we've lost that losing feeling

Exciting times indeed. As we go to print the Celts are in the Quarter Finals of a European Competition for the first time in 23 years and still in the running for the Domestic treble. If not a cue for cracking open the champagne bottles then - at least for most of us - the times when midweeks were set aside for platting a new noose or designing an eye-catching banner on the theme of 'Sack The Board' seem a far distant memory.

Despite everything, though, there are others who think it's open season to criticise the team and by implication the manager. Perhaps it's a sign of how expectations have grown since MON arrived that a 5:4 aggregate victory over the team currently lying joint-second in the Bundesliga is greeted with criticism of the performance from sections of the media (as expected) and from, what we would hope, is a very small element among our supporters.

Bhoys, bhoys, bhoys, (and ghirls) cast your minds back a mere three years to when we were getting knocked out of the Scottish Cup by Inverness Caley Thistle; we had a first team coach whose style of play was impenetrable to his own players but blatantly transparent to our opponents; we had a Director of Football who insisted on trawling the hacks around east end pubs for his press conferences; and we had a Chief Executive who was busily presiding over the signing of Rafael Scheidt - that'll be six million quid sir.

Please, Brothers and Sisters, let us give thanks for what we have and start to see the Guinness tumbler as half full rather than half empty!

This season we have defeated teams from three of the strongest leagues in Europe to get to the UEFA quarter finals. This isn't the late 60s and early 70s when we got to two European Cup Finals and another two semi finals in eight years and when these things could be taken for granted. This is 2003, and the last time we got this far in Europe a tanner was still legal tender and Shaun Maloney hadn't even been born!

Martin O'Neill has put the club back on the European football map. We may not be a major part of that map yet but at least we are once again visible. We may win four trophies this season; then again we may win none. However, one thing we can all surely agree on is that, despite being stuck in the mire that is Scottish Football, we are progressing.

Under MON that progress looks sure to continue. He, as much as any of us, knows that the team is still not as good as it should be. But if what he has achieved in his short time at Celtic Park is anything to judge him by then we have to trust in his ability to do whatever he realistically can to accelerate that improvement.

There were probably some fans walking away from the 1957 League Cup Final victory over Rangers complaining that it should have been 8:1 instead of seven, and no doubt when Celtic win the UEFA Cup final in Seville at the end of May (poetic licence, just stay with it...) there will be journalists and supporters who find something in our performance to criticise.

Us? We'll be too busy celebrating the victory to worry overmuch about how stylishly it was achieved. We've been spectators at too many of Celtic's glorious failures to concern ourselves with how European, and domestic, success is achieved. 'Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser,' is an aphorism often attributed to Vince Lombardi the American football coach. If Vince had been a Celtic fan (and there's little doubt that he would have been!) squirming through the last fifteen minutes of the Stuttgart return leg he would agree that in (Cup) football it's the winning not the taking part that counts.

Our experiences in Europe over the last 23 years have grown us accustomed to losing ... but this winning habit is beginning to grow on us.

Tim Winner & George of the Jungle

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