THE elephant in the room when it comes to Celtic and Manchester United is the demand and expectation that the team entertains. It is not simply enough to win games, the games have to be won with swashes buckled, elan and flair.
All well and good, for their fans: better a 5-4 "nine-goal thriller" than a dour 0-0 draw, settled with a last-minute penalty, or breakaway goal, but, unlike ice dancing, you don't, in football, get bonus points for entertaining. Breath-taking 5-4 or scraped 1-0, you still only get three points.
But, it is one of football's certainties - you can have all the swashbuckling, exciting and inventive forwards you like, but, if the back door is left permanently ajar, you will win nowt.
And, watching Manchester United slip quietly out of the Champions League on Tuesday night, then the start of Celtic's 2015-16 European finale on Thursday night (a prior engagement took me away before half-time, and, to be honest, I didn't see the point in recording the rest), there was one common denominator in the demise of British football's two great entertainers - the cry was no defenders.
Good teams are built round a solid spine: a great goalkeeper, two classy central defenders who work as a pair, a midfield general and a great goalscorer; if those five elements are in place, it doesn't really matter about the other six, so long as they have an element of quality.
The hole in the heart of the Celtic defence is obvious. It doesn't really matter, or hurt them all that often in the backwater of the SPFL, but, is a glaring gap in Europe. Manchester United's central defence is a work in progress, after the loss of the formidable Ferdinand/Vidic pairing. The guys who have come in have yet to reach that level of competence, but, in time they will. For Celtic, ah hae ma doots.
Until these two clubs sort-out the deficiencies at the back, however, they are going to struggle in Europe.
THE death of Alan Hodgkinson earlier this week was sad, albeit, 79 is a reasonably good innings. Hodgy was a wee man, but, he had a huge influence on the odd-men-out in football, the goalkeepers.
He played nearly 700 games, he was capped by England, he was actively involved in the game for 60-years, and his influence will live long, how he has gone. Had he done nothing other than coached Jim Leighton (before the pair had a spectacular fall-out), Andy Goram and Peter Schmeichel, he would have been respected. But, it was the advice and hep he gave to other stoppers, often unpaid, which set him apart.
I had a cousin, sadly taken too-soon, who played over 500 games in the English League, got into a Scotland squad, when with a very unfashionable club, but never got the cap he deserved. His active career overlapped with that of Hodgy, and he said: "If I was having a problem, I could call Hodgy up, we would talk it over and I always came away feeling better about myself and goalkeeping.
Speaking as an old, and not very good goalie myself, I know only too-well, the hardest thing about our position is the mental strain. A striker can fail to trap a ball and concede possession; if the midfield does not strangle the counter-attack at birth, if the full-back lets his winger pass, the centre-half misses the cross then the ball is deflected home by the striker; if the 'keeper merely gets a hand to the ball as it goes in - somewhere in the ground, someone will blame the goalie for conceding the goal - even though he was probably the one member of the team conceding it who made the smallest error, if he erred at all.
That is the goalie's lot. The outfield players usually have an alibi, the goalie seldom has - and that means mental pressure.
Hodgy was Yorkshire to his core, but, his service to Scotland during his years as goalkeeping coach, and the legacy he has left, through his disciples such as Jim Stewart, Billy Thomson and Stevie Woods is great.
I bet, up there in the great locker room in the sky, Hodgy has already settled-in beside Bert Williams to dissect the art of goalkeeping. And, he will surely give that great goalkeeper-philosopher Albert Camus a run for his money.
IN a sad week, in which we lost two great writers in Willie McIlvanney and Ian Bell, my spirits were lifted by a wee quip in Ken Smith's excellent Herald Diary. In the wake of his technical ko win in the Election Court, somebody in the Diary suggested: "This verdict means Alistair Carmichael has been considered by the SFA to be a fit and proper person to join the Rangers' board.
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