Honourable thing for Pole would be to zip it

DARIUSZ Mioduski talks a good game. An intelligent, self-made man, the o wner of Legi a Warsaw is a gregarious type who describes himself on his Twitter profile as an investor and entrepreneur.

He doesn’t say what his business interests are, but in the art of manufacturing industrial quantities of hot air, he is an industry leader.

For journalists, Mioduski is a ready-made quote machine. At a time when Celtic have taken a vow of silence over Legia-gate, here is a guy who has dominated the news agenda with colourful assertions and opinions.

Yet the fact is this: most of his claims simply don’t bear up to close scrutiny. UEFA thought as much when they ruled that playing banned defender Bartosz Bereszynski in the final minutes of a 2-0 win in Edinburgh should see Legia’s triumph over Celtic flipped into a 3-0 defeat instead.

Legia rightly argued that the punishment was disproportionate to the crime, with Henning Berg describing it as the equivalent of a 20-year stretch for failing to pay the electricity bill. And many sympathised with the Legia boss.

Celtic were outplayed in both games. When Bereszynski came on, the tie was lost. It had no impact on the outcome.

Yet, despite being originally thumped 6-1 on aggregate, the Scottish champions sneaked through on away goals and now meet Maribor i n Slovenia on Wednesday.

For Legi a , t he Court of Arbitration for Sport is their last, rather desperate hope.

Celtic have benefited from an enormous stroke of good fortune and no mistake.

But, even so, spare us some of Mioduski’s sanctimonious, pious nonsense of the last week.

His attempts to lay the blame for what happened at the door of Celtic rather than UEFA have been misplaced and irrational. Along the way, he has surrendered some of the goodwill and moral high ground Legia previously monopolised.

In the course of a 12-minute chat with Sportsmail the other day, Mioduski claimed the UEFA punishment was a ‘scandal’. But it was hardly one of Celtic’s making.

In every other instance of teams fielding suspended players in European competitions, t he punishment has been precisely the same — a 3-0 defeat. Legia were hardly marked out for special treatment. If their captain had s c ored one of t wo missed penalties, the Polish champions would still have progressed. In more ways than one they were architects of their own demise.

Nevertheless, Mioduski went on to slam Celtic for failing to pick up the phone while claiming that, had the shoe been on the other foot, the sense of ‘ honour’ amongst Legia’s fans would have forced the club to forfeit the tie.

‘Our fans would never accept it if we took advantage of a situation like this as Celtic have,’ he claimed. All of which prompted Parkhead fans to utter an ‘ aye, right’ in response.

This will be the same Legia Warsaw who lost the Polish title to Lech Poznan i n 1992- 93 after results achieved via match-fixing were rendered null and void.

Mioduski wasn’t in charge then, but it could be argued that few men make millions by employing Corinthian values and playing by Marquess of Queensberry rules.

He would also have us believe that Legia fans are paragons of socialist virtue and that last year’s £25,000 fine from UEFA for racist behaviour was an unfortunate misunderstanding.

The truth i s that, as a plc company with obligations to their shareholders, Celtic could no more turn down a Champions League lifeline than they could go out and sign Lionel Messi.

No Scottish club could. And with £15million at stake, Legia Warsaw would undoubtedly behave in exactly the same way.

Mioduski further claimed in last weekend’s open letter to Celtic that legendary figures such as Willie Maley and Jock Stein might have done things differently. Here, history is on his side.

In 1968, the late Celtic chairman Bob Kelly threatened to pull the club out of the European Cup on a point of principle if he was forced to send a team to the Eastern Bloc weeks after the old Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia.

But Celtic were European champions back then. They held sway and influence beyond their standing and were keeping pace with the biggest clubs in Spain, Italy and England without the desperate need for an annual financial injection from UEFA. Times have changed. That’s not the case now.

Fergus McCann returns to Glasgow to unfurl the l eague championship flag today, with his timing immaculate considering the circumstances.

The former Celtic owner once quoted from Pygmalion when he said, ‘ Principles? Can’t afford ‘em.’

As Dariusz Mioduski well knows, that’s as true of Celtic in 2014 as it was i n McCann’s hard- nosed, no-nonsense pomp.