Golden Goal – Henrik Larsson vs Rangers, 2000

When do football players announce that they are world class? Some do it early in their career (Wayne Rooney was just 18 when he played in Euro 2004, Ronaldo 20 when he signed for Barcelona and had perhaps the finest season in football) but some do it later. The reasons for this are many: sometimes a player needs a mentor (as with Thierry Henry and Arsene Wenger), sometimes a player needs a large stage (such as Eric Cantona) and sometimes a player needs the chance to develop in propitious circumstances – rarely possible with the constant demands for instant success in the modern game.

For whatever reason, Henrik Larsson – and we can surely agree he was world class – took time to announce his greatness. Though he was part of the Swedish team which finished third in the 1994 World Cup, his years at Feyenoord (from 1993-97) were not a success: he was unsettled, often played out position, and only ever managed 11 goals in one season, in 1995-96.

He moved to Celtic for £650,000 in 1997, just before his 26th birthday, when former manager Wim Jansen took over. Though Celtic won the league that season, Larsson was outshone by Jackie McNamara (see this brilliant reverse pass) and Craig Burley (scoring many important goals), who took the end-of-year gongs. But the overall impression was good. His athleticism, bravery and imagination were obvious. And he was a team player. Celtic had previously been cursed by prima donnas, in the form of “The Three Amigos”, Paolo Di Canio, Jorge Cadete and Pierre Van Hooijdonk, who demanded higher salaries and eventually obtained moves away, ignoring the effect on dressing room morale. But Larsson always spoke modestly and played quite without the selfishness that marks some strikers.

In his second season Larsson looked ever better under new boss Jozef Venglos, who installed a greater fluidity to Celtic’s play. He achieved 34 goals, some of them spectacular. One goal against Motherwell stands out: Tosh McKinlay crossed into the box from deep, with typical precision. Larsson took the ball on the leap but rather than whacking it, he cushioned it with a sublime feather-light touch to completely bamboozle keeper Stevie Woods, who stood there like a cartoon character wondering who’d turned the lights out. Larsson scored three more goals that day, in a ferocious snowstorm. He could do it on a dark winter night in North Lanarkshire.

The next season Venglos was gone and John Barnes took over. The early signs were promising, but Larsson broke his leg against Lyon and was out for the season. Without him, Celtic fell apart. Barnes was naïve and had poor man-management skills, though he was probably not helped by some double-dealing by his boss, director of football Kenny Dalglish. Despite some expensive signings (Eyal Berkovic at £5.75, Stilyan Petrov at £2.8m, Rafael Schiedt at a ludicrous £4.8m), the team performed poorly and Barnes was sacked after the debacle against first division Inverness Caledonian Thistle.

Martin O’Neill then got the job. By this time Celtic had the hardware for success, with a 60,000-seat stadium then the biggest in the British league football, but not the culture. They had only won the league once in 12 years. Twenty-one points had separated the sides the season before. Celtic, it seemed, could never get it together long enough to win silverware, in a Scottish equivalent of Cityitis. (When about to play a Champions League qualifier in 1998, for example, the team went on a media strike over bonuses). And Rangers, it appeared, had a hex over them. The reasons for this are myriad – the financial doping came later – but the Gers seemed to know how to grind out wins over Celtic. Even when the Bhoys did win, it seemed like they had had to fight an uphill battle. In the Scottish Cup quarter-final in 1997, Rangers went out simply intent on battering their rivals into submission. Three players (Craig Moore, Ian Ferguson and Gordan Petric) should have been sent off for wild challenges just in the first half, as Paolo Di Canio in particular took absurd physical abuse. Perhaps Scottish football accepted a gruffer, more agricultural style – a game for “real men”, and all that nonsense. But given that Celtic players were often smaller and more skilful and Rangers bigger and more powerful, this always put Celtic at a disadvantage.

Apart from that, Rangers had a culture of winning, a friendly press (contrast the media treatment of the two chief executives, Fergus McCann and David Murray, for a lesson in media spin) and money to spend. Joe Lewis’ ENIC had invested £30m in Rangers, which manager Dick Advocaat spent on very fine players such as Giovanni van Bronkhorst, Arthur Numan, Ronald De Boer, Stefan Klos, Tugay Kerimoglu and Michael Mols. (Van Bronkhorst was already a regular Dutch international, and Klos a Champions League winner with Dortmund, for example. Imagine players of that calibre in Scotland now). They won the league twice in a row and performed well if unluckily in Europe (where Walter Smith’s Rangers teams were often abysmal).

So the expectation – no, the hope - for O’Neill was simply to close that 21-point gap on Rangers, if possible.

But come the season, O’Neill seemed to be working his magic. Larsson’s partnership with record signing Sutton was clearly working. Joos Valgaeren had added steel to the defence. Both teams had won their first four league games. The prospect for the first Old Firm game of the season was therefore mouthwatering.

This doesn’t always, of course, make for a good game. The baying intensity of the fans inhibits thought and sends blood to the head. Open, flowing games are unusual; more often, there are occasional streaks of fluidity broken up by furious challenges and frenetic passing. But this time Celtic looked deadly intent from the off. In the first minute Sutton scored from a corner. On eight minutes, from a magnificent Moravcik corner, Petrov raced unmarked into the six-yard box to thump in a header. And on eleven minutes, Lambert blasted a long-range drive past Klos to send Celtic Park into delirium.

But when Rangers got one back through Reyna on forty minutes, the second half somehow seemed finely poised. No-one believed that Rangers could wilt so spinelessly. Surely normal service would be resumed. Larsson had until then had a relatively quiet game: at 3-0 he had been clean through on Klos, but the keeper had recovered well, and he had sent one wide when it ricocheted off Bobby Petta at 3-1. But given that Rod Wallace had had one chalked off for offside at 3-1, there was still all to play for.

Step forward Larsson. At fifty minutes, a long kick-out after a Rangers attack found Chris Sutton midway between the centre circle and the eighteen-yard box. With Lorenzo Amoruso tight up against him, Sutton showed exceptional strength, skill and awareness to turn the ball using his chest onto the path of the on-rushing Larsson. Despite the ball bobbling up, and despite the close attention of Tugay, Larsson raced for the middle of the D (and the huge space Rangers had criminally vacated) with two brilliantly controlled touches.

With the Celtic man now haring down on goal, Tugay tried to clip his heels but the Swede – remarkably strong for his slender frame – rode it out with balletic balance. As this was happening, defender Bert Konterman stepped forward to close him down. Konterman had won the Dutch title with Feyenoord and played in the Champions League, but he looked like gangling and ill-at-ease for someone who had just cost £4.5m. With Tugay visibly giving up like Peter Reid on Maradona, Larsson destroyed whatever reputation Konterman had with two ingenious touches. One moved the ball just in front of him, luring the Dutchman into putting a boot forward in the hope of intercepting, then another impertinently poked the ball through his now opened legs. Konterman was left stumbling idiotically like a new-born giraffe trying to take its first steps. This was footballing intelligence of an extraordinarily high order from Larsson, conceived and executed in fractions of seconds.

The entire goal now beckoned. A roar – of anticipation, of fore-knowledge - audibly went up around Celtic Park. Amoruso was by now racing towards Larsson, desperately trying to make up ground on the right, but he was a good ten yards away. Klos – a very good keeper, earning one of the highest salaries in European football—moved forward to narrow the angle, his hands down ready to thrust out an arm should Larsson shoot. Textbook technique. But in milliseconds the Swede had the vision to perceive that the space behind Klos was utterly defenseless. In an instant he adjusted his feet and his bodyweight, and dinked a beautiful lob over the goalie. The arc described by the ball was exquisite, reaching its peak above Klos’ head then gently descending to hit the back of the net at waist height.

In The Fight, Norman Mailer describes how Muhammad Ali, having bamboozled George Foreman with rope-a-dope, contrived to deliver a finish equal to his achievement. Larsson’s finish was of comparable execution: an astonishing feat to cap a remarkable display. It had arrogance, geometric beauty, ruthlessness, poise, imagination and technique. It was Ali finally coming off the ropes. It was Marco Van Basten volleying against Russia. It was the Miracle On Ice. It was Jim Baxter doing keepie-uppie at Wembley. It was Botham smashing Australia in 1981. It was everything sport can be, concentrated into one delirious moment.

The rest of the game was a formality. Celtic, astonishingly, ran out 6-2 winners. The hex was shattered, and the silverware flowed.

The 2000-01 season was pivotal for Larsson, and for Celtic. Far from merely closing the gap with Rangers, Celtic won the league by 15 points, and just one off breaking three figures. Domestic hegemony and European credibility returned to Parkhead, while Rangers collapsed in an attempt to spend their way back into contention. (It is literally no exaggeration that their collapse in 2012 can be traced to this game. They doubled the Scottish transfer record five months later, spending £12m on Tore Andre Flo, who couldn’t get a regular game at Chelsea). Whereas Celtic had lost insipidly to FC Zurich under Venglos, O’Neill oversaw a return to European glory nights, as heavyweights like Juventus, Porto, Liverpool, Lyon and Barcelona were beaten. And Larsson’s talents were now in full flower: he netted an incredible 53 times that season, earning him the European Golden Boot, and in the four seasons after his leg break he would plunder an astonishing 173 domestic and 26 European goals. His finest individual performance probably came against Porto, where his two headed goals took Celtic within finger-tips of the UEFA Cup.

After leaving Celtic in 2004, Larsson went on to play for Barcelona (alongside van Bronkhorst – a sign of the talent in Scotland a few years earlier), Helsingborg and Manchester Utd. Although Larsson only played 13 games in a loan spell at Old Trafford in 2007, his contribution received the highest plaudits. "He's been fantastic for us, his professionalism, his attitude, everything he's done has been excellent," Sir Alex Ferguson said. (He had tried to sign Larsson previously, but at the time Celtic could pay salaries equal to the top English teams: Larsson extended his contract in June 2001 for £40,000 a week, when Roy Keane was earning £50,000 a week. Sixteen years later, the highest wage of any Celtic player was £25,000 a week, while for Utd it was nearly 12 times that amount. Twelve times!). After his final game for Manchester Utd, Larsson was given a standing ovation in the dressing room by players and management. He was by then 35 years old. But anyone watching in August 2000 already knew how good he was.