Andrew Smith: Why the Scottish Cup final could be bigger for Celtic than 10-in-a-row

Rangers or Celtic will win the title this season.

What neither of them will do, following their ousting from this season’s League Cup, is claim a treble from the 2020-21 campaign. All of which makes the covid-time-warped 2019-20 Scottish Cup final that Celtic will contest on Sunday potentially the club’s most outstanding achievement available to them across the next six months.

The League Cup shocks suffered by the Glasgow clubs in the past month ensure that, if Celtic bring up a scarcely-believable quadruple treble, it will still mean only 14 trebles being claimed across the 75 seasons they have been up for grabs in Scottish football. Prior to Celtic’s unbeaten treble of 2016-17, 13 seasons had come and gone without any team achieving the domestic clean sweep.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Yer Celtic supporters seem entirely blind to the fact that their trebles run eclipses, every way up, any titles run achievable this season. That fact speaks of the poisonous hatred with Rangers, and the blinkered parochialism drenching this, often tedious, tribal rivalry. Landing 10-in-a-row would allow Celtic to give it large to Ibrox followers forever and a day. All get that. But it would represent local oneupmanship in a relative football backwater and barely register beyond it. There is every possibility Juventus will rack up a tenth consecutive title in Italy this season.

The first ten in Scotland would still be a long way off the 14-in-a-row runs of Skonto in Latvia, and Gibraltar’s Lincoln Red Imps, the 13-in-a-row runs of Norwegian powerhouses Rosenborg and BATE Borisov of Belarus, and not quite the measure of the 11 consecutive championship earned by Croatian heavyweights Dinamo Zagreb. And before anyone dares claim these are hardly major set-ups, just think for a minute about the international standing of Scottish football …

With these sequences merely the longest league-winning runs in Europe, the picture formed is that there is nothing truly exceptional about the biggest beast in a country having a decade-long stranglehold on their league set-up. In fact, before Celtic, and then Rangers, had their nine-in-row eras, CSKA Sofia had put together such a sequence in Bulgaria.

Contrast this with football trebles claimed across the globe. Not only has no team won four, as Celtic will have the opportunity to do, but all evidence suggests no club has even racked-up a treble treble. Only Darulaman FC of Malyasia have ever even achieved back-to-back trebles. Celtic, with their domestic clean sweeps as opposed to just their championships, are ripping up all available precedents then.

In terms of the Scottish game, they are not just boldly going where no team has gone before. They have travelled so far beyond what previously seemed possible, their current feats have taken them into another galaxy, far, far away. It has begun almost to seem pat to talk of their run of three-and-two-thirds trebles - which covers 11 domestic trophies and and now full-stopped record run of 35 straight cup-tie successes - as unparalleled, record setting. It is nothing short of utterly mind-boggling when the previous Scottish bests on these measures were one treble, seven trophies and 25 cup ties unbeaten. Yet, despite all this, an intercity battle will continue to be afforded precedence.

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this article. We're more reliant on your support than ever as the shift in consumer habits brought about by coronavirus impacts our advertisers. If you haven't already, please consider supporting our trusted, fact-checked journalism by taking out a digital subscription.

Comments

 0 comments

Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.