It was a fantastic all round display from Celtic in the Allianz Arena on Tuesday night. I’m sure almost every football supporter in Scotland outside of the Celtic Support would have thought, and hoped that Celtic would have got battered off Bayern Munich, one of the Top Class teams in European Football, so it would have been a huge disappointment to them to see Celtic take Bayern right to the final minute of added-on time before they managed to score, and eliminate us from the competition.
Brendan set the players a brilliant game plan, and the players executed it almost perfectly, so it was heartbreak for our magnificent players and for our supporters to at least take the game into extra-time, and we thoroughly deserved that at least. The fact is, we had a few opportunities to score, especially in the first half, when we had at least four great chances to score, but it wasn’t to be, and even in the second half when Nico scored, we had another couple of good chances to go two up, it makes you wonder, what if Kyogo had been playing, but that ship has sailed now. I’ve said all season that we need to show progress in the Champions League, I think everyone will agree we have certainly achieved that this season, the challenge is to continue to progress.
This new format in the Champions League was a direct alternative to the proposed breakaway threatened by a lot of the major players a couple of seasons ago. the new format was designed to get the teams from the supposed five big leagues through to the final stages. The top eight would go right through to the last sixteen, it hasn’t quite worked out that way this season, with Manchester City out, and four of the five Italian teams out. Now I’m not casting aspersions here, but I think we suffered from a few refereeing decisions against Bayern, the disallowed Kuhn goal in the first leg, and the not awarding of a penalty to us in the same game. There was also an incident on Tuesday night just before Bayern equalised when Daizen appeared to be fouled, whether it constituted a foul or not is irrelevant, it was a head injury and should have meant the play was stopped.
Let’s be clear here, UEFA have a long history of being economical with the truth, and some of their dealings would certainly border on the shady side at least. There are always double standards when UEFA are concerned, I think the old saying of “Money Talks” springs to mind. So let’s be perfectly clear, would the hierarchy of UEFA have been celebrating on Tuesday night if Celtic had qualified, I very much doubt that, they need the teams from the countries with the biggest television audiences to get through, that’s where the big money, it’s certainly not in Scotland.
Glasgow’s still Green & White.
