Rod Stewart has revealed that red tape stopped him from cheering on Celtic in St Petersburg tonight.
The hoops daft singer will be in Russia early next month for a couple of concerts and tried to get over early to take in tonight’s Europa League clash.
Stewart is currently in London after a break in South America but couldn’t resist making an enquiry to the Russian Embassy about a quick trip to St Petersburg.
“It is very difficult to get into Russia,” he explained on the Alan Brazil show on TalkSPORT. “I’m going over in ten days for a couple of shows but you have to get through a lot of paperwork.
“I was at the Russian Embassy yesterday and said that I wanted to go and watch a game of football, can I go? They said ‘oh no, you’ve got to do lots of forms, fingerprints’ it’s all changed.
“It’ll be interesting to see how many supporters are out there tonight.”
Just under 1,000 Celtic fans are expected at the match with the travelling support welcomed by temperatures of -12 degrees.
Fortunately the stadium is fully heated and will be a pleasant 17 degrees tonight with the roof on for the 9pm local time kick off.
Looking at tonight’s match Stewart added: “It’s got to be a perfect performance as it was last week. Considering that we have so many players out, Griffiths, Armstrong, Roberts and Gordon it will be a hard selection tonight.
“They played very well last week but the Celtic at home is different to the Celtic away in Europe.
“Dembele has to have a cracking game tonight, they all have to. They’ve closed the roof on the stadium so it’s going to be really noisy and very hot as well.”
Celtic have had no fresh injury problems over the last two matches, should they get through to the last 16 Patrick Roberts will be available with the winger scheduled to play in tomorrow’s Development League match against Partick Thistle.