AS CELTIC directors chatted with their Aalborg guests following the scoreless draw between the sides in mid-September, the hosts became rather sheepish when the subject turned to playing costs.
Inability to break the Danes down in that Champions League opener in Glasgow became all the more uncomfortable when they were forced to admit that the £4m Aalborg revealed as an entire yearly spend was around a 10th of the sum being eaten up by their
own football operation. It might be said then that there are £40m worth of reasons why there can be no excuses for Celtic failing in the Energi Nord Arena on Tuesday evening.
Gordon Strachan can only but concede the encounter represents "a great possibility" to end the club's winless run on their Champions League group travels now standing at 16 defeats, and one draw, eight of these under the present manager.
"For all the propaganda we might come away with here, for all the talking that might be done, it will come down to players playing well on the night or managers and coaches making good decisions at the right time," the Celtic manager says.
Every available indicator suggests the visitors to the Energi Nord Arena on Tuesday night should be capable of playing better and making better decisions than their opponents. Victory, coupled with a Manchester United success in Villarreal the same evening, is required for Celtic to take last 16 qualification hopes into a final game shoot-out at home to the Spaniards. Defeat for Strachan's side would see them lose out to Aalborg on third place in the section, and the UEFA Cup place that comes with it.
Celtic's away record in Europe's most illustrious tournament is treated as an amorphous mass. In reality, there are only a handful of occasions when they might have been reasonably expected to achieve a result on unfamiliar soil. One of these was their last trip to Denmark, to face Copenhagen two years ago. Strachan is cautious of talking up his team's chances this week because they were downed so dismally in losing 3-1 in the Danish capital. Yet he accepts circumstances are very different from back then.
"There was nothing (in terms of an edge]," he says. "I found it very strange. It kind of crept up on us – 'we've qualified, how did that happen?' I am not meant to be sitting here in my duffel coat thinking 'no problem'."
If Strachan wants to think positively, he could put together a raft of statistics to build a pretty solid case for saying that Aalborg should not be able to present his team with any insurmountable problems. By some margin the smallest club Celtic have faced in the Champions League – their stadium will house 10,500 seated spectators Tuesday – their status has been diminished by recent experiences.
When Celtic faced Copenhagen in December 2006 the Danes were in the midst of successfully defending their championship; Aalborg presently lie eight in the 12-team Danish Superliga with a third of the games played. Indeed, going into yesterday's round of matches they were only three points off second bottom. A 2-1 win over anchor club Esbjerg a week ago not only provided some breathing space, but also marked their first league victory in seven matches, and only a second of the season. Their previous league success came prior to them last meeting Celtic. Then managed by Bruce Rioch, the alarming domestic slump that followed resulted in the Scot being shoved out the door a month ago and his assistant Allan Kuhn taking charge on a caretaker basis. Strachan detects a modified approach under the temporary coach.
"We have watched them in the first half of last week's game and I think they have become a bit narrower in midfield, a bit more compact, though I don't know if that was just the team they were playing," he says. "They are a big team and when we are picking our team that has got to be a factor."
The reduced circumstances Celtic find themselves in because of injuries to key performers will greatly reduce Strachan's options. He will certainly require to be mindful of Aalborg's capacity for scoring goals against Villarreal, whom they drew 2-2 with at home after performing valiantly before losing 6-3 in a game that marked Rioch's last stand.
Yet for all that, there is no way of viewing Celtic's Denmark date in two days' time as other than a once-in-a-decade opportunity for them to emerge victorious in a Champions League away game.
Strachan, nevertheless, is wary. "You don't get any mentally weak teams," he says. "They have been tested by having to win their championship, tested by having to play knockout games in the qualifying campaign to get to this stage."
There is a mentality in football that if you win you have performed acceptably and if you lose you have performed unacceptably. Such logic does not follow for Strachan, who rightly points out that criticism of Celtic's display in the frustrating blank at home to Aalborg overplayed their inability to craft openings.
"We actually played better and made more chances against Aalborg than we did at home to Copenhagen, but we scored a penalty against Copenhagen and people think it was a good result. It was, but not a good performance. The actual performance against Aalborg was better, we made far more chances, but missed a penalty. That is how thin the dividing line is."
Strachan spoke to Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson about "one or two things" concerning Aalborg during the pair's post-match drink at Celtic Park earlier this month but expands no further than "he said the pitch was fantastic" and to "watch where I was spilling wine".
The identity of the spectators who fill round the pitch will make Tuesday's occasion a peculiar one for Celtic's players. With the club receiving only an 800 allocation, it will represent the smallest Celtic crowd for a competitive match by the club since David Murray banned away fans for the Old Firm game of April 1994.
Georgios Samaras, now clocking up game time from the bench following two months out with a knee injury, admits facing so partisan a crowd will be a new experience for him in Celtic colours.
"It doesn't matter if we play at Celtic Park or away – in the Scottish league, Champions League or even friendlies – the support is always there as our 12th man trying to push us on to win," he says. "But as players we can do nothing about the situation and only focus on bring happiness to the supporters even though they are not there."
With the striker's 10 goals in 11 matches before succumbing to a knee problem, it seemed inconceivable Celtic wouldn't find themselves pining for him during his lay-off. But Cillian Sheridan's emergence offered surprising compensation for the absence of both Samaras and Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink, though not to the Greek.
"Maybe you are surprised but I am not because I know the lad," he says. "We worked together in pre-season and he has real talent. He has the ability to be a striker for a long time at Celtic. He's a natural and when you see a kid with his ability you are just waiting for when he's going to explode."
The wait for the moment when Celtic explode the theory they will never win away in the Champions League group stages has also come.
AWAY DAY BLUESCELTIC'S game on Tuesday against Aalborg will be their 18th away match in the Champions League group stages. They are still searching for their first win.
2001-02 (manager: Martin O'Neill) Juventus 2-3 (Petrov, Larsson pen)
Porto 0-3
Rosenborg 0-2
2003-04 (O'Neill)Ba Munich 1-2 (Thompson)
Anderlecht 0-1
Lyon 2-3 (Hartson, Sutton)
2004-05 (O'Neill)AC Milan 1-3 (Varga)
Shakhtar 0-3
Barcelona 1-1 (Hartson)
2006-07 (manager: Gordon Strachan) Manchester United 2-3 (Vennegoor of Hesselink, Nakamura)
Benfica 0-3
Copenhagen 1-3 (Jarosik)
2007-08 (Strachan)Shakhtar 0-2
Benfica 0-1
AC Milan 0-1
2008-09 (Strachan)Villarreal 0-1
Manchester United 0-3
How the managers compareO'Neill's away record: P9 W0 D1 L8
Strachan's away record: P8 W0 D0 L8
Total: P17 W0 D1 L16
