Michael Gannon says Celtic’s night in Linz was The Hangover, I say it was the Normandy landing scene from Saving Private Ryan…

This morning, Michael Gannon reached for The Hangover to explain what happened to Celtic in Austria.

Trashed hotel room, bodies lying face down all over the shop, a tiger wandering about in the bathroom.

You can read the full thing over at the Daily Record, and there is plenty in it I agree with.

But not that.

It’s a decent gag, and it’s the wrong film.

The Hangover is a comedy about grown men who did it to themselves for a laugh and can’t remember a thing about the night before.

Nobody was laughing on Tuesday.

And every single one of us remembers every minute of it.

We’ll be remembering it for years.

No, if you want the scene that actually fits what we watched in Linz, it isn’t Las Vegas.

It’s Omaha Beach.

The ramp comes down, and half the boat is gone before anybody has taken a step forward

That is what the last half hour in Austria looked like from where I was sitting.

Men going down before they’d even got off the landing craft.

No shape, no cover, no plan – just wave after wave of it coming at us and not one soul out there with the first idea how to stop it.

Sixty attempts on goal across the two legs.

Sixty.

You don’t concede sixty attempts to a side whose biggest outlay this summer was £1.5 million because of one bad night.

That’s years of work, that is.

And there’s one more thing Saving Private Ryan has that Gannon’s film hasn’t got.

Everybody watching it knows the Allies got up that beach in the end.

We are never getting up that beach, and from next summer there will be three of these ties

8x Days of the Transfer Window left now.

And ungodly amount of work still left to do and we now do it without £18m or UCL money.

Usually, when we go out, an asset is sold and the loans are ferried in…

Goodbye Nygren and hello unknown, unwanted random squad players! pic.twitter.com/eR92Wo7OKD

— 🍔 Gastro Celtic 🍀 (@Gastro_Celtic) August 26, 2026

This is where Gannon is bang on the money, by the way, and I’ll hand him it gladly.

Scotland’s champions face THREE qualifying rounds from next season onwards.

Three of them.

And that’s assuming we win the league to get ourselves into them in the first place.

We can barely survive one tie against a club running on half our turnover and half our wage bill.

So what in the name of God are we going to do with three?

Eight different sides have put us out in our last ten attempts at this.

Only AEK Athens could look us in the eye financially.

Not LASK, not Kairat, not Ferencvaros. Not Cluj, not Midtjylland, not Maribor, and certainly not Malmo.

The beach doesn’t get shorter for us next summer.

It gets longer.

Where I part company with him is one line, and it’s a line that lets the guilty men off the hook

Here is what Gannon wrote about the fallout:

“The board will come under severe fire again after this latest debacle, but the suits are right to expect more from the football department.”

Really?

The suits are right to expect more?

The same suits who sold the only midfielder in the building with a bit of muscle in him and replaced him with nobody?

The same suits who sent a football department into a Champions League qualifier with five fit midfielders and a prayer?

And all the while they were sitting on £70 million and posting a transfer profit in the weeks before the biggest game of our season.

You cannot handicap a department for years on end, strip it for parts every July, and then stand there tutting at it because it limped.

I counted Luke McCowan losing the ball NINETEEN times after he came on.

Nineteen.

And one of those giveaways handed LASK the fifth, the goal that finished the tie and finished the season.

I said the same thing this morning, when our captain was busy telling the truth about it.

That isn’t McCowan’s fault.

The boy was a victim of circumstance and everybody in that stadium knew it.

Somebody put him out there with £40 million riding on it.

That somebody wears a suit to his work.

Martin O’Neill doesn’t get to stroll away from this one either, and I’m not pretending otherwise

Because the manager didn’t have a good night.

He had an inexplicable one.

Why was Hassan sitting on that bench while the thing burned down in front of him?

Why did the shape never change, not once, not even when it was obvious to every Celtic supporter in the world that it wasn’t holding?

And why did we never see Callum Osmand?

The same boy who came within a whisker of turning the Midtjylland tie on its head last season before he picked up his injury.

He was there.

Available.

He never moved.

Fair is fair – O’Neill has questions to answer for that, and he should be made to answer them.

But answering for your substitutions is not the same thing as answering for a squad you were never given in the first place.

One of those men picked the wrong bodies.

The other men didn’t buy him any.

Gannon’s best line was that Celtic built themselves a rainy day fund and then turned the hose on themselves while the sun was out.

He’s right about that too.

They were warned at the AGM that the Europa League might be our realistic pathway, and rather than fight it, they’ve marched us straight up the road towards it.

Two seasons, eighty million quid, gone.

This has now happened one time too many, and I’m long past the stage of dressing it up for anybody.

Then again, maybe his Hangover reference works after all.

Because this one is going to last for years.

We just never got the night out…

Choose Read Celtic as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.