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"And most of the football greats have passed through Parkhead's gates/to play football the Glasgow Celtic way." - 'Willie Maley', Celtic FC football song.
Sadly, despite my early childhood ambitions, I am not a football great.
I'm not even a football good, or a football OK. My last match involved me playing at right-back for Pantsoc against Dramasoc where my only major contribution was to unceremoniously upend the former chair of Dramasoc and give away a penalty.
I was substituted at half-time.
Nonetheless, despite my uselessness at playing football I remain quite a big fan of the game. Something that is inconvenient when I live thousands of miles away in Singapore and so haven't quite had the opportunity to make regular visits to watch my favourite teams (Celtic and Ipswich) in action. So when I had the chance to do a bit of travelling before term started, I decided to take a trip up to Scotland to watch a Celtic home game.
For those that don’t know, Celtic Park is at the East End of Glasgow. The friend who I stayed with is a second-year student at Glasgow University - apparently throughout his first year he avoided the area with the claim that "it's dodgy". Passing through on the bus, I can understand why. Unlike the beautiful Rennie Mackintosh buildings that dominate much of the city centre, the East End is full of ugly factories and council flats. Celtic Park, however, seems like an oasis in the desert. Despite its age it's an impressive structure, and feels modern and state of the art – then again, the last time I was at a football match I saw Singapore lose 1-0 to Vietnam in our crumbling National Stadium – so perhaps this is simply a matter of perspective.
In A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust writes about the experience of eating petit madeleines in adulthood, and describes how its taste brings back strong memories of his childhood.
I think I'll have a similar experience every time I get a whiff of HP brown sauce in the future.
The three young men seated next to me as I entered the stadium had poured copious amounts of aforementioned sauce onto their meat pies, and the smell was quite frankly nauseating. I tried instead to focus on the players warming up on the pitch, trying to pick out who was who. There was lanky Greek striker Samaras, who looks a lot like Jesus with his long hair and beard; Swedish centre-half Majstorovic, who is so frightening I might dress up like him for Halloween; and new signing Gary Hooper - wearing the number 88 to represent the year he was born. I, too, was born in 1988. Life is passing me by way too quickly, I thought as I watched.
Edinburgh's Hibernian were the visitors. The match itself was not particularly good: Real v. Barcelona this is not. Celtic took the lead within five minutes through Brown, and shortly after Stokes went down in the penalty box, only to be booked for diving. Defender Loovens got a second after half-time from a set-piece. Hibs pulled one back through ex-Celt Riordan, who hit a magnificent lob over Forster from the edge of the area. Later, the diminutive Mexican full-back Juarez rose to meet a corner, his header crashing against the bar... but this was the sum total of all the action in the match. To be honest, the playing wasn’t great, the rest consisting of misplaced passes, niggly fouls, poor refereeing decisions and attacks that broke down far too quickly.
More memorable were the colourful cast of characters in the stands. The attendance was 40,000, which means more than three-quarters of the ground was full and the “Jungle Bhoys”, the Celtic 'ultras' if you will, sing energetically throughout the game. At one point, they start humming the synth riff to Depeche Mode's 'Just Can't Get Enough' (the song being Celtic's 'goal song' this season), impressively bouncing up and down in time to the music. A part of me wishes I’d been in that section. There was no singing in my area (apart from an isolated chant of 'Celtic, Celtic' late in the second-half) but plenty of shouting. A man seated three rows behind me was keen on playing some weird version of Championship Manager: swearing at the players and telling them repeatedly to "get it first time".
I found it oddly endearing.
And I guess that’s what will keep me coming back to this sport and this team: something about the players; something about the fans.
It's been a month since I was at Celtic Park. Yesterday I was in O'Neill's in Low Ousegate watching the Old Firm match, where the team played abysmally in a 1-3 loss.
However, bad football or not, I know I'll be back in Glasgow one day.
For it's a grand old team...
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