A glance at the past offers glimpses of what might lie ahead. Under Walter Smith, Rangers’ extended forays into Europe were sporadic, though the demands regular, yet the Ibrox side never let their grasp of the Scottish game slip as they churned their way to nine league titles in a row. When Dick Advocaat, on the other hand, tried to provide his Rangers team with the extra quality required to scale the slope of the Champions League group stage, he upset the team’s balance and, coupled with Martin O’Neill’s arrival in Glasgow, sent them tumbling backwards. Celtic face a trip to the San Siro the week after next to face AC Milan, the Italian champions and winners of the Champions League two years ago, but O’Neill’s players cannot afford to become disorientated as they move from one competition to another, indeed one stratosphere to another.
“Naturally, we’re disappointed (about the Barcelona defeat). There’s nothing wrong with being disappointed, there’s nothing wrong with taking a day or two to get over it. The older I get, the longer it seems for me to get over things myself,” the Celtic manager jokes grimly. “But in terms of the players, you get over it. You have to. You push on because if you’re stuck with a hangover, you’ll get beaten.”
Reality is a dark cloud that cannot be ignored at Celtic Park, and while O’Neill’s team have made a habit of rising above expectations in Europe, their recent successes in the Uefa Cup highlights that sparkle, trying to finish ahead of Barcelona and Milan in Champions League Group F is a task that seems riven with improbability. On the surface, last Tuesday was an encounter between diverged forces, one club that had spent £45m during the summer, and one that had spent £1.5m. That relativity was reflected in the way the game unfolded, with Barcelona dominating, Celtic clawing back into it through sheer determination, then the Spaniards pulling lithely away again.
“What I’ve noticed in recent years is that the bigger clubs in European football are getting incredibly strong and other people are being left by the wayside,” O’Neill says. “There’s no doubt that Celtic, as are Rangers, are a fantastic football club, but in this particular environment they actually stand still, because of the money. I was involved with Nottingham Forest away back in 1979/80 and a provincial club won the European Cup then.
Football has changed and will never go back to those days. The frustration comes from all of us. Someone mentioned, will an SPL side ever win the Champions League? It’s highly unlikely. Let’s get real about it. We’ve only won it once in our history, at a time when there was more parity among European sides.”
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Such undercurrents of realisation flowed around last week’s game, tugs that were keenly felt. “In many ways it’s unbelievable what he (O’Neill) has done here,” observed Kevin Moran, the former Manchester United defender who was commentating on the game for radio. “I think he’d like to go onto the next level in this competition. I think there’s a frustration there at not having the money, and you can’t just produce it from nowhere to bring in class players. In the Champions League you’re not playing on a level field.”
That is the reality of Celtic’s situation, they are some way in front of the rest of the teams in Scotland, and some way behind the top teams in Europe. Yet to such relentlessly ambitious people as O’Neill and Dermot Desmond, Celtic’s major shareholder, accepting such an existence rankles. To Desmond, especially, it represents a challenge, rather than an eternal truth. In a radio interview in Ireland last week, he said he felt that “market forces” would pull the Old Firm into the Premiership within three years. It is a subject he regularly refers to, though one which seems laden under a heavy mound of objection and dubiety.
“My own view is that if, for instance, there was an invitation to Celtic and Rangers going in (to the English Premiership), if you were the chairman of Southampton or Bolton, it’s not something you’d be voting for,” O’Neill says. “And if there’s going to be no real differential in money, if someone from Sky said the difference was going to be £1.5m, that would be no fantastic incentive for anybody to vote. But if the difference was incredible, then that might be a different matter. I think that might be what he esmond is talking about, market forces, money. I have my own views that there will be changes in football, whether they take place in three years or not, I couldn’t tell you.”
Occasionally, money’s influence does not always hold true, as Porto proved last season. While pointing out that the Portuguese league is a strong competition, O’Neill acknowledged that their unexpected run to Champions League triumph offers a glimmer of hope for the clubs whose coffers do not glint with gold. “We contested the Uefa Cup final against them the previous year and somebody at a function I was at on Thursday showed me the team sheets from the two games , and there was nine of the side against us who actually played in the Champions League final,” he adds. “You’re always going to draw encouragement from that, because if you don’t what’s the point in trying to compete?”
Defeatism is an unknown concept at Celtic under O’Neill, however, along with complacency. When it was put to the Celtic manager that Rangers’ league challenge is already considered by some observers to be impotent, he shook his head vigourously. “That’s utter nonsense,” he muttered. “Absolute nonsense.” O’Neill understands that to let up in your focus is to let go of what you hold.
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