THERE was an acute sense of déjà vu last night: the red shirts would swarm toward the opposition goal; flailing legs would propel the ball back whence it came; the red shirts would regroup and surge forward again.

This unerring familiarity carried on into the second half: the fluid movement of the red shirts became agitated; the desperate punts upfield became more surefooted; and then, defying probability, the besieged team scored - and won. This was Celtic v Manchester United, but it might as well have been Scotland v France last month.

I once heard an American sports pundit decry 'soccer' because of its propensity for upsets. He missed the point. When an academic with too much time on his hands proved a few months ago that there were more shock results in football than in all other comparable sports, he was quantifying what millions of supporters of lesser teams already knew: a delicious potential for the unpredictable.