REALITY BITES
Brown insists notion of winning every league game was never on cards as Hibs hold on for point
NOW that perfection has slipped through their grasp, Celtic will just have to find another prize to chase. Something with a distinctly European slant, perhaps?
Back in front of their own crowd, in a Europa League clash carrying the extra baggage of a grudge match, Neil Lennon’s men will hope to bury the memory of a mildly-misfiring performance in Edinburgh.
If they get it right against Cluj at Celtic Park on Thursday night, few will remember the afternoon when fanciful notions of maintaining a 100-per-cent league record fell in round seven of the Scottish Premiership season.
Should Lennon lead his players into the latter stages of UEFA’s second-tier competition, domestic allowances will be made.
Oh, they’ll still prioritise the capture of a ninth consecutive title, of course. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
But their one-team act of defiance against the law of averages, the very idea that they might win every single league match, was always destined to collide with reality at some point.
The Invincible season was remarkable. Anything beyond that belongs in the realms of fantasy.
If few would have predicted Hibs as the team to halt the impervious march of treble-Treble champions with a battling 1-1 draw, well, football is nothing if not unpredictable. Crazy stuff happens all the time.
Celtic skipper Scott Brown, addressing the slightly wild idea of he and his team-mates churning out league victory after league victory in all circumstances, said: ‘It’s never going to be like that.
‘There are always going to be teams that sit off you and get a little bit of luck, and maybe score early doors.
‘We’ve got to try and win it back — and what we did on Saturday just shows the guys’ grit and determination to pull it back. And it was a fantastic equalising goal by Ryan Christie, as well.
‘We always think we can go and win every single game. That is the mentality we need to have to try and make our good run continue.
‘We’ve had a fantastic start to the season. We’ve gone to Easter Road and got a point — and that is a hard place to go to.
‘But we’ll take it, we move on, and we’ll look forward to Thursday now.
‘Obviously we are hurting — we want to take three points week in and week out. But it’s not that easy.
‘Hibs played well, they defended well and they created chances. And they got lucky with their goal.’
There was certainly an element of fortune in Hibs taking the lead after seven minutes on Saturday, with Kristoffer Ajer diverting the ball into his own net.
But the home side deserved credit for the build-up play leading to the own goal, with Adam Jackson and Scott Allan both playing clever passes that allowed Christian Doidge to put the ball into the corridor of uncertainty between defender and keeper.
Celtic’s equaliser midway through the first half saw Christie score with a lovely header, the home side appearing to be caught on the hop by a free-kick — awarded amid no little confusion — in the opposition half.
Some thought referee Kevin Clancy had ordered an uncontested drop ball. Others were making the rather odd assumption that Celtic were going to roll the ball back to Hibs, because the ref had played a long advantage before pulling play back for a foul on James Forrest. Hibs boss Paul Heckingbottom was red-carded in the scenes that followed, either for kicking a water bottle that hit assistant ref Alan Mulvanny on the leg or protesting with too much vehemence to fourth official Nick Walsh, depending on who is telling the story. Heckingbottom’s post-match rant about Clancy, with particular focus on Olivier Ntcham avoiding a red card for raising his hands to Josh Vela, gave the Hibs boss a verbal victory — on points, anyway — over Lennon (left), with his bog-standard complaints about penalty appeals waved aside. There was some actual football to admire, too, incidentally. Like the fact that Allan could play 11-a-side on a pitch the size of a squash court and still not give the opposition a sniff of the ball. But, as enterprising and hard-working as Hibs were, Celtic clearly weren’t at their best.
There was a jaded feel, mentally as much as physically, to much of their play in the final third.
‘If they’d snuck a winner, they’d have celebrated — but probably filed the day under ‘getting away with one’.
Their priority now is to regroup and reinvigorate themselves for Thursday night. An entirely different sort of challenge.
Brown, for one, is eager to get back to Celtic Park. And to achieve — at least — a repeat of the run that took them into the knock-out stages in their last two seasons.
Explaining how the home crowd still inspires Celtic players, the midfielder said he also believed opposition teams can still be spooked by the noise on a big European night.
‘There is always that little bit of a fear factor at play,’ he said. ‘The crowd get right behind us with every single tackle, every forward pass and every chance that we create.
‘You can ask a lot of players about it — they feel it as well. We need to make sure we start to make Celtic Park into a fortress again.
‘I think the Europa League — and the Champions League — is getting harder and harder. The teams we’ve faced haven’t been the easiest. But that is football — you want to compete against these teams and try to get the three points, especially at home.
‘We want to progress in this competition as it’s important for us to be involved in Europe after Christmas. We’ve had a sniff of it in the last couple of seasons and we want that to continue.’
HIBERNIAN (4-2-3-1): Maxwell 6; James 6, Jackson 5 (Whittaker 31), Hanlon 6, Stevenson 6; Vela 6, Hallberg 5 (Newell 88); Mallan 6, Allan 7, Middleton 5 (Horgan 71); Doidge 6. Subs not used: Marciano, Kamberi, Shaw, Murray. Booked: Vela, Stevenson, Allan.
CELTIC (4-2-3-1): Forster 6; Bauer 6, Jullien 6, Ajer 6, Bolingoli 5; Brown 6, McGregor 5; Christie 6, Ntcham 5 (Hayes 60), Forrest 6 (Sinclair 84); Edouard 6 (Bayo 72). Subs not used: Gordon, Rogic, Elyounoussi, Elhamed.
Booked: Brown, Bauer, Ntcham, Ajer, McGregor. Man of the match: Scott Allan. Referee: Kevin Clancy. Attendance: 18,339.