On This Day 8th February
Today it is hard as it is to believe that Celtic would lose to a team from a lower division. The Hoops have been the dominant force of Scottish football in recent years, having won the last eight league titles and numerous domestic titles.
Back in 2000, Celtic were in a state of decline and it was their arch-rivals Rangers who ruled the roost in Scotland.
John Barnes was the manager at Celtic and in his first season in charge. Going into the Inverness game, Celtic lost their previous game 3-2 at home in the league and drawn their previous two games before that.
They hadn’t won a match since a week before Christmas and patience was running very thin at Parkhead. Many fans had already had enough of Barnes who was clearly a much better player than a manager.
Still, they had Inverness Caledonia Thistle at home in the Cup. Perhaps hitting a few past Thistle from the division below might give the team a bit of a confidence boost? Think again!
A relatively low crowd of 34,389 were in attendance and saw Inverness take the lead after only 12 minutes.
The First Division team weren’t in the lead for long as Mark Birchall equalised for Celtic five minutes later. Inverness weren’t happy with being level and took the lead again on 24 minutes.
An inswinging corner came in from the right, Caley’s defender Bobby Mann had a free header at the far post and Celtic’s Lubomir Moravcik deflected the ball past his goalkeeper. 2-1 to the minnows and it was only going to get worse for the former European Champions.
Barry Wilson, scorer of Caley’s opening goal, was dragged to the floor by Celtic’s Dutch midfielder Regi Blinker and the referee pointed to the spot.
Paul Sheerin placed the ball into the bottom left hand corner of the net from the penalty spot to extend Caley’s lead on 56 minutes.
Celtic had no answer. They couldn’t muster another goal to make the game interesting and went out with a whimper. The Caley players celebrated on the pitch as the Celtic fans rapidly walked out after voicing their dis-pleasure at John Barnes and the board. The powers-that-be must have been listening as two days later, John Barnes was fired.
To rub salt in the wound, The Sun newspaper came up with an all-time classic of a headline in the next morning’s paper. In the style of the catchy tune from the film Mary Poppins ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidociou’, a wise-crack at The Sun came up with:
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