Friendly Saturday July 16th

Fulham 0

Celtic 0

Att: 16,873

MIB Dermot Gallagher

Celtic
Marshall Irvine Balde Varga Camara Petrov Lennon Sutton McGeady Aliadiere Hartson
subs
Maloney for Aliadiere 66;
Beattie for Hartson 66;
Wallace for McGeady 83;
Zurawski for Petrov 86;
Gardyne for Lennon 89

Pre-season friendlies are completely meaningless, of course, everybody acknowledges that. We've all seen championship winning Celtic teams hammered and looking awful in pre-season, and on the flip side of that coin, world beaters in pre-season who end up being crap as the nights start drawing in.

And yet it's almost impossible not to want the Hoops to win in these games and, even better, play well.

They did neither in this game and straight away the doom merchants were beginning to predict calamities ahead. True, it wasn't that good, but it wasn't that bad either, and there were a few positive things that could be taken from this non-contact, drinks intervals kickabout.

Camara looked quite sprightly galloping up and down the left wing, Aliadiere showed that he has lightning pace (even if he didn't do much else except sprint after lost causes) and Zurawski - badly in need of a decent barber - contributed to our brightest spell of play near the end of the match. He put Maloney through with a nice ball and the Fulham 'keeper upended him. Referee Dermot Gallagher gave the penalty and immediately begged the question, how far would he have gone in his career in Scotland with a name like that? Given the chance of scoring from the spot on his debut Zurawski made a complete arse of it. You could have struck the ball harder with a stocking full of diarrhoea.

Never mind, eh, he'll get plenty practice from eleven yards when the SPL kicks off, won't he?

The usual platitudes were trotted out by both managers at the end of the game and a good day was had by all.