DIARY Let’s hope it’s magnificent 7
A ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME event? When you’re as old as I am, it’s a seven-in-a-lifetime event...and hopefully counting.
But there’s no way relative familiarity breeds contempt. I was four years old when the Old Firm contested European finals within a week of each other in ‘67 and seven when Celtic took on Feyenoord three years later, so they didn’t register.
Rangers’ win in Barcelona in 1972 did though. For some reason the game wasn’t shown live, so it was a case of listening on the radio and watching the match in full when it was shown later in the evening. Can you imagine that happening these days?
I was a cub reporter in local newspapers 11 years later when Aberdeen did their thing in Gothenburg but it all began to feel real when Celtic reached Seville in ‘03. Spending a week in Porto before the final, speaking to the likes of their young manager Jose
Mourinho (whatever became of him?) set up that never-to-be-forgotten final that ultimately ended in tears for the tens of thousands of Hoops fans who made the trip.
That really did feel like it was the last time a Scots team would make it, given the disparity in wealth between our clubs and the continent’s elite. Yet Walter Smith and his troops proved everyone wrong in 2008.
And so to yesterday morning...dragging my old bones out of my bed at an unearthly
hour to battle through rain and roadworks to Glasgow Airport to witness what will be hopefully, a magnificent seventh after Rangers defied logic, budgets and two Bundesliga outfits to get to face another one in tomorrow’s final.
The taxi driver wore the look of a man who could have just pointed his car in the direction of the airport and let it do its thing, so often had he made the journey in the previous 24 hours.
Normally these guys say to you: “Where you off to mate?” This one simply said: “Seville pal?” Fearing the Daily Record bean counters would knock back a taxi trip all the way to southern Spain, I just said: “Glasgow Airport, pal. I’ll make my own way from there...”
From Glasgow to Amsterdam to Seville, we landed at 8pm. The airport was mobbed, a cushion of warm air greeting us at the exit doors. It was time to find our hotel...