Hail, Hail The Celts Are Here

This article was generously provided to ClubFootball by the British Council, which operates in China as the Cultural and Education Section of the British Embassy.

Don Watson tells us what it means to follow the green and white hoops of Celtic.
 
'Hail, hail the Celts are here,' is the opening of the song with which 60,000 Glasgow Celtic fans greet the sight of the distinctive green and white hooped shirts as their heroes take to the pitch of Celtic Park.
 
Every time I sing that song I feel a connection with all the generations of fans that have stood, in the ground known to us as Paradise, and welcomed the players in the green and white hoops. 'And if you know your history,' runs a later line, as if to reinforce the point, 'it's enough to make your heart go "oh oh oh oh".
 
Celtic fans do know their history. Of course, there is the fact that they are the only team ever to win the European Cup with eleven players born within a 50km radius of their home ground. Were it not for the fact that Bobby Lennox was born along the Coast from Glasgow in Saltcoates then the radius would have been substantially less. The only team ever to have come close was Steau Bucharest of Romania.
 
But Celtic has somehow always been about more than just football. It's about history itself. 'We are the underdog,' said Billy McNeill, a member of that famous Cup winning side, 'and we like to enjoy the time when we have our day'. Celtic, as any fan will tell you, were formed by a Marist priest, Brother Walfrid in the late Nineteenth Century and initially functioned as a focus for the poor Irish immigrants who had flocked to the shipbuilding industrial heartland of Clydeside to find work.
 
They were to have been called Glasgow Hibernian. But in a move to emphasise a tradition of integration rather than separatism, Walfrid chose Celtic. Although Celtic came from Catholic roots, this gesture of inclusiveness has become a part of the tradition that Celtic fans hold dear.
 
Celtic fans are proud of the fact that one of the first black players to play in Britain pulled on the green and white hoops in the 50s, long before Leeds United's Albert Johannson or West Ham's Clyde Best. They are prouder still that the player in question was Gill Scott Heron Snr (known as the Black Arrow), the father of the American rap star.
 
Earlier still Celtic had one of the first British Asian players, Abdul Salim, one of the many Celtic players to have achieved legendary status around Glasgow. Although his ball skills were apparently prodigious the feature of Salim's game that is still spoken about was that he played barefoot, wrapping bandages around his feet instead of boots.
 
In the dark days of the Eighties Rangers fans used to taunt their Celtic counterparts with 'All you've got's your history'. Before Wim Jansen's shortlived revolution in the late Nineties, and Martin O'Neil's recent and hopefully more lasting transformation, it was true. All we did have was our history. It still seemed like quite a lot.
 
Don Watson is the author of "Dancing in the Streets: Tales from World Cup City" and "Psycho Mike and the Phantom Ice Rink" (in "My Favourite Year" ed. Nick Hornby) both of which were published by Gollancz.

Don Watson, May 2001