Celtic Park like a morgue on a European night? Cheers Dermot! Even the joy of that has been killed by this board…

Last night, a Celta Vigo defender stood in front of the cameras and told the world that Celtic Park felt like his own ground.

Let that sink in for a minute.

According to the Scottish Sun, Javi Rodriguez, the man who bagged both of their goals, said this:

“Our fans were a big help – they were crazy and were even waiting for us when our bus pulled up.”

“It felt like we were almost at Balaídos.”

“It was a party in Glasgow for them.”

A party in Glasgow.

For them.

At Celtic Park.

Celtic Park resembled a morgue last night, with a lot of mourners in attendance

Once feared Celtic Park?

I don’t think so.

Three thousand Spaniards made more noise than the rest of the ground put together, and I’m not going to insult you by pretending otherwise.

You were there, or you were watching at home, and you heard it.

I’ll give the Celta fans their due, they travelled in their numbers and they sang from start to finish.

Fair play to them – that’s what a proper away support does.

But a visiting support shouldn’t be able to drown out a European night at Parkhead.

Not in my four decades of watching this club.

The Green Brigade stayed away again, and there were around 12,000 empty seats in the ground.

Of course, you could say that’s all down to the boycott.

But who drove the people who make the noise to stay outside in the first place?

I’ll leave you to work that one out.

Because make no mistake, those empty seats didn’t appear overnight.

They are the price of years of being told to like it or lump it.

And the board will tell you the club is in rude health, as they always do.

Tell that to the 12,000 seats staring back at the cameras.

Everything that was successful about Celtic is becoming past tense

Our fabled European atmosphere under the lights was one of those things.

It was the thing that other clubs spoke about when they came here, the thing that made big sides wobble before a ball was kicked.

Now the opposition are comparing it to a home game for them.

And this is what we’ve been reduced to.

Every element of joy from supporting Celtic is being removed, piece by piece, by the Despot Dictator and his Axis of feeble.

The absent meddling golfer collects the dividends from afar, Silent Mike says nothing, and the rest of us are left to pick up the pieces.

So cheers, Dermot.

Even the joy of a European night has been taken off us now.

European nights were occasions we always looked forward to.

Now we dread them.

And when we concede the goal that puts us behind, we just shrug our shoulders and think, ‘oh well, that’s that then.’

That is not how a Celtic support is supposed to react.

It’s how a support reacts when it’s been beaten down for so long it has stopped expecting anything else.

Martin O’Neill didn’t discourage that kind of thinking with his substitutions

Let’s be fair to Rodriguez, because he said something else last night that stung just as much.

“In the first half Celtic created almost nothing.”

He’s right, isn’t he?

Then they came back at us, scored twice, and we had no answer.

It was a must win game.

And when we needed somebody to change it, Martin O’Neill turned to Oliver Sorensen and Sebastian Tounekti.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that those two lost us the game on their own.

I don’t know what else the man has on that bench.

Then again, that is rather the point.

If the best you can do in a must win game is bring on those two, then somebody upstairs hasn’t done their job.

Having said that, the manager has to take his share of the blame for the way it unfolded.

But he can only pick from what he’s given, and that’s the whole problem.

Because squads don’t build themselves.

They’re built by a board that wants the books balanced first and the football second.

We’ve been saying it for years, and we’ll keep on saying it.

When will this misery reach its conclusion?

We get flashes of hope.

The 7-1 win over Hearts last weekend was one of them, and I’m not knocking it for a second.

We thought we could push on from there.

You thought it, I thought it, and we all let ourselves believe it.

Instead, we were brought crashing down to earth by another shambolic performance in Europe.

It’s the same old story, over and over again.

And it isn’t going to get any better.

So when does it end?

When we lose all of our Europa League ties and exit the competition with a whimper?

The way things are going, that’s now starting to look like a distinct possibility.

I hope I’m wrong.

I really do.

But I’ve been here long enough to know what the board’s idea of a European night looks like.

A morgue, with a couple of thousand Spaniards singing at the funeral…

We want our club back!

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