CELTS HAVE THE NORDIC KNOW-HOW
HARDLY a leap into the great unknown, is it? In fact, when the Celtic team bus pulls up at the Lerkendal Stadion on Thursday evening, the scene may well resemble a recurring gag from TV sitcom Cheers.
The locals will greet every single visiting player, coach, kitman and physio on a first-name basis. If only Celtic had a Norm in their squad, the punchline would be perfect.
Scotland’s champions will hope, of course, that their familiarity with Rosenborg will ease their path to a much-needed away win.
On their third trip to Trondheim in little over a year, Brendan Rodgers’ men intend to follow their usual route. And get the result they require.
Callum McGregor was a key man when Celtic ground out a 0-0 away draw there in August, securing a 3-1 aggregate win in the Champions League qualifiers.
‘It’s beginning to feel like a home game over there!’ he laughed.
‘It’s a place we know well and know what to expect. Sometimes you go to these big stadiums in Europe, you maybe don’t know what to expect and you are up against it.
‘I think the results we’ve had over there, it shows it’s a stadium where we feel comfortable and know we can perform in. We’ll be looking to play well there again.’
Celtic also beat Rosenborg 1-0 away in last season’s Champions League qualifiers and, with the Norwegians currently sitting pointless after four games of Europa League Group B, all of the momentum should be with the visitors.
Rodgers’ Premiership leaders can boast five wins out of their last six games in all competitions, scoring 18 times while conceding just once. That run includes the spectacular 2-1 victory over RB Leipzig at Parkhead which put them right back in the mix in their section.
McGregor said: ‘I think we can definitely draw on our previous games out in Norway.
‘Under the manager, we have managed to get some positive results out there so far.
‘And, if we continue to play the way we have been playing, there’s no reason we can’t go out and get another good result this time.
‘They can no longer (realistically) qualify so, if you look at it that way, they might not have much to play for.
‘But we can’t think like that. We just have to go with a positive mindset and try to keep our hopes alive. The Leipzig result obviously gave us a huge amount of confidence. They’re a top side. They’ve spent a lot of money and you could see their quality in the last game.
‘It was tense at the end, but we probably could have had a couple more goals on the night.
‘That was a real mark of the team at the moment. We are playing very positive stuff and creating a lot of chances. Hopefully, we can take that to Norway.’
On a personal level, McGregor is arguably in the form of his career for both club and country. And he’s not the only Celtic star in that situation.
If Rodgers’ men are to progress and secure European football beyond Christmas — a kind of bare minimum for any club of ambition these days — they will do so with a hard core of Scottish talent.
McGregor, James Forrest, Kieran Tierney and now Ryan Christie have all been hugely influential in the recent run of form.
With the first three members of that quartet all products of the Celtic youth system, the prospect of delivering more Euro adventures is particularly tantalising.
‘It’s huge for the guys like myself, KT and James, who have come through the ranks,’ said McGregor (below).
‘We’ve watched the big European nights at Celtic Park, so to go and give the fans another one like we did against Leipzig was great to be part of.
‘As a boy coming through, it’s all you can ask for, really. It’s some feeling sending the supporters home happy.
‘The Leipzig game was right up there with the best European nights in terms of the result and the performance.
‘It was massive for us. We’ve played well in certain games but it was nice to also get the result. We wanted to show we could compete with the best.
‘We always said it would be vitally important to win our home games. We knew we had difficult away ties in Austria and Germany and that turned out to be the case. ‘But we are probably where I expected us to be at the moment, in terms of the group. ‘If we can go to Rosenborg and get a positive result, we’ll be right in the mix.’ A win would put Celtic on nine points in the table, although exactly where that would leave them heading into their final round of fixtures remains to be seen. Plenty of fans will be following Thursday night’s meeting of the two Red Bull sides, Leipzig and Salzburg in Austria, with a level of interest bordering on the forensic. Salzburg currently sit top on 12 points, with Leipzig and Celtic level on six points in second in a competition which sees the top two teams progress. The risk of a carve-up between two sides effectively owned by the same people, yet magically granted UEFA dispensation to compete against each other, is as obvious as it is real. Celtic’s players can’t afford to think about that, of course, even though McGregor admitted: ‘It’s a tricky one with the two Red Bull teams. ‘We can’t do anything about their game. It’s up to the players at those clubs. ‘All we can do is try to keep it in our own hands. It will be interesting to see what happens, but if we take six points out of our final two games, we could be through anyway. ‘That’s got to be the focus for us going to Rosenborg.’