Mick M 🇵🇸
10.2K posts

Mick M 🇵🇸
@mickm25
Now on Bluesky: [email protected]














Celtic 1-4 Stuttgart This was a painful hammering at home for Celtic – there can be no sugarcoating it. Nor can the various vexed issues raised over these 90 minutes in Glasgow be avoided by Martin O’Neill or the club. The dispute that the Celtic board is having with the Green Brigade – Celtic’s noisy Ultras – is both debilitating and clearly diminishing Celtic on the pitch. The atmosphere tonight inside Celtic Park was woeful – excepting the joyous racket generated by 3000 Stuttgart fans – and this stand-off might very conceivably cost Celtic the title. O’Neill made a bold, plain statement after his team’s last-gasp win over Kilmarnock on Sunday that Julian Araujo’s winning goal after 97 minutes was directly linked to the wall of Celtic fans housed behind that goal. By the same token, the lack of the Green Brigade’s boisterous acoustics inside Celtic Park, which gets the rest of the crowd going, is now hurting Celtic and reducing the team. For clarity: the Green Brigade must carry some of the blame. They rarely come over as a conciliatory, open-minded group of fans. Their beliefs appear almost doctrinal: it is their way or no way. The Green Brigade will happily come back into Celtic Park, just so long as they have the club’s directors over a barrel. As for the Celtic fans’ protest tonight, which disrupted the opening few minutes of the game, O’Neill was evidently disgusted by it, even furious. After the game he said that those Celtic supporters who had disrupted the opening three minutes “need their heads examined”. Any energy and vibe brought out of the dressing-room and onto the pitch by the Celtic players was abruptly lost. Compounding Celtic’s misery the bulky, cumbersome Kasper Schmeichel somehow allowed two saveable Stuttgart shots to either go through him or over him, when in each case making the block would have looked unheroic. The Danish goalkeeper cost Celtic, and little more on this can be said. It is possible that O’Neill over the next few days will think: good riddance Europe. Celtic are now effectively out of the Europa League and O’Neill might conclude that this is advantageous to Celtic’s quest for an unlikely league-and-cup double. Celtic have a cache of onerous fixtures ahead, and O’Neill, at 73, now has to summon every ounce of his renowned psychological powers to haul his team up to the task. Meanwhile, a Celtic civil war is going on around him. •I’m podcasting tomorrow on the Green Brigade issue: to admit the fans back in to Celtic Park, or keep them out? patreon.com/c/pressbox










