Truthfully? Nine in a row felt like a far bigger achievement in 1974
IN April 1974, Celtic secured nine-in-a-row to a familiar backdrop. Anger and recrimination filled the Glasgow air.
The back pages screamed of foul play and dirty tactics. Sporting integrity was the phrase of the day. And, for once, an affront to Corinthian values had actually taken place on the pitch.
The first Scottish team to win the league over nine straight years, Jock Stein’s players were no strangers to the pop of a champagne cork.
Yet the bubbles which followed a 1-1 draw with Falkirk at Brockville came with a sour aftertaste.
Days earlier, the quest to win a second European Cup ended with a 2-0 semi-final aggregate defeat to a brutish Atletico Madrid team reduced to eight men during the first leg at Parkhead.
On a night when law and order was parked at the front door, David Hay still tells of a Glasgow policeman grabbing Atletico player Ruben Ayala in the tunnel at full-time and inviting him to take a free punch.
Between April 1966 and the climax of the 1974 season, Celtic’s first nine-in-a-row featured five European semi-finals, two finals and a European Cup triumph in 1967.
In the same era, Rangers reached two European finals, winning a European Cup Winners’ Cup. For Scottish club football, those were heady days.
In a recent BT Sport poll, Stein’s Lisbon Lions were voted the team of the last century ahead of the 2008-09 Barcelona side featuring Lionel Messi, Thierry Henry and Samuel Eto’o.
Even allowing for the organised, tribal voting of these things, a Scottish Cup final triumph over Dundee United in May ’74 put the tin lid on an era of domestic and continental achievement. An era with no ‘ah buts…’
Contrast that with how this nine-in-a-row will be judged.
Celtic have every right to toast another piece of history behind locked-down doors.
Under Neil Lennon, Ronny Deila and Brendan Rodgers, they have wrapped themselves around the domestic game like a Boa constrictor and squeezed tight.
And when Rangers fans mutter of tainted titles and shady votes over a curtailed season, they overlook a key point. Lennon and his players feel short-changed as well.
Last weekend was supposed to be the final of the Scottish Cup. And, just as Rangers speculate over what might have been had the season been played to a conclusion, so too can their city rivals.
With a 13-point lead in the league, they had a cup semi-final against Aberdeen to anticipate and a possible final against Hibernian or Hearts. Potentially, they were 180 minutes from a quadruple Treble
The SFA still hope to complete the final stages of the cup when football returns. But league season 2019-20 is gone and we now know it’s not coming back.
That will inevitably lead to jibes and catcalls. Talk of putting an asterisk on Celtic’s new adidas jersey where a ninth star should be.
Former Rangers chairman Dave King once claimed that titles won when Rangers were out of the league shouldn’t count. If he thinks that, then god knows what he’ll say about a title won after 30 games.
It’s not really Celtic’s fault that David Murray, then Craig Whyte, drove Rangers over a financial cliff in 2012. Or that Steven Gerrard’s side returned from a winter break in Dubai and slipped up against Hearts, Kilmarnock and Hamilton.
Any loss or distress caused to Rangers by their rivals reaching this point is largely self-inflicted. But where the Parkhead club’s last nine-in-a-row featured feats of glory in Europe, this one has the feel of a parochial squabble over the garden fence.
Just as Celtic fans bang on about Rangers titles financed by EBTs, so will Ibrox punters refuse to recognise the validity of an incomplete season.
The irony is that, for Celtic, nine has never really been the holy grail. Only a means to an end.
Rangers did the same number between 1989 and 1997 and, because of that, Parkhead fans now fixate on ‘the ten’.
But Scotland might be the only country where winning nine or ten straight titles is regarded as a sign of strength rather than weakness.
In other nations, a league where one club wins year after year is evidence of a hopelessly uncompetitive landscape.
Most leagues will never see one team win nine straight titles even once. The SPFL is about to see it happen for a third time.
Amid all the gripes over corporate governance and coercion, then, few have noticed that the Scottish Professional Football League has a far bigger credibility problem on its hands.
It’s now 35 years since Aberdeen last deprived Celtic or Rangers of the title. And, outside the obsessive bubble occupied by the Glasgow giants, the footballing world now looks on the Scottish league as the equivalent of two bald men fighting over a comb.