Here’s one for budding quiz enthusiasts. Who scored the very first goal of Brendan Rodgers’ second era at Celtic? The answer is Reo Hatate, in a Saturday morning match against Portuguese top-flight side Portimonense.
Celtic played the same opposition on Wednesday evening with a pretty youthful and inexperienced side, dotted with the players who didn’t head off to international duty in June. That one finished 0-0.
Today, it seems like the more established group of players who returned to training this week are involved in the 10am kick-off and they are already 1-0 up thanks to Hatate. It seems the popular Japanese midfielder has converted a penalty.
Like the mid-week fixture, this isn’t being shown anywhere but, thankfully, the club seem to have listened to feedback and are at least providing live updates on the official Twitter feed.
Liel Abada has since added to the scoreline, after ‘good play’ from Alexandro Bernabei, which is heartening to hear. Portimonense did pull one back through an unknown scorer, however.
At the time of publishing, there have been no further updates, with the game approaching half-time at 2-1. The full time whistle will come at around 11:45am UK time, so hopefully we get a match report and – fingers crossed – some sort of highlights video from the club.
This will be the group’s final bit of action in Portugal before returning to Glasgow, regrouping and heading off to Japan for more organised matches against Yokohama F.Marinos and Gamba Osaka – both of whom are in the middle of their competitive seasons and likely to provide a stiff test.
There’s then a match against Wolves in Dublin on July 29th, before the hosting of Athletic Bilbao in James Forrest’s testimonial match a few days later. Fans will at least get to see some sort of coverage of all these matches.
Good luck with the rest of this morning’s game Bhoys!
In other news, The bargain fees Celtic will pay to land next summer signings.
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