Bhoys keep swinging

I’m sure many of you can remember the extremely old, and not particularly amusing, joke that always gets dredged up from the bottom of the barrel whenever some team or other happens to be having a particularly desperate run of form. You know, the one about two blokes sitting on a desert island, and one turns to the other and says: “I see that Everton/Leeds/Forest/whoever have lost again.”

The other fellow says: “How do you know?”
“It’s five o’clock,” says the first guy.
Now, at last, this hoary old gag can be given a welcome update, by dint of the cunning ploy of merely changing the first line to “I see Celtic have won again.”
It’s getting particularly silly now, even in the context of a league where silliness is the norm. Twenty-five league wins in a row. An unbeaten streak that has lasted all season. A home record that is statistically perfect, with an average of four goals being banged in during every game. (Not that this last bit is a new development: the World Trade Center was still standing the last time Celtic lost at home.)
There is a very real possibility of them not just going unbeaten for the rest of the SPL season, but also winning all of their remaining games, which would give them a total of 112 points out of a possible 114, and a positive goal difference in the treble figures. Celtic are posting up figures that would have raised eyebrows even in the ’50s.
And yet, what calibre of an achievement is it, really? Is it that much of a feat to mercilessly whip the worst Rangers team since the days of Jock Wallace into submission, or to exert an iron grip over one of the weakest leagues in western Europe? Probably not. Rather, what is breathtaking is the sheer scale of their dominance, the dedication, the attention to detail, the unbelievably small number of goals they concede (one every two games), the near-psychotic consistency with which they go out and murder teams EVERY SINGLE WEEK, rather than just 75% of weeks. It has got to the stage that on the pitifully rare occasions when a team puts up any sort of a fight against Celtic — as Dundee United did recently, leading for most of the afternoon before inevitably losing — the resultant match reports are written in a tone of bewilderment, verging on shock.
One can envisage Martin O’Neill spending last summer immersed in a quiet, festering rage at the manner in which Celtic failed to retain the championship last season, for want of two extra fucking goals against Kilmarnock. He would have vowed to himself that this would never, ever happen again, and then set about making sure of it. So there have been no more slip-ups of the kind that marred the final months of last season, when Celtic were pissing away priceless points at places like Tynecastle and Dens Park. No more careless goals conceded at corners. No loose ends whatsoever, even when four or more regulars are out through injury.
Yet, results like the 5-1 demolition of Livingston the other week constitute the main reason why O’Neill will be in no danger of getting close to Willie Maley’s record for length of time spent managing Celtic. There are only so many times you can watch your players battering the shite out of bad teams in freezing weather before the appeal starts to pall. O’Neill is probably reaching that point around now. And the negative flipside of Celtic’s hegemony is, of course, that they invariably end up being at a huge disadvantage, preparation-wise, whenever they have to play a proper team in Europe, like Olympique Lyonnais or Porto.
Which brings us to Barcelona, and the UEFA Cup tie that will already have been half-played by the time you read this. I actually quite fancied Celtic in this one, for the simple reason that they are up against a team that represent the absolute antithesis of themselves: a collection of gifted, glamorous players who possess all the spine of one of the many brown slugs at the bottom of my back garden.
Moreover, the one player in the Barcelona team with any balls, Edgar Davids, is cup-tied. So all that remains is for Neil Lennon to put the reducers on Ronaldinho, and the die will be cast. And then maybe this Celtic team can be thought of as something even greater than simply the ultimate flat-track bullies.