Celtic FC Poised To Be First Scottish Side To Play In UWCL Group Stage
Glasgow Celtic are set to succeed where their city rivals have failed and become the first Scottish club side to reach the lucrative group stage of the UEFA Women's Champions League.
A fifth-minute goal from Murphy Agnew of the United States gave Celtic a 1-0 win away to Ukrainian champions Vorskla Poltava. Due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the match had to be played on neutral territory. The Ukrainians ceded their home advantage to play both legs of the tie at Celtic Women's Albert Bartlett Stadium in Airdrie.
On Thursday, the two teams will play the second leg with the Scottish champions requiring only to avoid defeat to make the sixteen-team group stage where each participating team is guaranteed to receive at least $447,000 in prize money from European governing body UEFA.
For years, the independent women's club Glasgow City were the standard bearers for the Scottish game, winning 14 successive league titles. They reached the last sixteen of the UEFA Women's Cup (equivalent to the current group stage) as far back as 2008 and even the quarter-finals in 2015 when the tournament was a straight knockout competition.
Yet, their position at the top of the Scottish women's game has been eroded by the increased investment from the so-called 'Old Firm' or Glasgow clubs - Rangers , champions in 2021, and current champions Celtic. Last season was the first time for 21 years that Glasgow City finished outside the top two positions in the Scottish Women's Premier League, thus missing out on a place in this season's UEFA Women's Champions League.
In January, Celtic appointed former Swedish player Elena Sadiku as their first-ever female head coach. The former under-21 international was forced to retire from the game at the age of 24 after rupturing her anterior cruciate ligament three times and undergoing 12 operations. In an Instagram post annoucing her retirement , she said "I hope I will get remembered as a fighter who never gave up and not a quiter."
She immediately went into coaching, moving to Beijing before gaining experience as an assistant in China and Denmark being recruited last summer by Women's Super League club Everton as their Academy coach. Four months after her appointment in Glasgow, she had led them to their first Scottish league title, pipping eternal rivals Rangers on goal difference.
Speaking after yesterday's win which leaves them on the brink of qualification for the group stage, Sadiku said "it was a solid performance. When it comes to the first twenty minutes, I think we acted exactly how the game-plan was. Then we kind of let them too much into the game by our own mistakes"
"Obviously we created a lot of chances today, we should have scored four at least. I'm very confident when it comes to how we hurt them today. Obviously we defended really well. They had a clear chance that they probably should have scored on, but overall I would say that the game should have ended 5-1. I felt like we created enough to just kill the game. For me, we should still be confident enough to go into the second game and perform well and get the job done."
If she leads Celtic to the group stage, Sadiku would be one month shy of her 31st birthday when the matches commence in October making her one of the youngest-ever head coaches at that stage of the competition. Jonatan Giráldez was aged 29 years, 10 months, 8 days when he took charge of FC Barcelona against Arsenal in the first-ever Women's Champions League group stage in October 2021.
Goalscorer Murphy told Celtic TV , "it's exactly what we've talked about. We talk about starting really fast, really strong, being all over them, pressing super-high and scoring as early as possible. I think that's what we did."
Looking forward to Thursday's second leg she added "if we win, we'll do something that we've never done before, so that's a lot of motivation."
