KEEP THE FLAK FLYING MY WAY
Brown is hungry for festive fireworks as the man Tynecastle really loves to hate
VISITS to Tynecastle tend to leave little to the imagination. When the front row of the audience is so close to the action that you can feel their breath upon your neck, every last syllable is received and understood.
One week before Christmas, Scott Brown is not bracing himself for a flood of festive good wishes to rain down on him this evening.
In the colours of both Hibernian and Celtic, he has rolled into Gorgie expecting nothing less for 16 years now.
Amid the abuse and the vitriol, interspersed with the occasional outbreak of humour, the Celtic captain detects a back-handed compliment. The day they stop bothering about him is the day he has become an irrelevance. And as long as he is worthy of their attention, he will know he is still doing his job effectively.
‘I love going to Tynecastle with the fans right on top of you. You hear every single thing they say. It’s lovely,’ he smiled.
‘The day you don’t get abuse, you’ll know you’re hopeless.
‘I just go there to show them what I’m about and, hopefully, they’ll keep singing about me the next time.
‘Staying in Edinburgh, I know a lot of Hearts fans, so I don’t want any of them having the bragging rights after the game.
‘If I’m out in Edinburgh, out at the Christmas markets or something, I always get a bit of that friendly banter, depending on what the result is. That is one of the good things about the Edinburgh clubs.’
Brown remembers the first time he had cause to take refuge behind the snow globes and the scented candles.
Hibernian’s trip across town in November 2003 ended in a 2-0 victory for the home side and very nearly an inauspicious ending for the visiting midfield tyro.
‘I probably should have got sent off,’ Brown recalled. ‘Against Elvis (Steven Pressley), I think it was. I smashed him a beauty and Hugh Dallas was the referee. Somehow, he let me away with it. I was already on a yellow.’
Back then, Brown seemed to walk tightropes with the regularity of a circus performer. Rarely, these days, does he expose himself to such risk.
This long-standing appreciation of the need to stay on the right side of the line has ensured he has been front and central as Celtic have hoovered up ten successive domestic honours.
Where, once, his worth to the cause would have split the Celtic support down the middle, these days, there is universal recognition of his bona-fide legendary status.
Playing arguably the best football of his career at the age of 34, Brown might well join Billy McNeill next year as the only man in the club’s history to lift the championship in nine successive years.
If the significance of that statistic is occupying his thoughts, he hides it well.
‘No, because we are in a title race and, every year, we have been in a title race,’ he stated. ‘Whether it is three, four, five, six or seven in a row, you never count your chickens until you are standing there with the trophy.
‘I have been in these situations before when you think you have started the season really well. With Gordon (Strachan), we didn’t do that great in the second half of the season and we did exactly the same thing under Tony Mowbray.
‘So it is about us maintaining the levels, ticking off the goals we want and building on the performance. As long as we keep playing the way we are, we will hopefully be there or thereabouts at the end of the season.’
It says much about the consistency of Celtic under Neil Lennon this term that the side is only three points worse off at this juncture than in the Invincibles season of 2016-17 with Brendan Rodgers at the helm.
Brown will wait until the outcome of this year’s title battle — perhaps even longer — to make sweeping judgments about which of the sides is superior. But he already senses the current batch assembled by Neil Lennon are, in their own way, special.
‘It’s hard,’ he said. ‘I’ve played with some great teams. We were invincible with Brendan all the way through and I don’t think anyone would have expected that.
‘We had a great team then and we’ve got a great team now. We have young players like (Jeremie) Frimpong coming through, Scotty Robertson too, so we are giving youth a chance as well.
‘We don’t want to just keep buying players in if we can produce players from the youth team or scout them early enough like wee Jerry.’
With each passing week, the business of signing Frimpong is looking like daylight robbery. Even accounting for the fact the fee Celtic will eventually pay Manchester City is likely to rise from £350,000 to £1million, the 19-year-old looks an extraordinarily shrewd acquisition.
Not only is the young Dutchman quick, a quality that simply cannot be taught, his ball skills and game intelligence also appear to be of the very highest order.
Brown believes those looking for a downside to Celtic signing him for a relative song are in for a long wait.
‘There’s no catch with him,’ said the skipper. ‘He’s just very, very good and is only going to get better.
‘He’s composed on the ball. In situations where you think he is going to lose it, he manages to pull out and gets his body in there to keep the ball.
‘He goes to press people and doesn’t dive in like someone young and naive. He jockeys them and forces them down the line because he believes in his own pace and ability.
‘When people get one-on-one, they just keep deepening and deepening. No one wants to put a foot in because if he gets by you, you aren’t catching him.
‘For the first couple of weeks here, he didn’t really speak with anybody. It was other people who were speaking to him.
‘We thought a wee laddie coming in from Man City could have a big time attitude but he has been unbelievable. He is (incredible value for money).’