Celtic and Rangers have acted like losers during their European journeys ... and that’s why they are losers
JOTA’S smile alone after bending home that exquisite free-kick at the end of Celtic’s 5-1 Champions League defeat in Madrid could have lit up the Plaza Mayor. He celebrated with the crowd, fought back tears, described the moment as the realisation of every kid’s dream. Absolute loser behaviour.
How those thousands of travelling supporters lapped it all up, filling the concourses of the Bernabeu with song in the immediate aftermath, showing their love and loyalty for their club, partying long into the night while turning the city into a bombsite. Absolute loser behaviour.
James Forrest certainly feels this first campaign back in the elite for five years augurs well for the future. Before kick-off in Spain, he talked of a campaign that ended bottom of the section with no wins as being jam-packed full of positives and an experience to be loved.
Absolute loser behaviour. At Rangers, the tone was different during their great Champions League return. It was set from the start with manager Giovanni van Bronckhorst emerging in the wake of a 4-0 opening-day loss to Ajax and admitting his team can’t compete at that level because of money.
Not much consolation then for the punters who had already been lured into spending an extortionate £180 for a three-match package by a board whose impressive commitment to milking the herd for everything it’s worth puts Graham’s Dairies to shame.
When Van Bronckhorst (below) was waving the white flag with five games still to go, is it any wonder his players gave up the ghost? And they absolutely chucked it in that second half when going down 7-1 to Liverpool in the worst home defeat of the club’s history.
It didn’t get much better. After being taken apart by Ajax at Ibrox in the last of Group A’s ritual sacrifices on Tuesday, Van Bronckhorst’s press conference was just the final insult in a campaign full of them.
Trying to deflect blame for what unfolded on Ajax being given six days off by the Dutch league? For those of us who spoke to the Rangers manager after a grim 1-1 home draw with Livingston two weeks ago, those words most certainly jarred.
He was asked that afternoon whether underwhelming performances were perhaps a result of this season’s particularly condensed fixture schedule.
‘How many games did we play last year?’ he replied. ‘It is no excuse if you play three times a week. Every player in my team can play three days a week with the same intensity and the same character. It is no excuse for me.’
To then start going on about how people felt Rangers had ‘struck gold’ by making the group stage and had money to spend on transfers when they didn’t was just astonishing. Didn’t Van Bronckhorst clock the reaction, the outrage, when lesser-spotted managing director Stewart Robertson and vice-chairman John Bennett tried this nonsense on back in September?
They keep banging on about how someone, somewhere once said Rangers were going to be making £40million from Europe.
Maybe someone did. Maybe it did appear in a rogue headline or two. But wasn’t a ballpark £30m a more commonly accepted figure? And won’t it all tally up to something not too far from that when ticket sales and hospitality are added to the prize money from UEFA?
Rangers also got £20m plus add-ons for Calvin Bassey. And £12m for Nathan Patterson. And decent money for Joe Aribo. And an estimated £20m for getting to the Europa League final. And nearly £4m in compensation for Steven Gerrard and his staff going to Aston Villa. And that’s before we’ve counted up how much those poor, maltreated punters have spent on season tickets and rip-off membership schemes along with the 6447 strips and anthem jackets and special commemorative Viaplay Cup golf trousers dumped on the market. Who are they kidding? Yes, the reaction to being back in the Champions League at Ibrox has been considerably different to that inside Parkhead. It has been a funeral there rather than a fiesta.
Celtic, if nothing else, have embraced the party. Everyone else is more glamorous and they can’t afford the VIP cocktails, but they enjoyed being on the dancefloor — even though their moves didn’t cut the mustard — and they like boring their friends about how great it was to touch the hem of the jetset’s garments and feel glam.
Rangers, on the other hand, spent almost all of it in tears out the back, moaning about how unfair life is and claiming they didn’t even have enough for a can of ginger.
Either way, it all reeks of loser mentality. Just different versions of it. And that has to change.
There is a certain truth, of course, in Van Bronckhorst’s words. Words best left unspoken, though, when you are the manager of a club charging top-dollar for access. Money is everything in top-end professional football and Rangers and Celtic don’t have enough of it to harbour realistic hopes of going far in the Champions League. No one expects them to make a dent in it. No one really expects them to even make top two in the group given their budgets. However, they are never going to make any kind of impression at all with their existing mindsets. They are set up to fail. Thierry Henry, a proper winner, raised an eyebrow over Jota’s little celebration routine. And no wonder. This is not Auchenshuggle Wheeltappers and Shunters Club scoring at Hampden in some big-day-out charity match.
Celtic run a £50m overall wage bill. Their major shareholder Dermot Desmond has stated how important European football is as a yardstick of the club’s progression. Jota has a shot at going to the World Cup with Portugal.
He should not be prancing around like some starstruck teenage tourist when his team is 5-1 down. Street parties, backslapping and airy-fairy chit-chat about fulfilling childhood fantasies at the end of an absolute hammering is not serious behaviour.
Celtic manager Ange Postecoglou, to his credit, is insistent on finding a way to take the club forward in that arena and wants success. However, he is not going to get it playing wide-open football and insisting he will never, ever back down from putting a team out to entertain.
‘Dancing On Ice’ is good, wholesome Saturday entertainment, too. But it isn’t going to lead to Joey Essex and Patsy Palmer taking gold for Great Britain with a reprise of Ravel’s Bolero at the next Winter Olympics.
Celtic’s long-running slide to the role of plankton in Europe came as a result of putting UEFA competition a distant second to 10 in a row. Their attempts to recover some kind of reputation there cannot now be sacrificed at the altar of naive ideas of altruism and purity. They must find different ways to win.
Yes, they did well in stages of games in Group F. However, by Champions League standards, it wasn’t a bad group to be in.
RB Leipzig were in bits when it started. Shakhtar Donetsk had lost most of their foreign players, were playing their home games in Poland and going with the kids — albeit one particularly special one in Mykhaylo Mudryk.
That Celtic couldn’t beat Shakhtar in two outings — losing comfortably in their other four games — renders the campaign a spectacular failure. Players coming out afterwards, especially experienced ones such as Forrest, and jabbering on about ‘positives’ is dispiriting.
As for Rangers, Van Bronckhorst’s defeatism from the get-go gave the players every excuse to not even bother bringing out the tools and, by Jove, didn’t they take advantage of it? The manager’s negativity killed the campaign before it started. As telling your own players they are not up to delivering on that stage might.
It was staggering for a guy who won the Champions League, English Premier and La Liga as a player in addition to captaining his country in a World Cup final before lifting the Dutch title against all odds as head coach of Feyenoord.
Sure, there no reason to expect Rangers to beat Liverpool, Napoli or Ajax. However, you want them to make life hard for these teams. You expect them to be able to stay in games during rough moments. Not roll over and die.
The Ibrox mantra now revolves around bumbling on about ‘learning curves’. Yeah, Allan McGregor, Steven Davis and Scott Arfield, with a combined age of 274 or something, will surely take much from getting their backsides handed to them every other week.
There has been one important lesson to take away for both sides of the Old Firm, though, no matter how different their failed excursions in Europe may have felt.
Act like a loser and you will, inevitably, become one. It shouldn’t happen again.