Well, has everyone got their breath back?!
What a night in Paradise where we seen Celtic take the lead three times against the billionaires of Man City. An inspired performance from a team who only two weeks earlier were exposed to the harsh realities of Champions League football after being out of it for over two years.
If the bhoys were nervous about last nights game before hand, they sure as hell didn’t show it. Dembel lead the line from start to finish, winning virtually every ball in the air that Craig Gordon or the defence would serve up to him. Brown a rottweiler in the middle of the park with Kolo Toure proving his worth in the latter parts of the game when Man City exerted more and more pressure on top of us. Kieran Tierney was magnificent down the left hand side, UEFA may not credit the weeman with the second but every Celtic fan will.
We may have conceded three goals on the night but I’m refusing to look at any sort of negatives at this moment in time because the players don’t deserve that. We are a work in progress in its infancy but yet we manufactured a result that no one before the game thought we were capable of.
One of the most telling and pleasing moments of the night was when it looked like Rodgers was about to hook Dembele after a long shift up front to make way for Leigh Griffiths. However, that was not Brendan Rodgers thinking! He proceeded to take off a midfielder and put two up front to go for the win. It was a gamble worth taking, even if we had conceded a late goal, we were 3-3 at home with a genuine chance of sneaking a win. We had a 60,000 capacity making so much deafening noise everyone felt it was possible and vitally so did the manager. Many before Rodgers would have stuck at this point and looked to hold on to what we had but the Irishman was brave in that decision. I would have understood it if we had conceded late on because of it, but many wouldn’t have.
In all my nights in Paradise, this is up there. For sheer volume of noise, passion, football and energy from the pitch to the stands. We were all in it together and we pushed the bhoys onto a great result.
What a learning curve for this team! Of course there will be harder games ahead now but we’ve just seen what the Rodgers project is capable of in its early days. We can only imagine what he’s building for the future.
Oh, it’s good to be a Tim!
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