Twelve months of shifting expectations
After the mayhem that was last season, I think most fans were happy to get a break from it all but I feel that the break has gone on for too long now. I know the players and staff at the club need a break and I don’t grudge them that at all but it feels like the break is dragging in.
I know my question is a difficult question to answer but, before the Scottish cup final, I heard a radio presenter (on TalkSport) asking how can Celtic fans be happy with the last season?
The point he made is that we were knocked out of both European competitions at the first round, had the chance to win the league and blew it and never turned up for the League Cup Final.
When you are in a pretty strong position for a treble and only win one cup some folk will ask where things went wrong ?
I guess when you look at a club like Celtic, who are expected to win things, the above doesn’t make for very good reading but who does it look bad for?
I can only assume that it would be for people who look in from the outside and don’t really know about all the extra, off the pitch events that the club had to deal with – bombs, threats, lying refs, record punishments etc.
As for next season, most fans will agree that we must win the league, not that we should win the league or it would be nice to win it but that we must win it.
Unfortunately, with the fact that a club will no longer be fined or punished for a fan attacking opposition staff members, I feel that we could be looking at another season where off the pitch incidents ends up dominating things more than on the pitch action does.
My hopes are that we can qualify for the Europa league and, at the very least, give a good account of ourselves in the competition.
The fixtures are out for next season and if we do reach the Europa League group stages, five of our six matches in the competition will be followed by a league match away from home.
Moving off on a bit of a tangent, five of Rangers six matches after European ties will be played at home. Damn the pesky computer that decided that should happen instead of both teams playing three home and three away games after the six European matches- the same pesky computer that a person must have written a program for at some point!!!
Traditionally, teams struggle after a mid-week European match so on that basis we are going to be up against it again.
With Ally McCoist being in charge at Ibrox, I would like to discount him as a failed TV presenter but there have been other managers who have done well in their first jobs, so hopefully he isn’t one of them.
I believe that we are in a position where we will win the league, the players have got a taste of victory from the Scottish Cup and if the atmosphere and emotion of the last match of the season doesn’t make them hungry for success then they shouldn’t be at the club.
So from the outside, we had a dramatic failure but from within the Celtic support, we had a season unlike any other in living memory.
I don’t regard is a failed season, I see as a season where we made a massive improvement on the previous year.
For next season, we have a lot of players who want to play for the manager who now know what it is like to win something for Celtic.
Hopefully, with the addition of two or three new players, remember we already have two in Kelvin Wilson and Adam Matthews, we will be in an even stronger position than last season.
Last season we racked up a points total that would have been enough to win the league in the majority of the last 10 seasons.
I am optimistic about the new season and lets hope the rest of our fans are too. More so, lets hope the players and management are in the same frame of mind and that we can turn Parkhead into a ground that opposition teams hate to come to.
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