celticman's blog

Scott Sinclair’s goal in the ninety-third minute to put Celtic three up put the sheen on a fine team performance and, more or less, guarantees Celtic third spot in the group table and a Europa League spot. European football after Christmas is not something we’re used to and after getting hammered by PSG the doom-mongers (let’s call them Ranger’s supporters) were predicting, once again, zero points in the group stage and an embarrassment to...

I, Daniel Blake is one of those films everybody thinks I should see. A typical conversation, or text message, goes something like this, sorry you missed the screening, you’d have loved it and the discussion afterwards in Dalmuir library. It’s one of those films I already know the story. Some old guy meets up with some young girl who has kids. They’re on the buroo and they get shat on from a great height because they’re poor and working class and...

I liked this book, it’s about us, the working class often portrayed standing outside history books adding a bit of colour to the stories of kings and governors, quietly happy to die for their country, or the working class portrayed as a Lemuel Gulliver lying down in the long grass and falling asleep and being tied down by Lilliputians who make theatrical speeches he doesn’t understand but he does what the little men, the 1% of the population...

I usually write a blog about Celtic’s big games, but this was one of those matches where everything goes as planned. Celtic didn’t score five this time. But if you listen to Steven Thompson on telly then Celtic could easily have scored five or six, had eighteen shots on target and he doesn’t think the gap between Celtic and Rangers has declined. Thompson is, of course, a former Ranger’s centre-forward and hardly a neutral. From where I was...

Roxane Gay is the author the New York Times bestseller Bad Feminist the tag on the cover of the book tells the reader. This is an easy book to read in terms of thin chapters and the subject matter of need and greed and what makes us what we are. This is right up there with the classic, Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face. Chapter 1 of Gay’s autobiography is one sentence long. Everybody has a story and a history. Here I offer mine with a memoir...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b095vnpx/risk I didn’t like Julian Assange after watching this programme, but I didn’t have to spend six or seven years filming him and his cult of followers, much of the time in the Ecuadorian Embassy, as director Laura Poitras did. It’s unusual for a director to speak directly to the audience with her misgivings about Assange’s motives as Poitras does. It’s the equivalent of actors breaking the third wall,...

uk/programmes/b081clh5 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0821s1b I watched episodes one and two of Black Lake last night. I’ll be following the other six episodes. I’m a bit of a Wallander anorak, loved wooly jumpers and The Killing, so a Swedish thriller with subtitles is a must see. A group of friends meet and drive to the Black Lake hotel complex, a remote ski resort that is so near the Norwegian border they joke they’re not even sure they’ve...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04t0h2b/stacey-dooley-investigates-young-sex-for-sale-in-japan I watched this half-drunk on Tuesday night, after the Celtic horror show. I quite like Stacey Dooley, a kind of Miss Marple with sensible shoes sorting the world out, but she’s breezy and young and pretty. It depends, of course, what you mean by young and pretty. Japan has a bit of history here. You’re probably aware of the rewriting of history...

Hamilton manager Martin Canning after Friday night’s defeat to Celtic admitted his team had stood off Celtic in the first-half, given them too much room to play, they’d done better in second half, but they were outclassed. Ditto here. Celtic were outclassed. The odds for both teams were roughly the same. Hamilton to win around 12/1. Celtic to win 12/1. The bookies are rarely wrong. It was all so easy for PSG at Parkhead last night. Barcelona...

Some things are as predictable as a blind man waving a white stick. Ranger’s supporters are saying what they say every year when Celtic make £30 or £40 million from the Champions League and they can’t make progress against a team called Progres who are fourth best in the a Luxembourg league, which is the equivalent of the Scottish First or Second Division, and you’d think that would shut them up, but it angers them even more and they cry Celtic...