THERE was a time when travelling abroad to watch the Celtic conferred a higher status upon a chap. It conveyed a sense among your peers that you were truly committed to the cause. You had crossed time zones to follow the Hoops and sacrificed other material delights to be with them in their hour of need. A European away trip was a spiritual pilgrimage and you almost convinced yourself that special indulgences would flow from it: perhaps the remission of some previous sins or ones yet to be committed.

And then the years pass and you find yourself moving in different circles among people for whom a two-day, midweek trip abroad is a sign of arrested development and maybe even a kind of psychopathy. You become a little more sheepish about your peregrinations in emerald. And you seek to mitigate your delinquency by adding quickly that your trip also had a cultural purpose. Visits to the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona have often been deployed to service this delusion.

I once caught myself actually uttering this sentence: “Much as though I loved the Nou Camp it was especially uplifting to visit the Picasso museum. Did you know that the wee man had a spiritual connection with Barcelona? It became significant link in the chain of his life, not only during his artistic apprenticeship but also in his exposure as an artist. And by the way, I thought David Marshall performed heroics in goal.”

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Thus, you become one of the culturally and socially undead; not quite in one camp or the other. Inside you die a little because you’ve tried to play down why a grown man with professional and family responsibilities still wants to go to somewhere like Aalborg to see Celtic get skelped. And you also know that in the curled lips of your new political chums there is contempt: “Why does this sort of thing still matter to you?”

And then you kind of reach a stage in your life when you don’t really give a Friar Tuck any more. Whatever else people think you are they know you’re a Tim and always have been. And they’ve probably already made their judgments about you based on that. And there’s really not much more that needs to be said.

I’d love to have been in Seville tonight to see Celtic play Real Betis. I missed out on our great 2003 crusade to this city. I was a senior executive on The Herald at the time and had a responsibility to help ensure that the paper covered the story properly at the front and back of the book. I’m still a bit cautious about undertaking flights abroad; me with my bad heart and the Covid and that. But if we emerge from this group I’m hopeful I’ll be in a position to get away for the first knock-out round.

On these occasions you always remember your first time abroad following Celtic. Mine was to Turin in 1981 with my friends Billy and Phil to watch us play an intoxicating Juventus side. I can’t actually recall how intoxicating Juventus were in beating us 2-0 because that happy state formed a permanent halo of dissolution around our entire week-long trip. This was at a time in life when you didn’t have to weigh up the consequences of quotidian inebriation. The next day would look after itself and you’d be none the worse for yesterday’s excesses.

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The three of us had secured brilliant summer jobs, all of them untaxed owing to our student status. When the draw was made pitting us against one of the best teams in the world we each of us had a decision to make: use the money we’d earned to ease the financial burden of the next university term or blow every single penny of it on a trip to Turin (via London and Paris) to watch Celtic and establish an early gold standard on how many consecutive days you could get howling with it. Plus, Juventus had Roberto Bettega playing for them and Roberto Bettega was (and remains) the coolest-looking footballer in the coolest-looking race on the planet. They also had Liam Brady and Dino Zoff and an absolute chiseller of a defender called Claudio Gentile. I loved watching big Gentile. He kicked everything that moved above the grass, but not in a desperate, cut-throat way. Gentile’s violence had its own aesthetic. There was an art to it. I used to fantasise about playing against him and getting really chibbed by him and maybe landing one on him myself and then the two of us talking about our techniques over a glass of chianti and some fava beans after the game.

I’d like to say that we also visited Turin cathedral where resided the shroud that covered the body of our saviour as he lay in the tomb. But only the Pope gets to decide when the Turin Shroud goes on public display. And despite our optimism that John Paul would get it out to mark Celtic’s first visit to Turin it remained firmly locked away. And so we were forced into more earthly pursuits.

I’ve never actually witnessed Celtic winning abroad in a European tie. Well, actually; I have. Twice. But both of these occurred on English soil, which isn’t really the same thing. It’s become fashionable among the shiny suit brigade in the press box to scorn our European away record. But we’ve actually won 52 games away from home in Europe and only two other British clubs have won more on their travels.

Of course you want desperately to see them win in a foreign city in a meaningful game. But just being there with them and suffering a little with them means a lot too. Because you also remember that it was all made possible by the sacrifices of an older generation.