'What this Celtic team produced on Thursday evening was an insult to the Lions’ legacy' || Graeme McGarry "Roll up, roll up, come and get your official Lisbon Lions commemorative shirts, tea-towels and trinkets. If nothing else, it may help you remember a time when Celtic actually gave much of a damn about European football. "One wonders if decades from now, the 'made a better fist of it after the break' range will have quite the same cachet. "Being drawn against Benfica in the Europa League was manna from heaven for the club’s commercial department. Thousands of Celtic fans would be making the pilgrimage to Lisbon and the Estadio Nacional, the sight of the club’s greatest triumph back in 1967. It was a chance to get a head start on punting some of the new range of tat before next year’s 60th anniversary and throw yet more of their supporters’ money on the big pile. "From a footballing perspective, though, this was the stuff of nightmares. Inevitably, when things went predictably pear-shaped on the field of play, the comparisons between the legends of the past and the lame ducks of the present was a stark one, and the stuff of headline writers' dreams. "‘From Lions to Lambs’ screamed the back pages, as Martin O’Neill’s men were dismantled in the Estadio da Luz by the Super Eagles, who far from getting their wings clipped, felt – as one Portuguese paper put it – only the slightest of tickles beneath them from their once storied opponents. "This is what Celtic, and by extension, Scottish football, have become. Our champions - mere cannon fodder for the big boys of the continent. Teams like Benfica, who have now put 10 goals past last season’s Scottish Premiership top two in two matches on their home patch, look at Celtic the way that we would once look at the minnows of Luxembourg or Gibraltar. A guaranteed win, with the chance of a good few goals into the bargain." 👇 𝘐𝘔𝘈𝘎𝘌: 𝘡𝘦𝘥 𝘑𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘴𝘰𝘯/𝘗𝘈 𝘞𝘪𝘳𝘦/𝘗𝘈 𝘐𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘦𝘴

Celtic and Dermot Desmond should reassess what brings 'shame' to club's name || Graeme McGarry "The statement that was released on the club’s official website over that protest by the Celtic Fans Collective was the stuff of fire and brimstone. In fact, it read like the stuff of a few too many clubhouse brandies. "It is a golden rule of journalism not to venture onto social media after 10pm on a Saturday evening, never mind slapping a statement on a club website that had the timbre of a divorced Da’s Facebook feed. Not only that, but it made the whole thing a bigger story than it otherwise would have been, the diametrically opposite aim of PR damage control. "One particularly stinging paragraph read: ‘Those responsible have brought shame upon the name of Celtic Football Club and upon a reputation which generations of Celtic supporters have spent more than a century building.’ "This is referencing the tennis balls, by the way, not the repeated failures to qualify for the Champions League, just for the avoidance of doubt." 👇 𝘐𝘔𝘈𝘎𝘌: 𝘚𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘞𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦/𝘚𝘩𝘶𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘤𝘬