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Despite a minor scare in the second half Celtic pretty much picked up from where they left off a week ago on Tuesday as they dominated Bosnian Champions FK Sarajevo once again last night at Celtic Park in claiming a 2-1 victory and securing a 5-2 aggregate win and ultimately a place in the 2nd Qualifying round of the Champions League.

It wasn’t the balmy evening that I’d hoped for as instead rain intermittently pinged down – as the weather also picked up from where it had left off last week – but it made little difference to proceedings as Celtic dominated from the get-go and had seventeen attempts on goal with nine on target.

Early on Sarajevo striker Mersudin Ahmetovic had a goal chopped off for offside and in the opening stages there was a real lack of tempo to the game but Celtic ultimately upped the ante and a mazy run from Odsonne Edouard into the box saw him lay it off to Ryan Christie who scooped it high into the net beyond the despairing Kovacevic in the visitors goal on 26 minutes.

That left Celtic with a more or less unassailable 4-1 lead in the tie and it looked inevitable that more goals would come but a lack of concentration from recent signing Boli Bolingoli let Benjamin Tatar in who finished well just after the hour mark.

Any fears of an unlikely comeback from the Baltic side in the tie were laid to rest though with a quarter of an hour to go when Callum McGregor rifled in a low shot from distance and that was it all over bar the shouting.

Late on Leigh Griffiths got a run out which was great to see and a vital step in his redevelopment.

I’m glad to see the back of Sarajevo who showed little technical ability or ambition and were effectively just a bunch of hammer throwers. They picked up five yellow cards last night and there could easily have been a few reds amongst them. It was the same in the first leg where they picked up four yellows and how they escaped both ties without one dismissal is beyond me. After seeing that you look back to Jeremy Toljan’s sending off last season in the Europa League Last 32 game against Valencia and can’t help but notice clear inconsistency when it comes to refereeing on the continent.

Anyway onwards and upwards.

And by that, I mean onto Estonia where we’ll be facing the footballing superpower that is Nõmme Kalju FC who surprised just about everyone on Tuesday night by overturning a 1-0 home deficit and progressing on away goals after a 2-1 win in injury time over North Macedonian champions Shkendija.

They came out of the traps fast and scored on six minutes through Italian defender and club captain Maximiliano Uggè only for their hosts to restore their advantage in the tie thanks to an Agim Ibraimi penalty on 62 minutes. But with the whistle about to blow on Nõmme’s 2019/20 Champions League campaign up stepped Brazilian striker Ellinton Antonio Costa Morais aka ‘Liliu’ who headed home seconds into injury time in front of a rather sparse crowd of 2,500 in the 36,000 seater Toše Proeski Arena.

That means the Estonian Champions will now visit Celtic Park in six days and there really shouldn’t be much to fear.

They are coached by the unknown Ukrainian Roman Kozhukhovskyi who replaced the well-travelled Russian Sergey Frantsev after he was somewhat harshly sacked back in April having led them to only their second-ever national title last year in a league which is usually dominated by the countries biggest club FC Flora.

In fairness, it was a helluva campaign as they went through the whole season unbeaten registering 25 wins and 11 draws from their 36 league games seeing them end up on 86 points and pipping FCI Levadia Tallinn and Flora to the title by two and three points respectively.

Outside of the aforementioned Uggè and Liliu their team is composed of mostly domestic players and they play in the tiny Hiiu Stadium in the capital city of Tallinn which has a capacity of only 650. However, their home tie against Shkendija was moved to Levadia’s home ground of the Kadriorg Stadium stadium which holds a more respectable 5000 and they could even request the use of Flora’s home ground, the wonderfully titled A. Le Coq Arena which is also the Estonian national teams home venue and holds over 14,000.

I’ll profile them in more depth in the lead up to next week but this year’s campaign isn’t going so well as they trail a resurgent Flora by ten points after nineteen games and have already lost two of them.  The goals have also dried up. They hit a spectacular 114 in 36 league games in the 2018 campaign but have only managed 33 so far in this one.

That aside they are perennial European qualifying rounds victims falling 4-1 on aggregate to Videoton of Hungry in the Europa League 2nd qualifying round last season and the Estonian league is rated 42 out of 55 in the UEFA coefficient with Scotland sitting at 26.

So like I say not much to sweat over on paper at least and hopefully, our squad will be bolstered by some new signings come next week too but on Monday I’ll write up a piece that will go into a fair bit of more detail about our next European opponents.

Celtic took a pretty big step into the second qualifying round of the Champions League last night with a comfortable 3-1 away win in the Bosnian capital.

I watched it with a very mixed crowd what with the ‘Rangers’ game having kicked off at 5pm and several bluenoses deciding to hang around the bar to watch the glorious hoops. God love them. They know quality when they see it.

After a poor opening 30  mins where we dominated the ball but looked sluggish and lackadaisical at the back, we found ourselves 1-0 down when Mirko Oremuš slashed home the opener for the hosts at close range after sloppy defensive work resulting from a corner that was needly conceded in the first place by Jozo Simunovic.

Previous to that there had been a few warning shots as the Bosnian champions hit us on the break but the goal served as a timely kick up the backside as Celtic immediately went forward with increased vigour and on 35 minutes Mikey Johnstone smashed home a wonder strike from outside the box to put us back on level terms.

Soon after James Forrest rampaged into the box and should have put us ahead but used his right foot to try and arrow it home as opposed to his left to pass it in and it whistled over the bar.

In the second half, Celtic picked up where they left off and Odsonne Edouard ran at the Sarajevo back line who crumbled in his wake before he placed the ball home and then substitute Lewis Morgan crossed in from the right flank and it fell for another sub, Scott Sinclair who backheeled home beautifully.

There could have been more but you can’t really complain with three away goals and a week today Celtic will be enormous favourites in the home leg to get the job done.

Our likely second qualifying round opponents – barring an unfathomable disaster next week of course – will be Shkendija of Macedonia who triumphed 1-0 away at Estonian Champions Nomme Kalju but let’s wait until we get this round over the line before we profile them a little bit more. Safe to say though they are around equal or maybe even slightly lesser quality than Sarajevo so not much to fear there at least.

All in all last night we improved as the game went on in pretty horrible weather with the rain pissing down all night though such conditions won’t be alien to anyone who’s played regularly on these shores.

If anything we looked more comfortable in it though hopefully, we get a balmy summers evening for the home leg next Wednesday so as to encourage more season ticket holders to come out for it which might be hoping against hope considering the overcast and wet summer we’ve mostly had thus far.

New signing Bolingoli-Mbombo looked comfortable at full-back though rolled his ankle and had to be taken off as a precautionary measure on 57 mins. Fingers crossed he’s okay for next week with Tierney still in the recovery room.

Now we move on to the friendly at the weekend against Rennes where we should get a glimpse of new centre back Christopher Jullien and a runout for the returning Leigh Griffiths.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESdfpx9zdbI

So with capturing the Treble Treble now a distant memory Celtic will return to competitive action on either Tuesday the 9th or Wednesday the 10th of July in the 1st Qualifying round of the Champions League.

Our opponents will be the champions of Bosnia & Herzegovina, FK Sarajevo with the first leg taking place at their home ground of the Koševo City Stadium aka the Asim Ferhatović – Hase stadium and as you’ll see below it’s got a pretty apt colour scheme.

Sarajevo is the capital city of Bosnia & Herzegovina and is situated along the Miljacka River in the very heart of the Balkans.

The stadium has the magnificent backdrop of the Dinaric Alps and is located in the Koševo district of town.

As well as being home to the countries current league champions it also acts as the national stadium and has a capacity of 34,500 so getting tickets shouldn’t be much of an issue as Sarajevo’s average attendance last season was 5,225.

They are owned by Malaysian multi-millionaire and Malky Mackay’s arch-nemesis Vincent Tan though his investment has been somewhat minor thus far since purchasing them in 2013 and any expected big-spending has never materialised.

On the pitch, they swept to an unprecedented domestic double last season with their first league title in four years and first national cup in five.

In the league, they won 21 of 33 fixtures with seven draws and five losses hitting the net 68 times in the process to finish on 70 points, five ahead of second-placed Zrinjski Mostar.

In the cup, they won all six of their fixtures en route to the final before winning 3-1 over two legs against NK Široki Brijeg to secure the domestic double for the first time in their history.

Their top marksman is veteran 34-year-old striker Mersudin Ahmetović who has two caps for the national team and scored 14 goals in the league with 16 overall.

Their captain is 31-year-old Macedonian internationalist Krste Velkoski who has 56 goals in 151 games over two spells with Sarajevo as well as 103 career goals from 311 club appearances.

On the sidelines manager, Husref Musemić played over 150 games for the club and is incredibly in his fifth spell as manager. Since his return in August of 2017, he’s won 46 of 73 games with only 16 losses.

So now let’s look at their European form and to be honest it’s anything but intimating.

Back in 2014, they were eliminated at the Play-off round of the Europea League going down 10-2 on aggregate to Borussia Mönchengladbach which included a 7-0 away defeat having previously defeated Haugesund of Norway (3-2 on agg) and Atromitos of Greece (4-3 on agg) in tight encounters with the second one requiring extra time.

The following year they were beaten 3-0 on aggregate by Poland’s Lech Poznan in the second qualifying round of the Champions League and in 2017 they went out at the 1st Qualifying round stage of the Europa League to FC Zaria Bălți of Moldova on penalties after a 3-3 aggregate draw.

In last season’s Europa League 1st Qualifying round they cruised past FC Banants of Armenia 5-1 on aggregate with a 2-1 win away and 3-0 win at home but then met Atalanta in the second round where after a highly credible 2-2 draw in Italy they were summarily crushed 8-0 at home.

Yep, you read that right, EIGHT-NIL.

So based on that we should feel pretty confident about our chances of progression.

The tie isn’t for another three weeks yet and a lot can happen in that time in regards to comings and goings within the squad.

Sarajevo tends to stick to the domestic market and rarely spend much so don’t expect much in the way of significant squad augmentation there.

We, of course, are already shorn of Cristian Gamboa, Scott Allen, Emilio Izaguirre and Dedryk Boyata who all departed under freedom of contract come June 1st not to mention the departing loan players such as Jeremy Toljan, Oliver Burke, Timothy Weah and Stefan Benkovic so the squad is pretty depleted.

Mikael Lustig is still to decide his future and Olivier Ntcham has also been linked with a big-money move away on multiple occasions in the past few weeks so there will likely be some development on those two fronts by the time of the Sarajevo tie.

Coming in so far is the dynamic Ukranian winger Maryan Shved who finally joined up with the squad after being signed last January before being loaned back for the remainder of the season to Karpaty Lviv. He scored 15 goals in 24 games last term coming in off the wing so looks like somebody to get pretty excited about. 

One player who certainly won’t be helping us progress is, of course, David Turnbull after his proposed £3 million move from Motherwell collapsed when negotiations over personal terms broke down. He now looks certain to move to Norwich City and will go with probably nobodies best wishes outside of possibly his close friends and family.

Anyway, if we do progress past our Bosnian opposition then we’ll face either KF Shkëndija of Macedonia or Nõmme Kalju FC of Estonia with the Macedonians starting big favourites.

So as not to potentially end up with egg on my face I’ll give Sarajevo the respect they deserve and wait until our tie with them is over before daring to profile our potential second-round opponents but again both are very beatable.

More to come nearer the time but even with the squad in its current state I’m pretty confident and going by the keystone defending on display below with very good reason.

Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qMhpYttghU