Celtic were overflowing with fine performances last night but mostly this was a tactical victory. Ajax dominated possession against Milan and enjoyed lots at the Camp Nou, so Neil Lennon knew what to expect.
Despite playing at home against our lowest-ranked opponent, we never chased the game, allowed Ajax time on the ball, and waited for the opportunity. We had the intelligence across the field to outsmart Ajax, with agility (Forrest), combativeness (Mulgrew, Kayal) and experience in the box (Stokes) to get the job done. We also have perhaps the best keeper in the competition. Shhh.
At some point before the return game in Amsterdam, The Bore may consider that his team deserved to lose, just as Nir Biton deserved his red card. Lunging into tackles inside the box is a recipe for defeat. Take the ball or you take your opponents leg. The noises from Ajax after the game suggested some bewilderment at the defeat; a well-worn track for teams to leave Celtic Park after Champions League games.
I hope de Boer carries that sense of entitlement into the next game, if he does, he’ll have learned nothing and his team will lose again.
Celtic’s area for remedial action is also clear. Over three Champions League games they have not conceded in the first 75 minutes but conceded four times after that point. This is not a complaint, it’s hard to maintain the levels of concentration, not to mention the physical effort, late in a game, but the stats suggest that, at this level, we wilt before our opponents.
The Dutch are known as progressive and tolerant people but the behaviour of Ajax fans (I hear from the moment they arrived at Schiphol Airport) was deplorable, without question the most violent European fans in all my time watching Celtic.
Football hooliganism is nothing like it was in the 70s and 80s but it is on the rise across Europe. Remain ever-vigilant.
On a more prosaic fan issue…. We were not at a pantomime last night. The moment between Nir Biton lunging forward with his studs up and the referee producing a red card was filled by a “Oooh” from many in the home support.
As soon as I heard this I knew the card would be red. Biton may have gone without the sound effects, but we don’t need to authorise the ref to make a big decision.
All this and the Big Glasgow Derby coming up!!
Between now and Sunday you are going to hear lots about the collection on behalf of the Greater Maryhill Foodbank, taking place before the Thistle-Celtic game on Saturday. What a great cause to be a part of.
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asonofdan
17:16 on 23 October, 2013% of pts Won at Home in Group Stages since 2001. Barca 84%, Madrid 79%, Chelsea 78%, CELTIC 76%, Man Utd 71%.
I wonder how long till the MSM turn that into a negative by using our relatively poor away form?
HH
Kickinthenakas, gillian I scream, BT (and anyone I’ve missed) –
thanks for the advice, will check them out.
LurkingbetweenhouseworktasksCSC
In the last 16 years only Liverpool, Arsenal,
Juventus and Barcelona have scored more
than 1 goal at Celtic Park in European
competition.
Celtic’s Champions League group stage home
record – 23 games, 16 wins, 5 draws, 2
losses. 32 goals scored, 14 conceded. 13
clean sheets.
O.G.Rafferty
Many members of my family live near Glennane Co Antrim from where many atrocities were carried out by a loyalist gang aided and abetted by serving RUC men and were aware of their activities.
I posted the link to John Weir last week. Incredibly greendreamz came up this gem. I saw no point in having a debate with such a well informed expert.
21:59 on17 October, 2013
Houl yer wheest
17:55 on
17 October, 2013
RobertTressell
17:02 on17 October, 2013
Great articles which should be circulated and read widely. Here’s a statement from a former RUC man.
SeeingRed [John Weir’s Affadavit]
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Would take much of that statement with a pinch of salt. He was convicted of one murder…….everything else is conjecture and the ramblings of the disenfranchised IMO.
Try reading this its a technique used by fiction writers I believe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
Statements of John Weir – Politics.ie
http://www.politics.ie › Forum › Regional Discussion › Northern Ireland
THE PAT FINUCANE CENTRE
(Armagh and Derry)
Justice for the Forgotten (Dublin) and Mercier Press (Cork)
Invite you to the launch of:
“Lethal Allies: British Collusion in Ireland”
BY ANNE CADWALLADER
Refreshments Served Tel: 02871 268846
Belfast:
Saturday 26 October at 1.00pm
St. Mary’s University College, Falls Road Speaker – Dr. Brian Feeney
(With thanks to Feile an Phobail and St. Mary’s University College)
Derry:
Monday 28th October at 1.00pm
Rathmore Centre
Speaker – Jude Collins
Dublin:
Tuesday 29 October at 7.30pm
Glasnevin Museum
Speaker – Vincent Browne
Anne Callwallader is a wonderful person who is doing sterling work for the Pat Finucane Centre. When she first came to the 6 counties she was fed info confidential info by senior police and military sources because of her London accent.
Mysteriously, these sources dried up. I’m looking forward to Saturday’s book launch immensely.
hankray
the consensus on Virgils booking in my ward was encroachment
Jackie Mac…… Don’t know if you can get RTE Johnny Giles, Liam Brady and Eamonn Dunphy are always full of praise for Celtic and are fully aware of the constraints that the club play under and the results the club can achieve.
“A loan that is not repayable is not a loan. It’s an illegal under the counter payment designed to avoid paying tax.
Does it take three Law Lords to tell us what is blindingly obvious to anyone with an ounce of honesty in their body?”
Good Evening Timland.
First post since our victory over Ajax……chuffed to bits, only
complaint NFL leave your central defensive partnership
alone……..no more switching Efe out to right back.
NATIONALISE GRANGEMOUTH:
save jobs, conditions and the nations wealthTodays devastating announcement that multi billionaire Jim Ratcliffe is walking away from the petrochemical plant at Grangemouth, putting this vital national asset into liquidation, means the loss of 800 skilled jobs, with countless hundreds more jobs threatened through the repercussions to the local economy.
And the same INEOS capitalist dictator has warned that Scotland’s only oil refinery will remain shut down unless the workers in that part of the huge industrial complex accept cuts to pay, pensions, shift allowances and bonuses that would total a loss of £10-15,000 per worker.
FERAL CAPITALISM
This is feral capitalism at its blatant worst, red in tooth and claw, fangs plunged not only into the workforce but the wider Scottish population. And contrary to the lies peddled by Ratcliffe and his well-named PR company – Media Zoo – this has nothing to do with the ‘financial distress’ of INEOS, and even less to do with any refusal on the part of the workforce or their union UNITE to see sense. INEOS bought Grangemouth off BP in 2006 as part of a much bigger £6billion takeover. It helped INEOS become the 4th biggest chemicals company in the world, with 51 manufacturing sites in 11countries across North America, Europe and Asia.
INEOS – which in an obscene insult to language is Greek for ‘bright new dawn’! – has plunged the Grangemouth workforce and the whole of Scotland into darkness and despair with their animalistic pursuit of profit at all cost.
TAX DODGERS
Back in 2010, Ratcliffe moved INEOS headquarters from the UK to Switzerland, to dodge company taxes of at least £100m a year.
They’ve paid no UK taxes for at least the past 5 years. And again contrary to their lie-machine in recent weeks, in 2011 Grangemouth petrochemicals made operating profits of £31m – which rocketed to £49m last year.Globally, INEOS last year had a turnover of £43billion, and profits over £2billion. So pleas of ‘financial distress’ from Ratcliffe and INEOS wouldn’t fool a child learning sums at nursery, let alone the adult population.
SUBSIDISED PROFITEERING
Hellbent on even steeper rises in profit, this one-man dictatorship over Scotland’s only oil refinery and petrochemical site – employing 1,300 directly and 5,500 in the supply chain – issued a poisonous cocktail of blackmail and bullying. They demanded £150m off the taxpayer as a price for investing and retaining Grangemouth. They demanded cuts of £50m in operating cuts per year from the workforce – make the workers pay!
They perversely used the fact that Grangemouth accounts for 85% of Scotland’s fuel supplies and 30% of England’s to hold a bazooka to the heads of both Westminster and Holyrood, demanding public subsidies for their profits.
PLANNED PROVOCATION
Within the workforce, Ratcliffe and INEOS saw one of the most powerfully organized industrial trade unions in the country as the enemy of their rapacious profiteering. So in the manner of Thatcher’s well planned confrontation with the miners in the 1980s, INEOS began to stockpile supplies in advance of provoking a showdown with the union and workers. Recently documents emerged proving that as far back as last March they were preparing for a strike this November!
But they weren’t just indulging in the arts of Mystic Meg: these billionaire gangster capitalists were out to consciously provoke strike action and then isolate and vilify the workers and UNITE as they held the country to ransom in demand of public funds for private capitalist profits to thrive.
To their eternal shame, the British Labour party leadership supplied Ratcliffe with an opening when they started a political witch hunt against UNITE convener at the site, and local constituency Labour Party chair, Stevie Deans. Labour – and the police who they scandalously sent a report to!! – subsequently cleared Stevie of all wrongdoing, but INEOS persisted with new investigations, ploughing through his emails, hunting for misuse of company resources for political activity – all in an attempt to decapitate the union and provoke strike action as a smokescreen for their real strategy.
SIGN OR BE SACKED
When the union stewards discovered management documents proving this long-planned provocation, they tactically withdrew the 48-hour strike due last weekend. Ratcliffe, besotted by his own wealth and arrogance, probably misread this as an act of weakness, and issued ‘sign or be sacked’ notices to the workers in their own homes – demanding that within 3 days they sign for new contracts involving £10-15,000 a year cuts to their incomes, or face the sack in 45 days. When workers refused to be browbeaten into submission – over 680 of the 1,000 UNITE members returned the forms unsigned to the union – Ratcliffe has stepped up the brutality even further, liquidating the petrochemical arm of the site (800 jobs), and still refusing to fire up the refinery unless the other 500 workers cave in to his dictatorship over terms and conditions.
PROFITS AND PAWNS
Even the mainstream media, not usually sympathetic to the workers’ side of any struggle, have overwhelmingly condemned the methods of Ratcliffe and INEOS. But the crunch question is what should be done now?
It is perverse in the extreme that an industrial complex that accounts for 10% of the nation’s GDP, and 85% of fuel supplies in Scotland, as wells it’s implications for the key Forties oilfield, is in the hands of one man – a tax-dodging multi-billionaire to boot. This one fact captures the lunatic immorality of capitalism as a system. Profit is all. People are pawns.
Ratcliffe declares the site ‘worthless’ and in need of huge public subsidies, and yet INEOS’s own company accounts confirm that last year sales jumped by 50%; gross profits rose by 20%; operating profits leapt by an incredible 56%.
So oil-rich Scotland has only one oil refinery, and it’s fate is in the hands of one venture capitalist!
As columnist Ian Bell rightly says (Herald 23 Oct 2013):” Strategic national assets are not something that can be left to the markets, far less individuals with big money and small ideas”.
CHINESE STATE OWNERSHIP?
Ratcliffe is pulling out, leaving devastation in his wake, because not even his obscene levels of bullying and blackmail have screwed the loot he wanted out of workers or governments. The SNP government is absolutely right to be looking at alternative ownership to retain the jobs, skills and vital economic output of this vast enterprise. But why, for instance, should they seek a takeover of Grangemouth by the Chinese state? The central bureaucracy of the Chinese Communist Party, who have rapidly transformed themselves into some of the most rapacious capitalists in the world, without a care for the health or safety of their workers – who are killed in the mines and elsewhere on an appalling scale – are already half-owners of the INEOS operations at Grangemouth. Is that where the Holyrood government seeks a new owner?
NATIONALISE – DON’T SUBSIDISE
Anyone would welcome a rescue of the entire operation – the refinery as wells the petrochemical plant – but instead of seeking either another multinational capitalist or the Chinese state as saviours, it would make infinitely more sense for the Scottish government to nationalize the whole complex – bring it into the collective ownership of the Scottish people.
That way they could also usher in new, democratic forms of management, incorporating the workers through their elected unions, and the Scottish government, in pursuit of the interests and well-being of not only the workforce but the entire population.In the old phrase, they should nationalize, not subsidize; take over the huge assets of a multinational that has revealed the real nature of capitalism as a system, and deploy the skills and expertise of the workforce as part of a state-owned energy industry, which could begin to look after people and planet alike.
INDEPENDENCE AND SOCIALISM
This whole episode also highlights the case for independence – for having the powers to take energy and other key industry into outright public ownership and control. But it also highlights the need for an independent Scotland based on the interests of the working class majority, not those of a few multinationals being bribed into investing here by low corporation taxes and public subsidies, only to bugger off again when it suits them.
We need to push for public ownership to save the jobs, skills, livelihoods and energy and industrial output at Grangemouth – and step up the argument that self-government for the Scottish people is the surest route to stopping modern pillage and plunder by capitalists with ‘big money and small ideas’
whitedogh
Not encroachment, pushing!
Was the official on the touchline who brought it to refs attention. That’s how I saw it. It was never a booking offence anyway.
HH
Paul, my thoughts on the pantomime sound effects too.. I knew Biton would go as the ref had to plays to the crowd ie us..
The Dutch fans are scary.. I’m nervous about going to Adam..
Finally, lots bitter hurting SMSM around.. Makes last night even sweeter…
HH
Found a pub at the last minute that was showing the Celtic game here in Sorrento everyone else was watching the Napoli game,well done the hoops puts us right back in contention for qualification
Only tim in pub csc
Wonderful result last night and my MOM was Izzy,
I must confess a couple of years ago I was never a big Charlie M fan but feel he has improved so much.
Previously, in my opinion Charlie M had a limited game where he could just deliver a quality ball and in these big games was often caught in possession however and seemed a bit slow, now I feel he is the most versatile player in the team.
He rarely loses the ball, always finds his man, delivers defence splitting passes, reads the game well, stops attacks and is now creating and linking so effectively with Sammy and Izzzy. I feel his game has improved so much all I can say is Well Done Charlie!
Always in my first team now.
eddieinkirk….
Great post
A belated yesssssss
A brilliant night in Paradise and Izzy back to his best. Loved it.
HH
OG Rafferty
Co Antrim = Co Armagh
Further to the link re EBTs.
That for me is the whole case summarised .A loan not to be repaid is absolutely not a loan , therefore part of an individual’s remuneration .
Oldco can therefore only loose this case, it was a travesty the original case outcome.
To me this should bring the ‘ sporting advantage ‘ debate to the fore.
Oldco cheated pure and simple with tax avoidance schemes which provided a sporting or unsporting advantage in allowing them to pay players that otherwise they would not have afforded.
I make it 9 in a row when we win the title this season!!!
Hail Hail
eddieinkirkmichael, 18:36;
Great post.
Totally share your sentiments…
Eddieinkirkmichael 18:36
Absolutely magnificiant, thank you
Oops magnificent
The tavern in grangemouth obviously a Celtic shop.
Shocking treatment of hardworking skilled workforce by money grabbing tax avoiding multimillionaire owners.
justafan
Perhaps ! I was distracted here by the Chief flinging the sink out the window
googybhoy ♥ Celtic & Burghbhoy
That ruling today is significant in so many ways and none of them good for thems :))
I make a point when talking to any Sevco fans about the old dead club ,of asking a question early on .
Do you believe that the EBTs paid by Ragers were actually loans or payments for playing for the club .
If they answer loans ,then I simply end the conversation ,as there is no point saying anything else
HH
eddieinkirkmichael
18:36 on 23 October, 2013
Press Release from the SSP?
It’s normal practice to attribute C&Ps.
As to the chances of having socialism in one country how are the SSP doing in the polls?
EBTs….don’t get your hopes up bhoys & ghirls the masonic hand was clearly evident in the original decision and is just as likely to influence the appeal.
Any rising of expectations now will only increase the angst later.
fergus slayed the blues
19:01 on 23 October, 2013
It’s suggested that HMRC conceded that the loans were bona fide loans.
Trouble is the tribunal sat in private so we can’t be sure.
Good to see the Ramsay principle being emphasised though.
leftclicktic
What judgement ive just logged on?
Eddieinkirkmichael 18:36
Wonderful post, fully agree but also wonder how much Westminster is behind this present situation.
leftclicktic
What judgement ive just logged on?
This one
http://www.scotcourts.gov.uk/opinions/2013CSIH84.html
I’m impressed anyone has been able to wade through it yet, never mind comment on it.
Hamiltontim is praying for Oscar 18:25:
Where did the two you go last night, never got to say hello to Minx1888?
Keep the Faith!
Hail Hail!
See when the law lords mention Ramsay cash box in their judgement on HMRC v Aberdeen Asset management with the Oldco case do we substitute Ramsay for Souness/Fergusson/Doddsy/ Klos/De Boer/Wattie/ ad nauseum ????
Really think justice will now be done !!!
Ernie
I would include any of the judiciary if I was ever in conversation with them in regards the question above .
Their interpretation of the law or not .
HH
Lennybhoy
We did say our au revoirs but had to leave sharpish as I had a ticket for someone.
Obviously still need to give you some dosh, doh! :-)
Sorry guys and ghirls I left out the authers name, it was by Ritchie Venton of the SSP. I only dream of writing posts such as that lol
ernie lynch
Just going by comments from Paul Mac & others,
Like you say it will take me a while to read it never mind begin to understand it :))
http://scotslawthoughts.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/has-the-court-of-session-today-made-a-decision-which-will-win-hmrc-the-big-tax-case/
Till later all
Bmcuw
Had a pint with your dad today, and a wee debate on the independence vote. Your uncle Jim is a drinking buddy of mine.
Tremendous result and a superb effort by every player last night. Spoiled a wee bit by the red card but ref got it right