So it’s back to Europa League action tomorrow night and a competition in which we’ve had some pretty good times in the past few seasons.
Indeed we’ve won ten of our last twenty matches in it with three draws and seven defeats scoring 27 goals and conceding 20 in the process.
That has resulted in us finishing runners up in our group two years ago and winning it with two games to spare last season and achieving post-Christmas football and the Last 32 on both occasions.
But we have to get to the group stages first and to do that we must face Latvian Champions Riga FC tomorrow night in the countries capital.
The carrot for victory is a play-off encounter with the winner of FK Sarajevo vs FK Budućnost Podgorica of Montenegro a week tomorrow with us once again the away team.
We’re massive favourites tomorrow night and will be against whoever hosts us next week also if we get through but Celtic playing in Europe is seldom straight forward so we can take nothing for granted.
Riga FC are a young club having only been founded six years ago and have taken Latvian professional football by storm capturing the national cup in 2018 before winning back to back league titles for 2018 and 2019 and they’re well on course to make it three in a row.
Fine domestic form has seen them win 17 of their 19 league matches so far this term with two draws and 45 goals scored with only 12 conceded.
Congolese striker Kule Mbombo is their top marksman so far in the campaign with seven league goals and ten in all competitions from eleven starts.
Another striker Ukrainian Roman Debelko also has impressive stats with goals galore in Lativian domestic football but not much to show on the continent.
Captain Stefan Panić has one cap for Serbia and there’s a sprinkling of Brazilians in there too with great names such as Dario and Roger in the squad.
Perhaps their three most interesting players are firstly summer signing Pedrinho who played well over 100 games for Portuguese side Pacos de Ferreira including three seasons in the top flight as well as ex-Celtic youth player Antons Kurakins who departed the set-up back in 2011 and went onto play a full season and 36 games for Hamilton Accies before joining his current side in 2017.
Thirdly there’s on-loan striker Stefan Milošević who hit double figures in the Belgian top flight for Waasland-Beveren last season so he could also be one to watch out for.
Manager Oleg Kononov has bags of experience having managed some heavyweights in his native Russia such as FC Krasnodar who guided to third place in the Russian top-flight back in 2014-15 and was in charge of Spartak Moscow who finished in 5th spot under him two seasons ago before being sacked at the beginning of the following campaign.
Though rumours abound that he might not even make tomorrow nights game due to family reasons and assistant coaches Mihails Koņevs and Kristaps Blanks could be in charge.
The venue will be the diminutive 8,000 seater Skonto Stadium which as the name suggests was the home arena of probably Latvia’s most famous club side Skonto Riga who captured 15 league titles and 8 national cups before being liquidated in 2016.
Skonto actually eliminated Aberdeen from the UEFA cup way back in 1994 and though they never went very far were a regular feature in early rounds European football right throughout their existence.
In many ways, Fc Riga are their spiritual successors and have even made some impact on the continent.
Last season they eliminated both Piast Gliwice of Poland and HJK Helsinki of Finland in the qualifying rounds of the Europa League before falling 3-2 on aggregate to FC Copenhagen in the play-off round.
The Danes, of course, went onto kill of our last 32 hopes.
This season though they were eliminated in Champions League qualifying 2-0 by Maccabi Tel Aviv before then struggling past minnows S.P. Tre Fiori of San Marino 1-0 in a game that started on the Thursday night and finished on the Friday morning due to weather conditions disrupting matters.
With Odsonne Edouard likely returning to the first team tomorrow evening it will be interesting to see if Neil Lennon drops Albian Ajeti who is in red-hot form to go back to the traditional 4-5-1 European formation or if he goes with two up front which we rarely do in Europe such is our paranoia of leaking goals at the back which we do even when we do go with only one striker.
Either way, this should be a match we are winning and with something to spare.
It could have been much tougher and indeed of all the four Scottish clubs playing in the Europa League 3rd Qualifying round tomorrow night we certainly have the most negotiable tie.
No excuses.
Let’s get it done and bring back more Europa League glory nights.
....Always A Tim! 