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« Previous « PreviousNext » Next »View GalleryPublished Date: 27 August 2010
By TOM ENGLISH
AT GALGANGENWAARD STADIUM
Utrecht won 4-2 on aggregate
• Giorgios Samaras will have to settle for domestic football with Celtic this season in the wake of last night's defeat. Pic: Getty
FOUR goals, two penalties, eleven headless chickens and one seething captain, deliberately hauled off the field by his manager a mere 51 minutes into another mortifying night in Europe for Celtic. Oh, how they specialise in calamity on the road, this club. They've produced some pearlers in the past, all manner of sorry defeats and gruesome capitulations. But this surely topped the lot. Neil Lennon walked along the touchline for much of the second half and we can only assume that, as he paraded the perimeter, he was looking for a hole in the turf into which he could throw himself.
Celtic's two-goal advantage from the first leg had gone after less than 20 minutes, two penalties (one dodgy, but who cares) from Ricky van Wolfswinkel had the visitors careering into despair before they had a chance to break sweat. Gone was the authority of the weekend and, Lord how we read too much into their destruction of St Mirren on Sunday. Gone, too, was any semblance of an attacking threat and any modicum of composure at the back.
To be fair, though both Jos Hooiveld and Daniel Majstorovic had a lamentable evening, they were not aided a great deal by a midfield that were throughly thrashed in the one-on-ones with their opposite numbers. Scott Brown? Didn't exist, save for some shouting and roaring. He was taken off for his own good. Sad, but true.
With the tie level at 2-2 at the break, an apoplectic Lennon would have rammed home (literally, we suspect) the need to stop the tomfoolery in his midfield and at the heart of his defence, but it never halted. It got worse.
A couple of minutes into the new half, Van Wolfswinkel, the darling of the Galgenwaard, drove in his third, followed by a fourth for Barry Maguire a short while later. The wonder was that it stayed at just the four goals, for Utrecht deserved more.
And so, humiliation from the jaws of victory for Celtic. No Europa League this time. They might gripe about the second penalty, but when you're out-classed to this extent you'd be as well off keeping schtum and getting back to being a bully in the SPL. For Lennon, he was nowhere else to go now. He hoped his new team had this tie sussed after Parkhead. How wrong he was.
The worry beforehand didn't just centre on Celtic's desperate vulnerability in these away games in Europe but also in Utrecht's rather tidy home form.