Celtic Diary Friday June 27: Save £500 On Seeing Celtic in Reykjavik.

from £785pp   

Hurray for Thomson sport.

Mind you, in the interest of fair and balanced reportage, there is this;

CELTIC have teamed up with Scottish Citylink to provide discounted travel for supporters heading to Edinburgh’s BT Murrayfield Stadium for our forthcoming UEFA Champions League round second qualifying tie with KR Reykjavik.

The fixture will be played on Tuesday, July 22 at BT Murrayfield – with Celtic Park unavailable due to ongoing preparations for the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony – and Citylink are offering Celtic supporters 20% off their journey when booking in advance.

The Citylink 900 service runs every 15 minutes from Glasgow, Buchanan Street Station, pre-match and every 30 minutes post-match until 11.12pm, dropping and collecting at Roseburn Bridge which is approximately five minutes walk from the stadium.

The 20% discount means adults will pay just £5.84 return, and children under 16, £4.16. Travel is FREE for concession card holders, although a 50p booking fee is required to reserve a seat.

Simply enter the promotional code CELTICUCL online at www.citylink.co.uk to receive the discount, or call 0871 266 3333 

A massive saving of just less than the price of a pint.

Going back to the away game,  you could fly from London to Keflavik on the fifteenth, fly back on the seventeeth for £262. ( Wowair ), leaving you around five hundred quid for a couple of buses and a room for two nights. ( Rooms in Kelfavik are cheap-starting at around £19 ) Keflavik is 50km from reykjavik, and the website “I love Reykjavik” claims;

If you are broke or you want to want to protest against the evil axis of organized tourism there’s two things you could try to skip spending money on a ride to Reykjavík.

First of all, you could try to hitchhike. Hitchhiking is pretty common and safe in Iceland but I don’t know how easy it is to get a ride on this particular route so you might have to walk a long way with all your luggage. Alternatively, you might want to try befriend whoever sits next to you on the plane and if he or she is a local, there’s a good chance their car will be at the airport or that they have a ride waiting for them when you land. People are nice, they might offer you a ride. 

Might not be a good idea to keep on about it to them though;

 Just saying, like…away games in Europe are an adventure.

 Of course, the travel package  to Reykjavik includes a match ticket, and wandering over to Iceland by yourself offers no guarantee of getting into the game, but with an extra five hundred quid to play with, then the odds become a little more stacked in your favour.

 However,when you think about it, an advantage of travelling officially with the club means that they can keep an eye on you, should, for instance a foreign police force start picking on you…..

For a long time, supporters have been disappointed with the monopoly enjoyed by travel operators Thomson, and again the PR and marketing department have failed to look after Celtic supporters. Whenever the contract with Thomson is up for renewal, I’m going to put in a tender.

Etims Travel. We’ll get you there. Sooner or Later. 

 In your package you will get ; 

 *  One match ticket ( subject to availability )

* A map showing you where the city is we are playing and a list of nearby airports

* Kick off times and a bus timetable to the stadium

* A book with some phone numbers of bed and breakfasts and youth hostels.

* A Neil Lennon calendar.

 I can’t see it being any worse an experience than using the clubs “official” package. Especially if  you get a calendar.

 Wee Jay Beatty from Armagh has been invited by the Greek federation to fly out to Brazil, and watch his hero Georgios Samaras in action against Costa Rica. As their guest.

 This followed a touching message fro the soppy big Greek that had us all reaching for the tissues .

Message to Jay from Samaras ( From the Talkin’ Baws website , somewhat inappropriately named in this instance, but still more than a decent site.)

The nice guy in all of us wants to keep Samaras, as he will soon be the media darling of the World Cup. He hasn’t sought publicity, but its going to happen. The media, and the tournament , needs a nice guy to help clean up the mess left by the Luis Suarez biting incident. Samaras fits the bill, and more so becuaase he’s a genuine nice guy, not doing it to sell his hairspray, or after shave. ( Never understood this aftershave thing with players. Who wants to smell like a footballer ? And don’t get me started on the one called “Diesel ” , the aroma of heavy goods vehicles is even less appealing to women, which makes it a bit more of  a surprise when you hear of one being found wrapped in a carpet in the back of the trailer. )

 Samaras will be the darling of the World Cup, and he deserves it, because he is a nice guy. And the ruthless businessman in me -you can see him when I yawn- would have signed him up for another couple of years by now..

 He wants to stay, and whatever we pay him would be more than recouped from some clever , manipulative marketing. And he is still a more than useful player.

Clever, manipulative marketing…Oh, wait. I think I’ve spotted a problem.

 Luis Suarez has been banned for four months worldwide. He’s probably going to make a fortune advertising dog food or something. Well, if he can’t play football in that time, he’ll need to find something else to eat.

Thinking about it, what if Ronny Deila is the man to develop the undoubted class act on the field that Samaras can be ? Thats why he was hired, he knows how to manage people.

 Tell you what. Time for another business venture…

Etims Marketing . You didn’t know you needed it till you bought it. 

Heres the plan, Peter. You re-sign Samaras. I’ll pay his wages if you let me have full control of his image rights.

And if you think the Yorkshireman had big hands, wait until you see the size of mine.

 Personally , I don’t want to see Samaras or wee Jay exploited.

Of course not, thats extremely poor taste. But you know someone will do it, so it might as well be Celtic. The money raised can be used by the Celtic charity foundation.

In a world gone wrong, where money is the god, at least  some good would come of it.

Speaking of exploitation, Gary Ralston, who writes for the Daily Record, in the loosest possible sense of the word, wants Celtic to offer to share the 1914-15 Scottish league title with Hearts.

At the start of the 1914-15 season Hearts won eight league games on the trot and hopes were high they would win their third title and their first in 18 years. However, the strain of the war effort told in the end as exhaustion from their army commitments took hold to such an extent even trainer James Duckworth suffered a mental breakdown under the pressure.

As a result of innoculations, non-availability and additional military training, their form inevitably crumbled. Hearts led the league for 35 out of 37 weeks but eventually succumbed and defeat to St Mirren and Morton allowed Celtic to overhaul them to win the championship by four points.

Striker Tom Gracie topped the scoring charts with 29 goals but played the closing weeks of the campaign with leukaemia. His body broken, he died in a military hospital the following year.

Jimmy Speedie was killed at Loos in September 1915 and Currie, Ellis and Wattie all fell at the Somme, that repugnant slow march to death ordered by their own generals.

Hearts would not hit such grand heights in football for almost another half century, with the last of their four championships won in 1960 after earlier success in 1958.

In recent years, a cairn has been established at Contalmaison and a bronze plaque was also recently unveiled at Tynecastle, 100 years old this year, to recognise their heroism. Scottish football, led by Celtic, have the ideal opportunity to do the same.

It would be a poignant gesture if they asked for the history books to be rewritten and that one campaign shared. Players come and go in Scottish football but this squad of 16 deserves always to be remembered. 

What on earth would be gained from this ?

 Apart from it being a somewhat tacky gesture, it would be completely meaningless.

 Anyone else beginning to worry that the memory of the volunteer army, so ruthlessly manipulated by the government of the time, is going to be ruthlessly manipulated come August, the anniversary of the start of the Great War, by the present lot ?

 Let these guys rest in peace. They deserve a bit of dignity in death.

One of the most bizarre stories to hit the web this week was the one about Kyle Lafferty and his womanising ways. Maybe thats what Neil Lennon meant when he called him a “big lump of wood “

Maurizio Zamparini, the chairman of Palermo, where Lafferty plys his trade, has had enough of him. He said;

“Lafferty is sold as a result of a precise request from my Coach Beppe Iachini,” he told Radio 24.

“He is an out-of-control womaniser, an Irishman without rules. He is someone who disappears for a week and goes on the hunt for women in Milan.

“He has two families with six children, he never trains, he’s completely off the rails. On the field he’s a great player because he gave us everything he had and more.

“In terms of his behaviour, however, he is uncontrollable. My Coach told me he cannot sort this player out, so he has to go.” 

 Wonder what sort of aftershave he uses ? Its obviously better than the one I bought in Blackpool. It was called Wild Stallion, I never got any women, but a couple of donkeys followed me back to my digs.

Speaking of donkeys, Kris Boyd will sign for Second Rangers today. He will link up with Kenny Miller as the new club attempt the unprecedented feat of going straight from the bottom division to the top in their first three seasons.

 And it only cost around £100m.

Well done !

What are you up to on Sunday ?

Babs is climbing Ben Lomond-its a mountain, obviously, and she deserves your support. All money will go to wee Jays charity.

Well it’s here!! The climb of Ben Lomond happens this Sunday at 10am.. 🙂 25 of us are climbing and afterwards it’ll be back to the Phoenix Bar (used to be the Eastender bar) in Gallowgate. Meeting, congregating at 6pm.. 🙂 I just want to say thank you so much for all the support you and Etims has given me over the last few months, it means alot.. Hope you can pop down on Sunday. 

Robert Snodgrass is going to Hull. Looks like our drunk can still get it right sometimes, which does our reptutation no favours.

Just think, if Neil Lennon hadn’t asked for the money to sign him, he’d still be the manager. Unless he wanted to buy someone else.

One of the England squad did get pass marks from Football365.com. Guess who ?

22. Fraser Forster (0 minutes)
Faultless. 

Hopefully, he’ll be pissed off at going halfway round the world for nothing, and decide to retire from international football until Neil Lennon gets the job. Having a pal as boss of your national team is much better than being blessed with talent, ability or loyalty. Ask Ben Foster.

 England , proving that you can sell anything,have announced their new sponsors for the upcoming European Championships..

While another picture shows how much we don’t really change as we get older…

 Yesterday, we showed a picture of Gary Gillespie, and a surprising amount of you remembered him, and what he looks like. During his time at Celtic he was always in the treatment room, and was just another example of the money wasted at the time.

Something good eventually came of the decision to buy this waste of space though…

What ?

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