You’ve only come to see the Arsenal!
And they did, they only come to see us.
Celtic fans keep banging on, along with their Glasgow rivals that they should be in the Premier league, but Tuesday night they proved that they would be way out of their depth in the world’s top club league.
In fact you only have to look back to last week’s Scotland international to see the quality they don’t have in their team, half the Scotland team came from the Championship with a couple from the 2 “big” Glasgow clubs; in other words their best internationals are no better than championship level.
Leaving Dublin at 6 a.m. in the morning was a chore, especially since it was the second time in 4 days. I think the hardest part was the fact that it was going to be another 11 hours before I hit Glasgow.
It took 3 modes of transport to get there bus, boat and train.
Bus journey all quite, nothing to report, except if you ever want to go to Belfast use the Aircoach as I did, great service and it actually gets there on time unlike that shower Bus Eireann who are always late and results in you missing your connection. Reminds me of Aer Lingus and Iarnród Éireann the train provider. Hmmm I see a picture developing here....
Boat. Oh fuck. I arrived at the new swanky Stena terminal in Belfast to be greeted by a sea of green and white shirts. I naturally encountered a good few jeers and boo’s, but I was to have the last laugh, at least twice. After a pretty smooth ferry journey, ended with the start of a 2 ½ hour train journey. I thought I had been cunning by cancelling my bus reservation to opt for the train, why? Alcohol of course, no drinking on buses but you can on trains. But this must have been the first train I have been on that had no trolley or restaurant car; I was going to be starved of drink. But things changed for the better and this is where I was to get one up on the West Belfast posse. I had bought one of these meal deal things earlier in the day and ended up with 2 500ml bottles of cokes that got buried at the bottom of my bag.The Northies, quick to spot a bargain, had bought a litre of vodka on the boat, but as they had been too busy drawling over the vodka they had forgot to buy mixers. Several attempts were made to drink it neat but they were getting nowhere with that, it was like watching a junkie without a fix.
I couldn’t resist pulling out the cola and sitting the bottles on the table. It only took about 3 seconds and a deal was done and I came out on top 500ml of coke for 500ml of vodka, what a steal! But it got better! The greedy fuckers had polished off their lot within 10 mins and there is me sitting with 2 500 ml plastic bottles of strong vodka and coke, so using my Scottish bargaining skills, I swapped one bottle for a packet of Marlboro lights. Brilliant! It was only after we got into Glasgow that one of them realised that they’d been stung!
Pre match drinking was limited, the pubs were packed but I did manage to get me and the old boy into one pub whilst the tic posse queued to get in. We met fellow Gooner and long time traveller Baz in the boozer, if you don’t know Baz, he wears a shirt with half the home and half the away kit sowing together, this can also be said for his shorts and he wears one of each sock. Baz is a Gooner legend.
Anyway on to the ground where, believe it or not I met the Arsenal stewards. Yes lads you know who it was and you know who frisked me. To those who don’t know this I always bump into a female steward home and away, everywhere across Europe, she’s a great laugh and imp sure she could tell some stories about us lot. But there’s nothing going on. Honest.
So into the ground, I was expecting a great atmosphere but the fuckers must have been shitting themselves and we only got 3 songs out of them. 1 at the start, 1 at the start of the second half and another during the second half.
“Where’s your famous atmosphere” was sung vibrantly around the away end; we were the atmosphere.
No matter what anyone says we were all over them, and the Celtic following told us they played well. But they never had a hope in hell of scoring. Arsenal in my opinion played good but not spectacular. Like Everton on Saturday Arshavin wasn’t in the game, but wait until he starts firing on all cylinders, we can only get better. The big difference was we won every individual battle and turned it into a big team performance. The goals might have been lucky but we were always going to score.
I have to say not all Celtic fans are dickheads, we managed to bump into a good one after the game and as we were lost he drove us to a pub that was near our hotel, fair play mate.
The following day boat journey was fun, I just grind like a Cheshire cat for the whole journey and tried to sell the lads their Marlboro lights back!
Great to see the Clarets turn over the Mancs the other night!
Next up, three points from Pompey.
Ten minutes to go and Arsenal fans chant "Is there a fire drill"
The start of the second half where the attempted to role out a big banner but as you can see they could only get the orange part down, ha ha! The Scottish club with the Irish flag absolute muppets
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