call from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.”
When arrested, he had numbers stored in his phone for people in 34 countries. He carried a business card with a FIFA logo that described him as “executive manager.”
Perumal wrote from prison that he started fixing matches in Asia in the early 1990s.
“I grew up in a region where football betting and match-fixing was a way of life. Gradually I developed the ability and the expertise to execute the job myself,” he said.
He claimed to have paid off players in Syria and Africa and spoke of fixes in the U.S. and in Bahrain, as well as games involving teams from North Korea, Kuwait, Zambia, Bolivia, Venezuela and Togo. Zimbabwe linked him to widespread corruption and fixes involving its players and soccer association.
Perumal also is suspected of rigging games involving South Africa before it hosted the 2010 World Cup. FIFA determined that Perumal’s company, Football4U, was a front for his betting syndicate and infiltrated the South African Football Association.
In Finland, Perumal told police how he distributed bundles of cash – tens of thousands of dollars at a time – to corrupt Finnish league players, including a 56,000-euro bribe handed over in a stadium lavatory in 2010.
In a prison letter, he lamented that “all corrupt players and officials are like whores who will walk with the highest bidder. There is no loyalty in this business.”
But he felt no guilt about his role.
“I have had players thanking me for giving them this opportunity and telling me how much this money will change their lives,” he wrote. “The only people who get affected are the illegal bookmakers, and they dissolve their losses in the massive turnover of profits.”
Perumal had been in and out of jail repeatedly in Singapore. In 2010, he was given a five-year sentence for injuring a police officer. He appealed but then skipped town. Singapore police spokeswoman Chu Guat Chiew told the AP that Perumal is still wanted in Singapore.
In his prison letters, Perumal said he lived unnoticed in London while on the run, jogging daily around Wembley Stadium and attending Premier League matches on weekends. The handwritten prison letters were sent via Perumal’s lawyer to a journalist, Zaihan Mohamed Yusof of the New Paper in Singapore.
If not for peculiar circumstances in Finland, Perumal might never have talked.
His arrest came on a tip from an informant, also Singaporean, who walked into a police station in Rovaniemi in northern Finland in February 2011 and told the duty officer that Perumal was in the country on a counterfeit passport and staying at the Scandic hotel, Finnish police told investigators. But the informant gave police the wrong room number, so they detained the wrong man, who was later released.
Once armed with the correct room number, police tracked down Perumal and put him under surveillance to be sure that they had the right man, said Eaton, the ex-FIFA security chief who is now director of integrity at the International Centre for Sport Security, a Qatar-backed group funding research into match-fixing.
Finnish police followed Perumal to a game and saw him in heated discussion with a player. That piqued their curiosity and prompted them to contact soccer officials. They, in turn, got word to Eaton at FIFA, who already had Perumal on his radar and immediately recognized the significance of the Finnish catch.
“It was like a bell went off, an alarm went off, in my office,” Eaton told the AP. If the police hadn’t tailed Perumal and had just picked him up and sent him home for traveling on a fake passport, they might never have realized he was fixing matches and he might never have decided to cooperate, Eaton said.
“It would have been virtually a blip instead of the explosion it really was,” Eaton said.
Before his arrest, Perumal had been gambling heavily, built up debts and bilked his syndicate by pocketing money meant to be used to fix matches, Eaton added. He said Perumal also had become too high-profile for Tan, who is believed to be in Singapore.
Perumal “was on Facebook. He was on LinkedIn. He was on Twitter,” Eaton said. “Perumal’s attitude was, `This makes me more valuable, more known by players, more known by the people I want to corrupt and influence.’ Dan Tan wanted him to be more discreet.”
In a prison letter, Perumal alleged that the tip to Finnish police was an effort by his associates “to get rid of me.”
“I knew I was set up the moment they stopped me,” Perumal wrote.
“Seeking police assistance is a violation of code No. 1 in any criminal business. Dan Tan broke this code and stirred the hornets’ nest. And now he has to face the consequences,” Perumal wrote in another letter. “I hold the key to the Pandora’s box and I will not hesitate to unlock it.”
Investigators say Perumal’s decision to cooperate also was motivated by self-interest. As long as he remains useful to authorities in Europe, he delays the day he might be sent back to Singapore, where he faces a prison term and possibly vengeful former associates.
“He’d be in prison for five years and perhaps he wouldn’t come out of that prison,” Eaton said. “He progressively started giving information. Not at once, not in some great blurting splurge. He gave enough each time to ensure that he wasn’t extradited, that he wasn’t sent back to Singapore, to a point where he gave enough that they are now using him in other investigations.
“Progressively, he’s realized, `The only way out for me is to become an informant and to cooperate,'” Eaton added. “But I still don’t believe he’s given anywhere near 100 percent of the information.”
After serving half of his two-year jail sentence in Finland, Perumal was sent to Hungary, which had a European arrest warrant out for him, said Detective Chief Inspector Jukka Lakkala of the Finnish Bureau of Investigation.
Eaton said Perumal served as a “controlled informant” in Hungary, living in a safe house under police watch.
“And no doubt he’ll be in Italy, too,” Eaton added.
In declining the AP interview request, Perumal replied in an email that he did not want “to provide any more details.”
“My life is now settled,” he said, adding that he prefers that it “remains that way.”
Even allowing for the cheating (as Scotland manager Gordon Strachan described it in his role as ITV pundit), Lustig conceded that Celtic were the architects of their own downfall.
Wee Gordon.
Loved him before.
Love him still.
Am now able to give unqualified support to the Scottish national team.
Irrespective of the players he chooses.
macjay1 I’ll second that.
In fact I might log on as someone else and further endorse it.
new article posted.
I like it when Phil is late :-)
asonofdan
12:34 on
14 February, 2013
————————————–
evidence” on Tan Seet Eng, also known as Dan Tan,
Any relation?
Roses are Red
Violets are Glorious,
Don’t try and Surprise,
Oscar Pretorious!
Sorry if posted before …… Happy Administration day !! Sashes to ashes, dust to dust ,a year ago today the Huns went BUST !!
Lurking for years but really felt compelled to write this…..
Since the game finished the other night I suddenly became very aware of just how important this blog is to me. I live in Cork in Ireland and most of my friends are your standard EPL type supporters with mainly a passing interest in Celtic. I and my father would be like the many on this site…completely obsessed, but in a healthy way ;) in all things Celtic. I have always felt fortunate that I dont have to put up with having the old rangers and all that comes with them on my doorstep but have at times felt deprived of being unable to celebrate with fellow fans when we have great victories. I talk to my father about the games but we can often end up arguing about aspects as we both hold strong and not always common views.
In my pain after the defeat on tuesday I took to this site as I usually do gaining comfort from knowing that many others were hurting just like me, even though life seemed to be going on as normal for all around me and this gave me great comfort. I am still very proud of our performance and feel so lucky and grateful to my father for bringing me into the celtic family, a tradition I have also passed on to my son. I was so down after Juve but the reading of all the comments since on here has me just about back to normal again.
For that I thank you all…even you Kevjungle :)
Snake Plissken
I was in a bookshop yesterday in Basel and they had a book with Sepp’s ugly mug on the front with a title something like ” Sepp the KIngpin of Football” and there my friend you have it in a nutshell!!
If Gary won’t sign then he should go because he doesn’t get what we’re doing and I agree hard to replace, my favourite striker since Henrik and I think he’ll get better.Swansea would be a good move for him an upcoming club without the baggage that the perrennial underachievers Spurs have!
Big Vic in my opinion still has a ways to go to command a big club transfer and he would do well maybe to cement his reputation before a move to benchsplintersville elsewhere..
The sadness of the modern game was exemplified by the craven performance of the referee on Tuesday night and that is straight down the line from Sepp, the clique is an Art form in Switzerland and the big clubs clique is fully supported by Sepp and his cronies in the business world.
As I posted after the game sometimes you watch a 90 mins and think what’s the point, like the World Cup now and pretty much the Champions League as well- what’s the point??
Celtic are going in the right direction that’s for sure and hopefully we can compete at the later stages of the CL in the future but we’ll have to fight tooth and nail for every inch of progress we gain…
Rebelbhoy72 :: good man !! Great to hear a fellow Rebel passing on the Celtic traditions to his family. Agree with you regarding CQN 100% no such thing as a bad post just an alternative view. Have to say it’s been a Rebels nightmare for the last 10 days pumpt by the Dubs gubbed by Kildare then losing to RUBENTUS ! Hopefully a better weekend this week fella ! Corcaigh Abu !
I am vexed to write this but Neil Lennon has made a complete and utter hash of this tie. Team selection was wrong and tacticts were all wrong both solely down to him i’m afraid. There is not another team in the last 16 that would have fielded Efe Ambrose and I certainly don’t buy the idea that it was out of neccesity as Mulgrew or Rogne could have played beside Wilson. Why did we not play the same tactics which worked against Barcelona not easy on the eye but effective and as has been mentioned before the resources Juve had at their disposal compared to ours is night and day so theres no disgrace in addopting tactics to suit the tie to make sure your still alive for the 2nd leg away where we can then look to be more expansive and catch them cold. I listened to Davy Moyes, Henrik Larsson, Gordon Strachan and Andy Thownsend all state the obvious thing that Celtic must set their tactics out to still be in the tie after 90mins. Unfortunately due to bad team selection and tactics we played right into Juve’s hands and they killed us off stone dead unbelievable naivety on Lennons part or was it his ego running riot and wanting to wipe the floor with Juve sending shockwaves throughout Europe again I just can’t get my head around this I really can’t and I love this guy to pieces but sometimes he frustrates the living daylights out of me and this is definitely one of those occasions!