WHOLE NEW BALL GAME
From cannon fodder to PSG and Lyon, Old Firm pre-season ties now a...
This is guaranteed to be a season like no other
RIGHT, who are this lot? The usual summer fodder at some godforsaken outpost, no doubt. Waiters carrying a few extra puddings round the midriff, plus a guy who once had a trial for someone.
Hang on, did you say PSG? Not the actual PSG, surely. That can’t be right…
There is nothing normal about 2020, remember. And that extends to the pre-season programmes put together, in necessary haste and amid much uncertainty, by both Celtic and Rangers.
Over the next few days, Scotland’s two biggest clubs have volunteered to front up against the kind of quality opposition often avoided until the group stage of the Champions League.
Considering the alternative, staying at home and facing the same old opponents already on the fixture list from now until doomsday, they have done absolutely the right thing.
Neil Lennon knows he will learn plenty from seeing his men take on Nice and Lyon in the Veolia Trophy event before heading to Paris to play the Ligue 1 champions themselves — Neymar (below), Kylian Mbappe et al — by way of a bonus next Tuesday.
Steven Gerrard will feel the same about his team’s involvement in the tournament, with Moussa Dembele’s Lyon on Thursday and Nice on Saturday guaranteed to stretch Rangers.
And that, to be honest, is what makes this condensed programme of games so very different from the norm.
You see, pre-season is usually carefully constructed around a schedule of gradually increasing difficulty.
Why, on the day of their first or even second game of a standard summer, Rangers and Celtic players will often put in a brutal training session in the morning. The reason? Because the evening friendly isn’t so much a fixture as a chance to work on team shape and get some miles in the legs.
Over the years, anyone who has closely followed the fortunes of teams at this stage of the average campaign — not as exciting as stamp collecting, in all honesty — will recognise certain recurring themes.
There’s the absolute mauling of some bunch by the name FC Beatrix or SK Pinkafeld. Complete with a fringe player bagging a double hat-trick — ‘Beatrix Slaughter!’ roars the headline — before insisting he’s just keeping his head down and hoping for more game time this year.
In more lavish days, there was perhaps a North America tour complete with only one absolute cert — no teamsheet for the college boys providing the opposition. Leading to some interesting match reports.
Over the years, our top teams have been dragged halfway up Slovenian mountains, through Norwegian public parks and back via an athletics stadium that once hosted the European Under-23 Championships.
Or, just for variety’s sake, invited to grace virtually empty Australian rugby stadia, the only folk in attendance being a bunch of misty-eyed expats indulging in beery nostalgia for the dear old Scotland they left behind in 1975.
The opposition are an after-thought, in many cases. They could be anyone, a side of (barely) moving mannequins.
Which contributes to the other great truth of these affairs. Everyone on the touring team looking like an absolute world beater.
Mountains could be constructed out of the column inches devoted to new signings who, on the strength of outplaying a retired fireman with no cartilage in his knees, have each been hailed as ‘the man who can make all the difference in Europe’.
Nobody really believes it. Yet these games serve their purpose, allowing players rusty from inactivity to ease themselves back into football.
Now, after months on the sidelines, their muscles losing mass and tendons tightening regardless of how much running they’ve done, in they go to face elite opposition. It’s certainly a bold strategy.
And the point is that both Celtic and Rangers desperately need this. A couple of really tough nights, maybe even a morale-denting defeat, is probably a price worth paying for taking a shortcut to match sharpness.
Because, in case anyone forgets, this is guaranteed to be a season like few others.
Rangers cannot possibly afford to pitch up undercooked at Pittodrie on matchday one of season 2020-21. Not with so much at stake.
The same goes for a Celtic team in pursuit of history. A slip-up by either in the first few Premiership matches would hand momentum to the other — and risk sending the entire campaign into a downward spiral.
In order to avoid that, it might be necessary to take a few risks now. Starting by confronting a Lyon team boasting not only Dembele but former Manchester United winger Memphis Depay and a Nice side led by Patrick Vieira. Then, in Celtic’s case, heading north to face PSG. Who, judging by their 9-0 weekend thrashing of Ligue 2 opponents Le Havre, are taking a more traditional approach to pre-season.
Not for Celtic or Rangers, the luxury of beating some village XI with a score running into double figures. Not in this year of living differently.