The Glory Glory Bhoys - Celebration Of Celtics Triumphant 1997-98 Season

The Glory Glory Bhoys – Celebration of Celtic’s Triumphant 1997–98 Season (1998) by Andy Dougan
Mainstream Publishing
ISBN: 9781840181555
Condition: Good

Football clubs are never merely football clubs when enough history, rivalry and emotional damage have accumulated around them.

Celtic certainly qualify.

Andy Dougan’s The Glory Glory Bhoys celebrates the 1997–98 season, the campaign in which Celtic finally reclaimed the Scottish league title and, rather importantly, stopped Rangers from winning a tenth consecutive championship.

For Celtic supporters, that last detail was not incidental.

It was the detail.

The season had everything required for proper football mythology: pressure, expectation, nerves, goals, near-disaster, revival and the constant knowledge that one badly timed result could turn an entire year into something people would spend the next decade avoiding discussing.

Celtic began the campaign under Wim Jansen, a Dutch coach who arrived carrying the considerable responsibility of restoring a club that had endured years of frustration while Rangers dominated Scottish football.

No pressure, then.

Jansen’s side gradually took shape around players who would become central to the season’s story, including Henrik Larsson, Paul Lambert, Jackie McNamara, Craig Burley and others who helped transform hope into something rather more dangerous: expectation.

Larsson, in particular, would go on to become one of Celtic’s great modern icons, although at this stage he was still relatively new and had not yet accumulated the almost supernatural status he would later enjoy among supporters.

Every legend has to start somewhere.

Preferably by scoring goals.

Dougan’s book follows the twists and turns of the campaign, preserving the matches, characters and atmosphere of a season remembered not simply because Celtic won the title, but because of what that victory prevented.

Rangers were chasing ten championships in a row.

Nine was already enough.

Ten, from a Celtic perspective, would have been intolerable.

Football supporters are sometimes accused of lacking perspective.

This is unfair.

They possess enormous perspective, provided the subject is football.

The title race therefore carried a weight far beyond the ordinary mathematics of points and goal difference. Every dropped point seemed catastrophic. Every win was evidence that destiny had finally stopped laughing.

And because football understands dramatic structure better than most playwrights, the championship was not settled comfortably in March while everyone relaxed.

It went to the final day.

Celtic faced St Johnstone at Celtic Park knowing that victory would secure the title.

Which meant thousands of supporters had the simple task of remaining calm for ninety minutes while watching the culmination of years of frustration.

They did not remain calm.

Henrik Larsson scored early.

Harald Brattbakk eventually added the second.

And Celtic won 2–0 to secure their first league championship in a decade.

The relief was enormous.

People celebrated.

People cried.

People probably embraced complete strangers they would ordinarily have crossed the street to avoid.

That is football.

The Glory Glory Bhoys captures that sense of release and celebration, looking back across the season and the personalities who made it possible.

It is not simply a statistical review, but a souvenir of a very particular moment in Celtic history: the moment when a run of dominance by their greatest rivals was finally broken and the league trophy returned to Parkhead.

There is also something wonderfully nostalgic about football books of this era.

This was before every transfer rumour became a twenty-four-hour online event.

Before clubs announced squad numbers with cinematic trailers.

Before supporters could spend every waking moment examining possession statistics on their phones.

You watched the match.

You bought the newspaper.

You argued in the pub.

Civilisation somehow continued.

For Celtic fans who remember 1997–98, this book will bring back the nervous Saturdays, the crucial goals and the glorious sense that a decade of waiting had finally ended.

For younger supporters, it offers a snapshot of the season that helped reset the balance of Scottish football and introduced players who would become hugely important to the club’s modern history.

And for neutral football readers, it is an entertaining reminder of just how much emotional energy human beings are prepared to invest in twenty-two men chasing a ball around grass.

This copy is in Good condition, which is probably more than can be said for the nerves of most Celtic supporters by the final afternoon of the 1997–98 season.

Available from Crappy Old Books, where the stock may change daily, but thankfully nobody is currently attempting ten titles in a row.

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