Celtic eased to a comfortable first-leg win over Swedish Champions AIK tonight and will take a strong lead over to the Swedish capital for the second leg next week.
With summer signings Christopher Jullien and Boli Bolingoli started and Callum McGregor put back into his usual midfield role Celtic completely dominated the game from start to finish.
AIK were expected to sit in and frustrate but this was negative football to the extreme with their full team behind the ball and few of their players rarely venturing into our half.
The visitor’s goalkeeper Oscar LinnĂ©r pulled off a few good first-half saves but also proved himself to be a cheating clown as he threw himself to the ground on a few occasions feigning injury.
Referee Tamás Bognár also decided to continuously wave play on in the face of persistent Stockholm fouling and proved like all of the other referees we’ve come across in Europe so far this season that poor officiating isn’t just restricted to those employed by the SFA.
On 20 mins Boli set-up Mikey Johnstone for what looked like a certain goal but he somehow placed it past the post at point-blank range.
Anyway despite a 0-0 half time scoreline I was pretty confident we’d break the deadlock and then some in the second stanza with my prediction being that the goals would come late and we’d win 2-0. As it tuned out I got the scoreline right but the timing of the goals wrong as the first came pretty quickly after the restart.
James Forrest blasted us into the lead on 48 mins with the play-acting Linnér doing a spot-on impression of a chocolate fist as his weak effort failed to stop the wingers strike finding the net and then on 73 mins, Odsonne Edouard cracked in a stunning free-kick from 25 yards to give us a deserved 2-0 cushion.
There should have been more and AIK literally deserved nothing for their pathetic efforts. Considering that they are champions of Sweden I’ll go as far as to say they are one of the worst sides I’ve ever seen visit Celtic Park on European duty. They really were that bad.
I haven’t seen any match stats yet but I’m pretty sure the visitors didn’t register an actual shot on goal and outside of a couple of corner kicks which resulted from speculative long balls they rarely even saw our box.
Celtic away from home Europe are of course a completely different animal and by no means is the tie over but it would take AIK to go through gears they don’t look like possessing in order to trouble us in the away leg in seven days.
For a start they’re going to have to come out and actually show some ambition of which they literally showed none at Celtic Park. Their star striker Tarik Elyounoussi will be back from injury next week which is the only real change they look capable of making that could in any way affect the tie.
As for Celtic Mikey Johnston was terrific running relentlessly at the opposition backline all night and Jullien looked comfortable in the centre of our defence albeit there was virtually nothing coming at him. Boli still looks a bit worrying though his confidence improved as the game went on. The rest of the team were all on form pretty much to a man.
We deserved more goals and you sort of get the feeling that if we had hit three or four that they might just have decided to down tools for the second leg and focus solely on the run-in of defending their league championship. But we didn’t so the tie is still very much on.
Neil Lennon has been in this predicament before, defending a 2-0 lead when we visited Dutch side Utrecht back in 2010. That night we saw our 2-0 advantage go up in smoke within 20 mins of the away tie before going down in flames 4-0. But there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then so fingers crossed for no repeats.
On Sunday we return to league action for what will be our fourth straight home game on the spin with the visit of Hearts. They’ve actually made some tidy singings during the summer and sometimes it can be pretty draining going into a Sunday afternoon encounter after a Thursday night Europa game but Craig Levein is still their manager which is always a leveller and it looks like their main catalyst Steven Naismith and central defender John Souttar will both be out injured so that helps too.
Hearts drew two and won two of their League Cup section games in July before opening up their league campaign with a 3-2 loss at Pittodrie against Aberdeen. They then drew 0-0 against Ross County at home two weeks ago before defeating Motherwell 2-1 last Friday at Fir Park in the League Cup second round. So a mixed bag of form so far this campaign.
Their record at Celtic park though is abysmal with them last recording a win against us at Celtic Park ten years ago and their last win in the league there back in 2005. So safe to say we’ll be favourites for that one but already the attention moves to next Thursday and our vital second leg play-off qualifier.
It’s a start and hopefully, now we can kick on after a rough last week.
Celtic in their wisdom have since blocked AIK’s channel highlights – for what purpose God only knows – so here is a shortened version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTHReCh0UXQ
....Always A Tim! 