For Celtic and Rangers, it’s been a while. It’s knocking on for five years since the Parkhead team last breathed the rarefied air of a Champions League group stage match and closer to 12 years since the Ibrox side did it.
Darren Cole and Kyle Hutton started in Rangers’ last game at this level – Jordan McMillan came off the bench. It was a 1-1 draw away to Bursaspor in early December 2010. Kenny Miller scored the Rangers goal. You might say that things got pretty interesting at Ibrox fairly soon after that.
If Celtic’s most recent experience doesn’t quite feel like a million years ago, they still had a centre-back pairing of Jozo Simunovic and Dedryck Boyota on the night of their last nod in a Champions League group game, a 1-0 home defeat by Anderlecht in December 2017.
A teenage Odsonne Edouard came off the bench. Liel Abada had just turned 16. The 17-year-old Matt O’Riley had not long played his first senior game of football, an EFL Cup tie for Fulham against Wycombe Wanderers.
Celtic host Real Madrid on Tuesday night and Rangers play Ajax in Amsterdam on Wednesday. As intoxicating as this Celtic game will be for the home side, it’s also going to have a huge resonance for those who have Real in their hearts.
Glasgow is a city that is at the centre of their epic European story, the place where Puskas and Di Stefano, Santamaria and Del Sol put on the greatest show on earth in the 1960 European Cup final.
These days, the Champions League is so much about participation fees and television rights and gate receipts – all the financial trappings of a fiscal freak show – but back then it was about glory and little else. Madrid fans of a certain age will travel to Glasgow thinking in part about their dominant present but also of their beautiful past.
So this will be special. What’s utterly compelling from a Celtic point of view is the question of how their team will look when going up against the biggest of the big boys. Can they cause the great Real some trouble? Can Ange Postecoglou’s team – inventive, pacy and dangerous in domestic stuff – bring any of that to bear against the greatest club side most of them will ever have faced.
In many senses, it’s a free hit. Nobody really expects a Celtic victory, or even a Celtic draw, but how they cope will be pulse-quickening on the night. Can Jota get change out of five-time Champions League winner Dani Carvajal? Can Abada give an uncomfortable night to his £50m opposite number, Ferland Mendy?
Madrid beat Real Betis 2-1 at the weekend with a midfield three of the great Luka Modric, the brilliant young Frenchman, Aurelien Tchouameni, and the teenage wonder Eduardo Camavinga. These are the replacements for the departed old guard, Isco and Casemiro among them.
Can Callum McGregor, Reo Hatate and O’Riley put a dent in them? Can the Celtic defence somehow survive the speed and power and towering world class of Vinicius Junior and Karim Benzema? It’s the chance to find out that’s the thrill in all of this.
Postecoglou’s team are a proven outfit in Scottish football, but they’re an unknown entity in the truly big time. These upcoming games in the Champions League will be a terrific barometer of where they’re at.
Celtic have not won a home group game in this tournament in seven attempts, albeit against the heaviest hitters. That all seems an eternity ago though. Indeed, the season before Postecoglou arrived feels like a different dimension in time given the changes he’s brought in.
Can they get something on Tuesday? Well, Sheriff Tiraspol did last season, beating Real in Madrid in round two. Shakhtar Donetsk beat them home and away the season before, while Borussia Monchengladbach held them, as did Club Brugge the season before that. CSKA Moscow did them twice a year prior.
It can be done. Not often. Not unless you are foot-perfect, but others have shown the way.
Celtic are going into Tuesday on a wave of self-belief. Rangers are going to Amsterdam under a cloud. Any Old Firm shellacking does tend to set the hair on fire among the vanquished and the aftermath of their 4-0 hammering on Saturday has been no exception.
Goalkeeper Jon McLaughlin has been getting it, the centre-backs have been getting it, the midfielders have come in for stick, Ryan Kent has been lacerated, manager Giovanni van Bronckhorst has been questioned heavily, the recruitment has been pored over with a merciless eye. The anger is understandable. Rangers were out-played to an embarrassing degree.
They remain an enigma. Last season, they went all the way to the Europa League final, beating stellar sides along the way, and yet dropped points in 11 of their 38 league games and got dumped out of the League Cup by Hibernian.
The team that beat Borussia Dortmund, RB Leipzig and came within a penalty kick of beating Eintracht Frankfurt in the final toiled on the home front. The split personality remains. They put PSV Eindhoven out of the Champions League in a display of organisation, hard work and ruthlessness and yet none of those qualities accompanied them to Celtic Park on Saturday.
You’d trust Rangers in European football way more than in Scottish football, which is a surreal thing to say. Ajax, in the Johan Cruyff Arena, is fantastically glamorous and it’s entirely possible, given their nature, that they will follow up the 4-0 with something substantial on Wednesday. Maybe not a win or a draw, but some pride restored.
Ajax’s policy of nurturing and then selling quality is jaw-dropping. Sebastian Haller scored in every round of the Champions League group stage last season, but he went to Dortmund for £27m. Lisandro Martinez and Antony both went to Manchester United for a combined £130m. Ryan Gravenbach went to Bayern Munich for a humble £16m.
In the two seasons before this one, they sold Donny van de Beek, Sergino Dest, Hakim Ziyech, Sven Botman, Frenkie de Jong and Matthijs de Ligt for around £230m. They’re one of the most extraordinary clubs in the global game.
They’ve not exactly sat on their hands on the recruitment front, Calvin Bassey being a subplot given his move from Rangers to Ajax in the summer. Just as the months ahead will tell us something about Postecoglou’s ability to make his domestic destroyers into a team that can ask questions of the best in Europe, we’ll also discover more about this Rangers side.
They’ll need that resilience on the road this week. Before that, back in Glasgow on Tuesday, never mind checking the weather forecast. Bank on thunder.
