So tomorrow night Celtic entertain the visit of the illustrious champions of Estonia to our home ground in the 2nd round, 1st leg of the Champions League qualifiers.
Having disposed of FK Sarajevo 5-2 on aggregate in the 1st round it was pretty much expected that we would then be matched up with North Macedonian champions Shkendija after they had triumphed 1-0 away in Estonia in the first leg.
Byt the plucky Nõmme stunned everyone by turning it all around via a 2-1 win in Toše Proeski Arena, situated in the heart of the Macedonian capital of Skopje.
It’s pretty safe to say that they are pretty surprised to be here themselves.
Last season they won the Estonian top league (The Meistriliiga) for only the second time in their history thanks to a fantastic campaign that saw them go unbeaten through 36 league games with 25 wins and 11 draws, scoring an incredible 114 league goals into the bargain.
Alas, the 2019 season has not been so kind and they currently sit in 4th spot, 12 points behind leaders Flora having already lost two of the first 20 league games and have only scored 34 goals.
Brazilian marksman Liliu remains their top domestic scorer with nine goals in the league thus far but that’s way down on the 31 he bagged last season. Though he did head in the injury-time winner against Shkendija so safe to say he’s their dangerman.
They are also without title-winning manager Sergey Frantsev who was fired early in this years campaign after a poor start which seems a tad harsh considering the historic feats he led them to in 2018 but if Claudio Ranieri can get sacked after winning the title with Leicester then I guess anything can happen in modern football.
His replacement is the Ukranian Roman Kozhukhovskyi whose achievements are so vast he doesn’t even warrant a Wikipedia page.
Squad wise it’s pretty much all domestic players save the aforementioned Liliu and club captain Maximiliano Uggè who hails from Treviglio, Italy and has racked up over 60 appearances for them though it’s difficult to quantify as details and stats on Estonian football are pretty thin on the ground.
Outside of those two, the other one to watch would be playmaker Igor Subbotin who provided 16 assists last year.
All that aside we really should be hammering them.
Scotland’s UEFA club coefficient is not great at 26 out of 55 – it was in the top 10 a decade ago – but Estonia’s is at 42.
Individually Celtic are placed at number 46 whilst Nõmme are at 288. By comparison, Sarajevo are rated at 231 though Shkendija place at 178 so perhaps it is all somewhat misleading.
They also play in a 650 seater stadium attracting crowds of a few hundred and lat season truly was an anomaly.
They are unbeaten in their last 16 domestic games as they begin to refind the form of last year though have drawn their last three, scoring only two goals in the process.
We’ve spent well over ÂŁ10 million so far this summer acquiring the talents of Christopher Jullien, Luca Connell and Boli Bolingoli-Mbombo with Hatem Abd Elhamed also on the verge of singing at the time of writing and as a club are on a completely different level to the Estonians to such an extent that our visit next week has been compared to a Metallica rock concert by the mayor of Tallinn.
Even if we’d been drawn against the far bigger Estonian clubs such as FC Flora or FCI Levadia Tallinn – who between them have pretty much dominated Estonian football over the past quarter of a century – we’d still be expecting to skelp them so it should be the case even more so with the diminutive Nõmme Kalju.
So in summation…..no excuses.
Let’s hope we deliver the goods on what looks like it’ll be a balmy summer evening tomorrow in the east end of Glasgow and put the tie to bed with either Israel’s Maccabi Tel-Aviv or Romanian champions Cluj presenting a far more daunting task in the 3rd round.
....Always A Tim! 