Matchday 1 Behind the Hedge in Quinta do Lago as Celtic take on Portimonense

At one stage early this evening over 5,000 Celtic fans were watching a Twitter stream from a mobile phone two hedges away from the ‘Closed Doors’ friendly between Portimonense and Celtic.

The match took place at The Campus next to the holiday resort of Quinta do Lago with a claim that around 100 Celtic fans were hoping to watch the match which is believed to have ended 0-0 with the hoops having a ‘goal’ disallowed.

In pre season a defeat doesn’t matter as it is all about fitness while a win is a good habit to get into. A draw is neither.

It seems that the presence of some fans put the clubs and security staff on a spot, accommodating supporters wouldn’t have been much of an issue but could encourage far more to attend another game between the two sides on Saturday.

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— DMC (@davemc71) July 12, 2023

The stream performed something of a function but required some prompting by the host who gave away snippets of information of what he could glean from afar. One fan compared the quality with the VAR evidence used to disallow Jota’s goal at Motherwell in November.

The Starting XI was reported as:

Siegrist; McPherson, Kobayashi, Scales, Bernabei: Iwata, McCarthy, Turnbull; Forrest, Oh, Haksabanovic

With around 30 players in the squad reaction to the first match will be assessed in the morning before the squad resume double sessions on Thursday and Friday with Saturday’s match due to start at 11am.

On Sunday the squad will fly to Japan where they will play two matches in public, on July 19 against Yokohama F Marinos then three days later they face Gamba Osaka with both of those matches kicking off at 11am Celtic Park time.

Ben McPherson, a right-back, who hasn’t been mentioned as being with the squad certainly played part of the match.