Up in my attic I have several boxes full of magazines, for years in the 90's I bought the Celtic View every week, and several years ago i rounded them all up, but unable to actually chuck them out I ended up "storing" them all in the attic.
This Christmas I had a look through some of them, a mate called me the other night to tell me the Phil O'Donnell had collapsed and died while playing for Motherwell. The funny thing is that I never enjoyed supported celtic more than i did at that time, even while we were winning stuff since, and definately not the current stuff, I just can't seem to reconnect with the passion I felt from the early 90's right up to Seville, I had my mate Ger (who died last year) beside me most of the time, watching and screaming for the Celtic of Collins, McStay, Cadete, Di canio, Rieper and marvellous Moravcik.
I was in my late 20's and early 30's. Life was brilliant, nobody we knew died of "natural causes" and as long as we were careful what pubs we went into and where we wore our colours we felt indestructable.
Well Ger is dead, and now one of the young lads we used to watch playing is dead too, I certainly don't feel indestructable anymore, so I went up and had a flick through some of the magazines, through the time of Tommy Burns, Wim Jansen, Dr. Jo, John Bloody Barnes and finally Martin O'Neill (I stopped buying the magazine years ago) and I felt glad to have had all those experiences, glad to have lived through those times and in a strange way i felt that I had little choice back then, cos i had got myself into something i had to see through, and in a strange way Martin O'Neill helped deliver us from that, after Seville it became possible to follow Celtic as a pass time rather than as a compulsion.
It allowed us all to grow up a little.
The ten years before that had kept us as angry passionate teenagers from 1988 to 1998,
But we loved it.
Phil O'Donnell is the first Celtic player of that generation to move on.
RIP
