Details
Reference to: Celebration t-shirts after Celtic won the final match of the 1997/98 season to stop Rangers march to ten league titles in a row.
Derivations: Smell The Glove, One in a Row
Started: 9th May 1998
Match: Celtic 2-0 St Johnstone, SPL, 9th May 1998
Definition
When Celtic stopped Rangers in their attempt to ten league titles in a row, a certain slogan paraded by the Celtic players appeared to baffle everyone and became a cult .
In the celebrations after the pivotal 2-0 victory over St Johnstone that sealed the title on the last day of the league season, the Celtic players all wore custom made t-shirts celebrating the one in a row league title with the curious slogan on the back of “Smell The Glove“.
Many years later, players explained what it was all about, with Paul Lambert explaining the background to the slogan as follows:
“We were training with Scotland at one point and down at Kilmarnock. Tosh McKinlay was a really funny guy and was in the Scotland squad at that time.
“When we pulled into Kilmarnock there was a brick wall on the right hand side and there was a little spray painted hand on the wall and under it had the slogan ‘smell the glove’.
“When we went into training that day, Tosh kept on shouting it ‘smell the glove, smell the glove’.
“When we went back to Celtic and got our own gloves, so we thought ‘If we win the league we can get t-shirts made, smell the glove’.”
The main problem is that nobody outwith of the Celtic playing & coaching staff had known what it meant, so humorous but ultimately spurious theories spread amongst the support to try to explain it.
There had been a popular belief that it referred to an incident with Andy Goram, which is actually apocryphal, and over the years grew arms & legs. Following a 2-0 defeat to Rangers in the league in April 1998, it looked like Rangers were on the road to take the title and win ten league titles in a row. Rangers’ goalkeeper, Andy Goram, had an outstanding game, which stunted Celtic’s chances. The story goes that after the match Andy Goram that Andy Goram went into the Celtic changing room and threw his gloves into the room and snorted: “Smell the gloves that lost you the league!“. He was quite a despisable character so it was very believable, but it’s apparently an untrue story. (Others have said it was after Celtic’s New Years Day victory, but that doesn’t make sense with the story). All a shame as the supporters liked this story, preferring it to the actual truth, and was for many years the most commonly referenced story behind the slogan.
‘Smell the Glove’ was reportedly a reference to the front cover of a fictional album by heavy metal spoof band ‘Spinal Tap‘, where a naked woman was smelling a glove. ‘Smell The Glove‘ was the title of the album that the fictional band were touring about in their cult classic film ‘This is Spinal Tap‘. There is no truth in the link to Celtic. Highly doubted that the graffiti referred to in Lambert’s story is any reference to that fictional album.
The supporters actually ended up preferring the theories to the truth in this case due to the humour of it all, so those stories carried on for many years but the facts from the players are now on record.
Humorous and oft-remembered, and as from the start, the slogan continues to baffle newbies & youngsters.
Articles
Paul Lambert reveals details behind infamous Celtic ‘smell the glove’ taunt as he dismisses Andy Goram rumours
The former Hoops captain was part of the famous team that won the league in 1998.
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/paul-lambert-reveals-details-behind-22060229
By Mark McDougall
19:37, 20 MAY 2020
Paul Lambert has revealed the reasons behind Celtic’s infamous ‘smell the glove’ t-shirts when they stopped Rangers winning 10 in a row in 1998.
And the former Hoops skipper has moved to dismiss the rumours that suggested it came from an angry Andy Goram throwing his goalkeeper gloves into the home dressing room after a Rangers defeat at Celtic Park.
And he made the surprising revelation that it really means nothing, or at least Celtic players don’t even know what it was mean but it was planned for a while.
Lambert was part of the famous Celtic team that won the league in 1998, after joining just six months after winning the Champions League with Borussia Dortmund.
And the current Ipswich boss admits that it was good fun within the Celtic group but revealed there wasn’t really much behind.
He explained to Richard Keys and Andy Gray on beINSPORT: “We were training with Scotland at one point and down at Kilmarnock. Tosh McKinlay was a really funny guy and was in the Scotland squad at that time.
“When we pulled into Kilmarnock there was a brick wall on the right hand side and there was a little spray painted hand on the wall and under it had the slogan ‘smell the glove’.
“When we went into training that day, Tosh kept on shouting it ‘smell the glove, smell the glove’.
“When we went back to Celtic and got our own gloves, so we thought ‘If we win the league we can get t-shirts made, smell the glove’.
“That started to leak out in the press that Celtic were going to do this smell the glove thing. We beat Rangers at Parkhead and there was a story that never ever was true, that Andy Goram had thrown in goalie gloves into the dressing room, enraged that we had beat them.
“That’s nonsense but we had decided to make these t-shirts with smell the glove.
“Honestly, that created an absolute frenzy because people thought ‘What does that mean?’
“We didn’t even know what it meant. See the guy who actually took the time to do that he must have been thinking ‘I should have copywrited that’ because he would have been a millionaire, that guy.”