Keep The Faith.

Thanks to all who helped us with the book. The response was fantastic.
It's out on the 28th of this month, I think, but here's chapter One.
Apologies for the layout, but you guys don't take attachments. It's
published by Mainstream.

KTF Ron Mackenna


FIELD OF DREAMS

With a four-leafed clover on my breast

And the green and white upon my chest

It’s such a joy for us to see

For to play football the Celtic way . . .

(Four Leaf Clover: The Peatdiggers & Peter Barry)




IT IS 10.40 P.M. Saturday, 26 May 2001. Bars can sometimes have a joyous
feeling, a wall of warmth that hits you when you walk through the door.
Tonight, Pier 17 on Glasgow’s Clydeside is like that. In the semi-gloom
of the spotlights people are sitting, talking, shouting, some of them
are even singing. The babble of voices has got louder and happier with
every round of drinks. This is more than a Saturday-night-out crowd. The
men seem fitter, healthier, more handsome, even. And they are glowing
with something more than alcohol: it is pride. Their wives and
girlfriends are with them. Some of them have brought their parents too.

The mood has swept everybody along with it. It is a celebration, a
joyous celebration that is taking place, tonight, for the first time in
32 years. Look closely and there are football players at every table. In
their jackets and suits they look different than they did five hours
ago. Over there, sitting together are Henrik Larsson, Ramon Vega and
Chris Sutton.

Amid the noise they have been laughing and telling stories. But Vega has
stopped and, listening intently, he is turning his head towards the
smallstage. He looks at the others, laughing, and says, ‘Tom Boyd is
singing.’It is a song they have all heard the club captain sing before.
He sang itat his testimonial a few weeks ago. And he has hummed it
almost everyday since as he wandered around the training field or
dressed in thechanging-rooms. Usually he has a smile on his face and
normally nobody pays much attention. But now everybody is listening.
People seated withtheir backs to him have craned their heads around to
see. The conversation has died down.There is something different about
his voice this time.He stands with his head slightly tipped back and the
microphone near his face: ‘With a four-leafed clover on my breast . . .
And the green andwhite upon my chest . . .’ But the words are not coming
out right. His voice is thick with emotion and breaking . . . ‘It’s such
a joy for us to see. . .’ Those are tears coming from his eyes.

The car horns are still sounding in different parts of Glasgow. The
citycentre is awash with celebrating fans in green and white. All around
thecountry the same song Tom Boyd is singing and many more are being
belted out by groups of euphoric people. On the other side of the world
supporters are dancing. In Singapore, Sweden, Canada and the States the
Celts are swinging. There are parties everywhere.

Tony Murray is at one of them in Clydebank’s Duntocher Hotel, a pint in
his hand, his wife and friends around him. A lifelong Celtic
supporter,he too has cried at today’s victory. He was sitting in the
North Stand of Hampden. His eight-year-old son Anthony was on one side
of him, on the other his best friend James McKenna, over from Australia
for three days to see history in the making. Maybe it was the
green-and-white bedlam that erupted around him at the final whistle.
Maybe it was the sight of the team reappearing on the park in the
traditional green-and-white hoops.Maybe it was the fact that he was the
same age as his son is now when Celtic last won the Treble. It doesn’t
really matter.

And who knows what was going through Tom Boyd’s mind when thetears came?
The thought of all those hard, lean years being finally over?Flashing
images of the night Celtic beat St Johnstone, or finally won theleague,
or the cups? Perhaps the closeness of the players in the first-team
dressing-room? Every player in the room, everybody associated with the
football club had their own memories of the year at that moment. Put
together like aflickering movie reel, they would reveal much more than
just what happened on the park. Of course there would be the crushing
defeatsinflicted on Rangers, the moment in Perth when Stan Petrov broke
his legand the league was sewn up, the games when it all looked lost but
the team fought back.

But there were the funny moments too. Martin O’Neill standing naked
before Billy Connolly. Chris Sutton and the other players talking about,
Henrik Larsson meeting the Chewin’ the Fat boys, or the team singing
together in the dressing-room.

The people outside in the streets celebrating had their memories too;
thoughts of crazy trips to Finland and France; of watching matches on
theother side of the world at four in the morning; of dining with the
team under the sun-kissed Florida sky. And many people would have
thought back to the beginning.

It is the morning of 29 July 2000. Outside a towering stadium which
dominates Glasgow’s East End a crowd of supporters, journalists, a
fewgawpers is growing; milling around, laughing, their shouts rising up
into the summer air:. There is an air of expectation. The sun is
shining. Deep inside, underneath the stands, a slim man in his late
forties, at firstglance unremarkable apart from his steel-rimmed
spectacles, is turning to face a group of fit, healthy young men:
athletes, football players, Celtic players.

‘Gentlemen,’ he begins. ‘I will always be 100 per cent honest with you
and the press. But in the coming weeks you will hear me tell a lie.’ The
man, the new manager, continues: ‘When asked by the media if we can win
the league I will say no, that we are too young and still developing as
team and manager. Disregard it. ‘We will win the league. Some of you
believe it already and all of you will believe it shortly.’ (31 August
2000, Daily Mail)

The game has begun.

The man is Martin O’Neill. The words are only extraordinary if you know
what went before. And everybody in Glasgow, in Scotland, everybody who
knew anything about football, knew what went before.

What nobody expected was what was to come after.

Twenty-one points is a large gap between two teams in any sport.
Infootball it is a gulf. In football, in the league championship in
Scotland,when it is the gap between Rangers and Celtic, it is worse. It
is humiliating.

Yet 21 points were not all that had separated the two sides at the end
of the 1999–2000 season. As the month of May ended there was also the
small matter of Celtic having lost their eleventh championship in twelve
seasons; their fourth manager in four seasons and on the way having
suffered the worst defeat in the club’s history when they were ejected
from the Scottish Cup, at home, by a team which five seasons previously
hadbeen playing in the lowly Highland League. And there is a painful
footnotesomewhere recording that one of the club’s greatest idols, Kenny
Dalglish,had been found, on returning to Celtic, to have feet of clay.

Across the city Rangers, deadly serious rivals for more than a century,
had picked up every championship Celtic had lost in the last 12 years.

They were rampant. They had coasted to their latest league victory. They
were strong, confident, accepted across the UK and Europe as the
realmasters of Scottish football, and still building for the future.

For an ordinary club such a predicament would have been painful. But
Celtic is no ordinary club. The heavy hand of history bears down on
every season. The ghost of Jock Stein lingers in the dressing-room. His
team, the Lisbon Lions, propelled Celtic to immortality in 1967 by
becoming the first British club to win the European Cup. It was an
extraordinary feat that has ensured that Celtic’s name is known and
spoken of with respect throughout Europe. Yet it has also brought with
it a burden of expectation.

A fear that with every passing season’s slip the lustre dulls . . . The
club Martin O’Neill walked into in the summer of 2000 should, then, by
any standards have been damaged, broken and spiralling downwards. In
other cities in the UK, where the fortunes of two clubs are so tightly
intertwined, the unbearable disappointments almost inevitably lead to
one beginning the slow depressing march to the lower leagues. Celtic had
had more than a decade of uninterrupted underachievement, broken briefly
by Wim Jansen’s glorious league win in 1998.

A victory which was cruelly followed by the Dutchman’s immediate
departure and defeat in the next season, confirming the sceptics’ claims
it was just a one-off handed to Celtic on a plate by a temporarily
exhausted Rangers. And the season that had just ended was a howler, the
mother of all bad seasons.

Yet anyone studying the statistics and visiting Glasgow’s East End for
the first time to take the club’s temperature was in for a shock. The
patient was far from sick and wasting away. In fact the opposite was
true.

Celtic as an institution, as a football club, was in gloriously rude
health, miraculously showing no signs of lasting damage.

The explanation lies in the emotions of more than 250,000 supporters.
Sport is emotion. In Kevin Costner’s movie Field Of Dreams Idaho farmer
Ray Kinsella hears a voice telling him: ‘Build it and they will come.’
In the face of bankruptcy, divorce and the mounting suspicions of his
neighbours he constructs a baseball diamond in his cornfield. People are
drawn to the empty field from all over the country. Ghosts of the
Chicago Black Sox walk out of the corn and start playing ball.
Kinsella’s father and the long-dead relatives of others join them. It is
Hollywood nonsense, but it is also a film few men can watch without
feeling a tear well up in their eyes.

There are no voices at Celtic Park but, like Kinsella’s cornfield, the
setting has been created for a return to the glory of days long
past.Emotion has seen the building of a world-class football stadium
that was until very recently the largest in Britain. It waits for the
emergence of a team to rival the Lisbon Lions.

The supporters, who made it possible, wait too. Thousands of them became
ordinary shareholders and bought and bought at a point when the business
world said it was not possible. The share issue came at the end of a
five-year trophyless spell and was derided as doomed to failure. It was
not a rational purchase as The Herald (January 1995) ominously warned
supporters, pointing out that the funding for the new stadium was not
inplace.

It was a fact the club, under Fergus McCann, had already pointed out
themselves in the prospectus. They warned that only the money to rebuild
the North Stand was in place and anything else would depend on ‘the
achievements of the first team, future availability of cash resources
and bank and other facilities and the level of ticket revenue in future
seasons’. It was, therefore, a leap in the dark. A leap of faith.

The share issue was oversubscribed to the tune of £5.4 million. More
than 10,000 supporters paid a minimum of £620. It was the biggest share
ssue of its type in Britain.

It was also a new beginning.

The stadium rose from the rubble in the East End and the faithful rose o
the occasion with it. Despite the lean years on the park the clamour to
ecome part of what was going on became deafening. There are now 0,000
season ticket-holders and all signed up on no more than the dim
xpectation that things could only get better. They linger, like the
peoplewho came to sit around Kinsella’s corn field. They are not alone.
In the extremely unlikely event that they should change their minds
there are 10,000 more sitting on the waiting list.

In Australia, Singapore, the United States, anywhere that Scots and
Irish have gone to find work or a new life, people still cling on to
Celtic.

Distance does not dilute the extraordinary gravity-defying support for
the club.

It’s a sentiment embodied in the phrase ‘Keep the faith’. A phrase that
passes across the lips of Celtic supporters whenever they part company.
A phrase that sums up the optimism of tens of thousands of ordinary
people who have passed the Celtic torch down over generations.

The story of the Treble-winning season is their story as much as it is
the story of the team on the park or the manager. It is a tale of a club
in waiting and of faith repaid.



(This is the shortest of 13 chapters)


Thanks to Jonathan Russell of the Scottish Mirror and Kevin McKenna of
the Herald forthe use of match reports.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Thomas Jordan, Kevin McCarra, Jonathan Northcroft, Ian
Campbell, Neil Cameron, Jim Traynor, Andrew Smith, Rob Robertson, Glenn
Gibbons, Charlie Nicholas, Billy McNeill, Bobby Lennox, Jimmy Johnstone,
Ronnie Simpson, Bob Crampsey, Chris and Eugene Cairns, Damian Rogers,
Jim Smith, Joe Cook, David Norrie, Eddie Toner, Joe O’Rourke, Gerry
Madden, Brendan Sweeney, Jim Divers, Jason Henderson, Stilian Petrov,
Neil Lennon, Ramon Vega, Tom Boyd, Austin Barrett, Steve Clarke and
www.e-tims.net, www.celticfc.co.uk, Tony Hamilton, Keith Sinclair, Frank
Murphy, Phil Miller, Davey Paton, Adrian Cocozza, Brian Wilson, James
Allcock, Chris Starrs, Willie Hughes, Thomas Jordan, Alan Storer, David
Welsh.Tony Murray, Graham Lynn, Kevin Cawley, Gerry Madden, Eddie Toner,
Joe O’Rourke, Brendan Sweeney, Jimmy Divers and
www.celticsupportersassoc.co.uk, John Paton, the North American
Federation of Celtic Supporters Clubs, the Singapore Celtic Supporters
Club, the Australian Celtic Supporters Clubs, www.thehuddle.co.uk and
Tom Carruthers (President Western Australia Celtic Supporters Club)..