James Forrest
The Emperor of Ice Cream
Here’s some advice for the Ibrox club, if they are willing to take it from a mad Polish girl who supports Celtic, Scottish nationalism, might be a witch and speaks in broad Glasgow dialect; Danny Röhl should stop talking his “every game is a cup final” pish.
The news of the week is that the man who opened the post-split fixtures by talking about how his team were facing “five cup finals” has lost the first two of them.
To be honest, we should have expected it. After all, we have seen how his team fares in actual cups. Not well. What’s the stat? Two domestic cup wins since they popped up like a horror film zombie after the death of Rangers.
Most of that squad has never played in a cup final, far less won one. It is no wonder they were not good enough to make it.
Celtic have done it plenty of times. Celtic have won plenty of titles and plenty of cup finals. The Ibrox club are nowhere near that level. So, Danny Röhl talking about his club treating every game like a cup final is pish overload.
There are phrases in football that are meant to stir something primal, something fierce and unyielding. But sometimes they land with all the weight of damp paper.
“Five cup finals,” Danny Röhl said, as if words alone could conjure steel into the spine of the team he is running. I felt like laughing when I heard it. This was not Ginger Witch prophecy from this joker. This was performance. Hollow, rehearsed and doomed to echo like a guy locked in a pub toilet after hours.
As I see it, a cup final is not a slogan. It is not a neat little soundbite to pin onto failing ambition. A cup final is pressure that claws at your lungs. It is history breathing down your neck. It is the knowledge that one moment can define you forever.
You do not simply decide to treat a match like one. You either belong in that fire, or you are consumed by it. It was the wrong thing to tell a team which has only rarely risen to handle that sort of pressure.
The Ibrox club were consumed.
There is a naivety in declaring such things when the core of your squad has never stood in that storm. Actually, it is more than naivety. It is stupidity mixed with arrogance. They have never truly stood tall and puffed out their chests in that moment where there is nowhere to hide. You cannot fabricate that experience. You cannot dress ordinary players up in the cloth of glory and expect them to fit. It showed. Oh, how it showed.
When the moment came, when the air thickened and the stakes sharpened, there was no composure. No quiet authority. No sense of inevitability and hesitation. Just cracks spreading under pressure that was entirely self-inflicted.
If every game is a cup final, then every weakness is magnified. Every doubt is amplified. Every flaw is dragged into the unforgiving light.
This is where the comparison collapses on itself, as it always does. Because across Glasgow, there is a club that does not need to say such daft stuff, and if we do say it we say it from the perspective of having done it. We didn’t win our cup final this season, nor the one before it, the one at the end of the last campaign, but we know how to.
This is a club that breathes cup finals as naturally as air. Celtic do not pretend. Celtic arrive. Outside of Celtic Park, Hampden is the ground we’ve visited most in the past 10 or so years. Some of these players walked that path so many times that they may even have woken from the middle of a deep sleep and found they’ve made the journey there on foot, as though the memory of previous glories was guiding them.
The medals, the trophies, the moments carved into history, they are not distant dreams. They are lived reality for these guys.
That is the difference. It is not just about winning, although the silver tells its own relentless story. It is about knowing how to win when everything is on the line. This is about stepping into chaos and finding calm. It is about turning pressure into purpose.
Celtic have done that again and again, across generations and across eras, until it has become part of their identity.
So, when I heard Röhl talk about “five cup finals,” it did not stir fear or even respect. It stirs dark amusement, laced with inevitability. Because calling something a cup final does not grant you the mentality required to survive it.
It only raises the stakes of your own failure.
I heard one Celtic fan call him Sausage Röhl last night. I had a good laugh over that one, because it rings true; flaky on the surface over a soft centre. No wonder the failure of his team felt somehow preordained. He’s not an impressive guy.
There is a rhythm to football that you learn to trust when you listen closely enough. A cadence that tells you who belongs and who is merely moving through the landscape like a stranger in a strange land. My Ginger Witch instincts, sharp, restless and unerring, picked up that discord immediately.
The words did not match the reality. The ambition did not match the capability. It was theatre, not focus. Football has a cruel way of exposing theatre. He belongs on the stage, like some stand-up comedian, trotting out lines like that. I know Ibrox fans were not impressed by his “we’ll treat them like three cup finals” talk after the Hearts game.
Because lose a cup final and you’re out.
You don’t get two or three more of them. Since he’s never been in one as a manager, he might not be aware of that. He can thank me in a postcard later.
Celtic, meanwhile, move with a different energy entirely. There is a certainty there, a quiet and almost ruthless confidence born not from talk, but from repetition. They have stood in the fire so often that they no longer flinch. They expect to win, not because they say it, but because they have proven it time and time again.
We also know the cost of losing. If we don’t win this weekend and Hearts do there won’t be anymore talk of cup finals; we’ll have blown it and we’ll know it. That’s what the term literally means. Each of these games is a one-shot deal. Lose in even a single one of them and there will be no do-overs.
That is what separates the giants from the pretenders. Sausage Röhl is a pretender. That is a man hopelessly out of his depth.
It is easy to speak of cup finals when you are chasing relevance, when you are trying to manufacture significance out of thin air. It is much harder to live them, to endure them and to emerge victorious when everything is at stake.
Celtic have done that. They continue to do that. Until that changes, the gap between the two clubs in terms of their mentality remains not just wide, but unbridgeable.
So no, I do not buy into the rhetoric. I do not dress it up or grant it weight it has not earned. Calling those fixtures “cup finals” was not a rallying cry. It was a confession. It was saying “yeah we blew it and we know we did.”
All I heard was an admission that something fundamental is missing. Something that cannot be summoned by words alone.
Deep down, beneath the noise and bravado, that truth lingers. Because in football, as in life, you cannot fake belonging at the highest level. You either do or you don’t. Fake it until you make it sounds good in theory, but under the harsh spotlight everyone gets found out. Everyone’s weaknesses are exposed. Everyone’s flaky surface crumbles and leaves the soft bit in the middle exposed.
Celtic has been over the course. Effortlessly. Relentlessly. We know what words mean. We know what’s at stake. The Ibrox club, and especially Sausage Röhl, are still trying to convince themselves that they do.
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The post Rohl should have parked his “five cup finals” talk until he actually got to one. appeared first on The Celtic Blog.
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The news of the week is that the man who opened the post-split fixtures by talking about how his team were facing “five cup finals” has lost the first two of them.
To be honest, we should have expected it. After all, we have seen how his team fares in actual cups. Not well. What’s the stat? Two domestic cup wins since they popped up like a horror film zombie after the death of Rangers.
Most of that squad has never played in a cup final, far less won one. It is no wonder they were not good enough to make it.
Celtic have done it plenty of times. Celtic have won plenty of titles and plenty of cup finals. The Ibrox club are nowhere near that level. So, Danny Röhl talking about his club treating every game like a cup final is pish overload.
There are phrases in football that are meant to stir something primal, something fierce and unyielding. But sometimes they land with all the weight of damp paper.
“Five cup finals,” Danny Röhl said, as if words alone could conjure steel into the spine of the team he is running. I felt like laughing when I heard it. This was not Ginger Witch prophecy from this joker. This was performance. Hollow, rehearsed and doomed to echo like a guy locked in a pub toilet after hours.
As I see it, a cup final is not a slogan. It is not a neat little soundbite to pin onto failing ambition. A cup final is pressure that claws at your lungs. It is history breathing down your neck. It is the knowledge that one moment can define you forever.
You do not simply decide to treat a match like one. You either belong in that fire, or you are consumed by it. It was the wrong thing to tell a team which has only rarely risen to handle that sort of pressure.
The Ibrox club were consumed.
There is a naivety in declaring such things when the core of your squad has never stood in that storm. Actually, it is more than naivety. It is stupidity mixed with arrogance. They have never truly stood tall and puffed out their chests in that moment where there is nowhere to hide. You cannot fabricate that experience. You cannot dress ordinary players up in the cloth of glory and expect them to fit. It showed. Oh, how it showed.
When the moment came, when the air thickened and the stakes sharpened, there was no composure. No quiet authority. No sense of inevitability and hesitation. Just cracks spreading under pressure that was entirely self-inflicted.
If every game is a cup final, then every weakness is magnified. Every doubt is amplified. Every flaw is dragged into the unforgiving light.
This is where the comparison collapses on itself, as it always does. Because across Glasgow, there is a club that does not need to say such daft stuff, and if we do say it we say it from the perspective of having done it. We didn’t win our cup final this season, nor the one before it, the one at the end of the last campaign, but we know how to.
This is a club that breathes cup finals as naturally as air. Celtic do not pretend. Celtic arrive. Outside of Celtic Park, Hampden is the ground we’ve visited most in the past 10 or so years. Some of these players walked that path so many times that they may even have woken from the middle of a deep sleep and found they’ve made the journey there on foot, as though the memory of previous glories was guiding them.
The medals, the trophies, the moments carved into history, they are not distant dreams. They are lived reality for these guys.
That is the difference. It is not just about winning, although the silver tells its own relentless story. It is about knowing how to win when everything is on the line. This is about stepping into chaos and finding calm. It is about turning pressure into purpose.
Celtic have done that again and again, across generations and across eras, until it has become part of their identity.
So, when I heard Röhl talk about “five cup finals,” it did not stir fear or even respect. It stirs dark amusement, laced with inevitability. Because calling something a cup final does not grant you the mentality required to survive it.
It only raises the stakes of your own failure.
I heard one Celtic fan call him Sausage Röhl last night. I had a good laugh over that one, because it rings true; flaky on the surface over a soft centre. No wonder the failure of his team felt somehow preordained. He’s not an impressive guy.
There is a rhythm to football that you learn to trust when you listen closely enough. A cadence that tells you who belongs and who is merely moving through the landscape like a stranger in a strange land. My Ginger Witch instincts, sharp, restless and unerring, picked up that discord immediately.
The words did not match the reality. The ambition did not match the capability. It was theatre, not focus. Football has a cruel way of exposing theatre. He belongs on the stage, like some stand-up comedian, trotting out lines like that. I know Ibrox fans were not impressed by his “we’ll treat them like three cup finals” talk after the Hearts game.
Because lose a cup final and you’re out.
You don’t get two or three more of them. Since he’s never been in one as a manager, he might not be aware of that. He can thank me in a postcard later.
Celtic, meanwhile, move with a different energy entirely. There is a certainty there, a quiet and almost ruthless confidence born not from talk, but from repetition. They have stood in the fire so often that they no longer flinch. They expect to win, not because they say it, but because they have proven it time and time again.
We also know the cost of losing. If we don’t win this weekend and Hearts do there won’t be anymore talk of cup finals; we’ll have blown it and we’ll know it. That’s what the term literally means. Each of these games is a one-shot deal. Lose in even a single one of them and there will be no do-overs.
That is what separates the giants from the pretenders. Sausage Röhl is a pretender. That is a man hopelessly out of his depth.
It is easy to speak of cup finals when you are chasing relevance, when you are trying to manufacture significance out of thin air. It is much harder to live them, to endure them and to emerge victorious when everything is at stake.
Celtic have done that. They continue to do that. Until that changes, the gap between the two clubs in terms of their mentality remains not just wide, but unbridgeable.
So no, I do not buy into the rhetoric. I do not dress it up or grant it weight it has not earned. Calling those fixtures “cup finals” was not a rallying cry. It was a confession. It was saying “yeah we blew it and we know we did.”
All I heard was an admission that something fundamental is missing. Something that cannot be summoned by words alone.
Deep down, beneath the noise and bravado, that truth lingers. Because in football, as in life, you cannot fake belonging at the highest level. You either do or you don’t. Fake it until you make it sounds good in theory, but under the harsh spotlight everyone gets found out. Everyone’s weaknesses are exposed. Everyone’s flaky surface crumbles and leaves the soft bit in the middle exposed.
Celtic has been over the course. Effortlessly. Relentlessly. We know what words mean. We know what’s at stake. The Ibrox club, and especially Sausage Röhl, are still trying to convince themselves that they do.
Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.
The post Rohl should have parked his “five cup finals” talk until he actually got to one. appeared first on The Celtic Blog.
Continue reading...
