Tom English has finally written something nice about Celtic, he wasn’t wrong, he was just years late

Yesterday, Tom English sat down at the BBC and wrote something nice about Celtic.

Not through gritted teeth either.

Actual, unqualified, warm praise.

I read it twice to make sure somebody hadn’t set up a parody account.

Is this the same man who found a 98th minute penalty at Fir Park “profoundly grim” in May?

Back in May, when Kelechi Iheanacho broke Hearts from the spot at Fir Park, I wrote that English would eventually get round to praising us through clenched jaws.

I was wrong.

He’s gone the whole way – no caveats, no sting in the tail.

The man they call House Paddy in the corridors of Pacific Quay has finally noticed what the rest of us could see all along

His piece on Wednesday night’s 3-0 is genuinely good.

He takes Duran’s second goal apart, all thirty seconds of it, from Sinisalo out to Donovan, back to Sinisalo, wide to Trusty, into midfield, Hogh to Duran, Duran to Nygren, Nygren back to Duran, top corner.

It is a decent bit of writing ( I say that through clenched teeth) about a lovely bit of football.

He is careful about LASK too.

Austrian champions, cup winners, a bucket of chances created in Glasgow, and a warning that the tie isn’t finished.

All fair.

He points out that we won only 10 of our previous 50 games in Europe, so this one was to be savoured.

Also fair.

He even name-checks Bodo/Glimt, Midtjylland, Freiburg and Rayo Vallecano, and asks why a club with our spending power shouldn’t want a slice of what they’ve had.

Then he asks the question that matters, which is whether the ambition goes any further than this, with £40m possibly about to land in the account.

And you know what?

I can’t argue with a single word of it.

Every point in that article is a point this support has been making since the window opened, and nobody at the BBC wanted to hear it then

That’s the bit that sticks in my throat.

Not that he’s wrong.

That he’s late.

We have been saying for years – a wee bit of ambition wouldn’t go amiss – that the barometer for this club is Europe and not the domestic stuff.

We’ve been saying for years that the money exists and the ambition doesn’t.

We said it when the board sold the striker and didn’t replace him.

We said it when they decimated the midfield and sent us into a qualifier with the books balanced and the squad hollowed.

And every time we said it, we were the deluded ones.

Entitled.

Never happy.

Where was he when the noise was coming from the stands and not from the scoreline?

Here is the line from his piece that I keep coming back to:

A stadium that has rocked to the sound of protest has now returned to deafening praise.

Lovely sentence.

Written by a man whose industry spent the entire spring telling everybody those protests were the work of a lunatic fringe.

The protests were right.

The recruitment shifted because the protests were right.

Duran is in that team because the support made enough noise that ignoring us became more expensive than listening to us.

None of which appears anywhere in the article.

Funny that, isn’t it?

So why does it feel strange being handed a compliment by a man who has spent fifteen years telling you you’re not worth one?

Because we’ve seen this film.

English is quick onto Celtic’s summer recruitment now that it’s produced a 3-0 and a highlight reel.

He’ll be every bit as quick onto the next feel-good story out of Ibrox.

That’s not a prediction, that’s a pattern.

And how long do you reckon it takes?

Three good weeks over there – that’s all it takes – and the tone changes, the columns get warmer, the ambition question quietly stops being asked of them and starts being asked of us again.

Have a think about how many times you’ve watched exactly that happen.

Now, I want to be fair to the man.

He didn’t invent the Scottish media’s default setting, and on Wednesday he wrote a better piece about Celtic than most of the rest of the media managed.

Credit where it’s due – he watched the same game we did and he described it honestly.

That is more than most of his colleagues managed on Wednesday night.

But credit is not the same thing as trust.

I’m delighted he enjoyed the football.

I’d be more delighted if he’d been saying it in June when it might have cost him something.

A leopard doesn’t change its spots, it just waits for better light

Make no mistake, the second leg is still to be played, and a bucket of chances at Celtic Park becomes a bucket of goals in Linz if we go over there sleepwalking.

If it goes wrong next Wednesday, watch how fast the warmth drains out of the coverage.

The recruitment becomes a gamble.

The £40m becomes a burden.

The ambition question becomes an accusation.

And the same man who wrote a hymn to Camilo Duran on Wednesday will be explaining to us on Thursday that we were never as good as we thought we were.

Because that’s the register he’s most comfortable in.

Who does that leave holding the good feeling?

Us, same as always.

Enjoy the article, Tims.

Print it out, even.

Just don’t go framing it.

He’ll be back to himself soon enough…

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