Yesterday I did a piece on Tony Watt that generated a lot of discussion, including an excellent piece over on CQN which you can read here.
No-one should assume I hate Tony Watt.
He’s simply an immensely frustrating guy.
What I do hate is seeing talent – obvious, stand out, clear-cut talent – squandered. In a world where a lot of young guys and girls struggle to make the best of what they have and never get anywhere in spite of a tremendous work ethic and dedication, to actually see someone with the whole world at their feet pissing it away … that makes me sad, and angry.
Tony Watt is a fantastically talented footballer.
He really is. Nobody who’s watched him play, at any level, is in the slightest doubt about what he has as a player. Some have described him as one of the best natural talents Scottish football has produced in decades … I don’t even think that’s an exaggeration. Because the ability is definitely there.
It’s that other thing, that work ethic I talked about, and that’s as essential to making it as having the skills. In fact, players with a fraction of his ability have gone on to decent careers because they were dedicated to the profession and gave everything in pursuit of it.
Watt can still make it. That’s a given.
He is a young guy; this hasn’t all gotten away from him.
He can still go on and be a genuinely class player, win trophies and international caps. In the end it has nothing to do with physical fitness but more a mental thing; it’s about focus and drive. If he can find the strength to dig in and commit to this game he will get from football everything that talent of his deserves, and I hope he can find it yet.
Tony Watt is not the only young player to seem as if he was on a self-destruct course with his career.
I’ve seen it happen to at least a half dozen other players at our club down through the years, with three obvious stand-out examples. Others, like Mark Burchill, Simon Donnelly and Gerry Creaney had a certain level of skill which they allowed to go to their heads … but there were three who could, and should, have done big things either at Celtic Park (where they all had a chance at greatness) or away from the club. None of them did.
Worryingly, there’s a player at the club right now who, in spite of possessing a natural ability which I think far exceeds that of Watt and the others, may not make everything of his own career that all of us hope for him.
That’s a concern, especially in light of recent events.
This piece is going to look at all four of them.
Islam Feruz: A Mystery Inside A Riddle Wrapped In An Enigma
No discussion of footballers seemingly hell-bent on wrecking their careers would be complete without this kid, which is why I’m opening with him.
It’s not the first time I’ve written about Islam Feruz, a player in whom so much early faith was placed and who appeared to justify every single bit of it based on what he could do with a ball.
I’d heard of him years before I ever saw him, and that’s saying something considering he was still only fourteen when we were treated to a public display of his skills at Celtic Park in the Tommy Burns memorial match in 2011.
He dazzled, as he did in Scotland Under 16 games, and there was a feeling we were watching the emergence of a huge talent.
But all the while there were rumours that as big as that talent was we would never get to see it fulfil itself in a Celtic shirt.
Feruz’s name and reputation had spread far and wide before he ever pulled on the strip in that game, and the platform it gave him made it inevitable that even more interest would follow. Rumours circulated about how dismissive he was of the club and how a serious attitude problem had developed. He showed no sense of loyalty and some speculated that he couldn’t wait to depart and chase the big money in England.
It was no surprise when he left for Chelsea having never seen first team football at the club.
His departure infuriated many inside Celtic Park.
To say that the move hasn’t worked out is an understatement.
It would be hard to over-state just how big a mess Feruz has made of his early career.
He is now a 21 year old, still young enough to crack it, and is still on the books at Chelsea, who he signed for in 2011, but since getting his first professional contract in 2014 they have sent him out on loan to five different clubs and he has played a grand total of 22 games in that time.
He has never scored a goal in senior football.
To put that into some kind of perspective, Watt is 23 and has 37 career goals in 164 professional games. That’s a very decent ratio for any player. For all the criticism he gets, he has been playing regularly from an early stage. By the time he was Feruz’s age he had already appeared 34 times for Celtic and scored 8 senior goals … including that one against Barcelona which both defined him as an up-coming talent and has haunted him ever since.
It’s almost impossible to imagine Feruz ever scoring a goal of that nature; although younger than Watt, he hasn’t accomplished anything like what Tony has in his career thus far and looks increasingly unlikely to.
His own return to Scottish football was a disaster; ironically enough, he wound up in Edinburgh like Watt did. But whereas Tony Watt made 17 appearances for Hearts and scored a goal, Feruz made 6 for Hibs, all from the bench, and his contract was cut short by a club that simply ran out of patience.
As with Watt, there’s still a chance that Feruz can make it but the career clock is ticking down on him, and you can sense that it won’t end well. Everywhere he’s gone there have been the same complaints of a negative attitude and a refusal to buckle down to the hard graft. Like many blessed with an awesome ability, Feruz believes it’s enough.
It’s not. It never was. As others have already found out.
Liam Miller: The Stupidest Transfer Move Of All Time
What to say about Liam Miller, now 35 and plying his trade in the Australian League having had a career in which he won only a small number of trophies and 21 caps, when for a while he seemed like a player with the whole world at his feet?
What to say? How about “How stupid were you?”
Liam Miller was on his way to becoming a huge part of Martin O’Neill’s Celtic team. He had played well for the club and looked on the cusp of something big. Martin to make him an integral part of the midfield engine room, but it was never to happen. Manchester United thought they saw something and Miller went down there in January 2004 to talk to them. He came back to Glasgow having signed a pre-contract agreement.
To say our fans were surprised is an understatement.
The general emotion was shock, and anger, that he had made that decision in spite of all the club had done for him. We rescued Liam Miller’s career; it’s no exaggeration to say that. He suffered terrible injury problems in the early part of his career and we showed tremendous faith and loyalty to him as he fought back from that. Having been so staunch for the player we expected some measure of that back, but we didn’t get it. He played a total of 26 games for us.
His time at United was, to put it bluntly, a disaster. At 22 he should have been playing first time football every week. It says a lot for his self-confidence, bordering on arrogance, that he thought he was too good to do that at Celtic, and that he could break into a Manchester United midfield that included Scholes, Beckham and Keane. To say it was unlikely is to be generous to him. He was light years from being able to play at that level.
In fact, it’s probably fair to say that Celtic and Manchester United both over-estimated his potential.
Reports suggest that he was offered a £1 million a year deal at Celtic Park; looking back at that now you wonder what the Hell Martin O’Neill and our board were thinking about in sanctioning that when he had played so few games and scored only 2 goals.
He made just 22 appearances in a Manchester United shirt, only 9 of them in the league.
He went on loan to Leeds, where he did get a lot of first team football but never scaled the heights. Manchester United released him on freedom of contract, and he went to Sunderland, to play under Keane, a move which held out promise but delivered little although he played 60 games in three seasons there. It was his attitude that did for him; Keane finally transfer listed him due to “poor discipline and bad time-keeping” amongst other things.
An unsuccessful spell at QPR followed, and finally he wound up back in Scottish football, which he’d left only six years before to “better his career.” He signed for Hibs, after spending nearly five months without a club. He’d clearly earned himself a reputation but not the one he’d hoped for.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he found Scottish football more on his level. At Easter Road he became something of a cult figure; he stayed two years and played over 70 games and scored 7 goals, which was easily the best spell in his career. By the time it ended he was thirty, and on the downslope, and although Hibs offered him a new deal he knew the best was behind him. When an offer came to move to the softer environment of the Australian League he jumped at it.
He’s been there ever since. The part of his career which some people regard as their peak has been spent in a relative footballing backwater. To give him his due, the move was probably the best he’s ever made. The standard of living over there is excellent, and he probably has no regrets. He’s made a decent fist of it and done alright out of the sport.
But Liam Miller’s career is a cautionary tale for all that, one you can’t look back on without thinking of opportunities wasted, of what might have been.
Derek Riordan: The Boy Who Could Have Been King
I remember exactly how I felt when I heard that Derek Riordan was signing for Celtic; I was over the moon. I thought it was a perfect piece of business. He was one of the top scorers in the Scottish league and had been for many years. People tend to forget now just how clinical he actually was. He was averaging a goal every two games; a remarkable record for a kid who was at a club like Hibs. I had no doubt he would score goals in the Hoops.
He arrived in a strange deal, a pre-contract agreement that wasn’t meant to kick in during the summer but which would have seen him arrive in January instead.
In the end, Celtic and Hibs hashed it out and they agreed a modest fee – Rangers had offered four times as much in a straight transfer the previous year – and the deal was tied up in June. It was odd, but that summed up his time at Celtic Park almost perfectly.
I could foresee no circumstances in which Derek Riordan would be a flop at Celtic Park, which is why I was a little troubled when I asked my flatmate of that time – who was a huge Hibs fan – what he thought of the player. I found him less than impressed. In fact, he was pretty scathing. He said Derek Riordan had serious problems with his discipline and general behaviour off the field. He said he would never cope with the goldfish bowl of Glasgow.
Months later, with rumours running wild about Riordan’s behaviour in Edinburgh my mate told me he was one of those guys who would never rise in football because he carried too much baggage and was forever “back home with the lads” – a clear reference to the naughty boys amongst the Hibs support, with whom Riordan had many lasting friendships.
This, in itself, isn’t to be knocked. Riordan remembered where he came from and was proud of his roots. That’s no small thing. But I was worried about the perception that he was one of those guys who was out on the booze most nights.
A little over two years after he signed he was banned from every pub in Edinburgh, by court order, after a rash of neddish incidents which Gordon Strachan will have viewed with immense distaste. It was too late for his Celtic career to recover at any road; he’d played a little over 30 games and was clearly surplus to requirements.
He was let go, having scored just eight goals. It was no shock that he went back to Hibs, where he picked up right where he’d left off, scoring for fun. They were always the club closest to his heart and there he played for the jersey. I never grudged him that.
In this two spells there he scored more than a 100 goals in little over 250 games, which is a phenomenal ratio. When he left for the second time he was still only 28 … nowhere near his prime, and he should have gone on to more great things.
Bizarrely, and before the big money was there, he moved to China. The move lasted weeks and he came home to sign for St Johnstone. It didn’t work out there and he left at the end of the season. I don’t know whether it was homesickness or what, but he played only sporadically for Bristol Rovers – 12 games and no goals – then did a spell at Alloa where he only played twice, without scoring, followed by a trial at Brechin City and then a spell at East Fife.
He finally washed up (an appropriate phrase) at York where he played four times without getting a goal.
That was in 2015-16, and he hasn’t played professionally since.
After his departure from Hibs Derek Riordan played a little over forty matches in five years … a dreadful end to a hugely promising career.
So was it his time at Parkhead that ruined Derek Riordan?
Probably not.
Based on what I know, he was damaged goods before signing for us, on path that was only leading one way. That his career was effectively over at 28 should serve as a warning to every young guy out there who’s in the game just now but isn’t applying himself with the utmost professionalism.
Some of Riordan’s peers – like Scott Brown and Steven Fletcher – have done astonishingly well in the game.
I don’t think Fletcher possess an ounce of the talent Riordan had when both were at Easter Road, but he had that other thing, that work ethic, that determination and professionalism, which got him big money moves and assures he’s still playing at a good level today. At 29, he’s played for four English clubs, including a good spell at Sunderland in the EPL, and has been on loan at Marseille. He is forever linked with a move to Celtic.
Riordan never came close to the career Fletcher has had, and could still have.
By the time he was Fletcher’s age it was just above over, although the fans of the club he’s best remembered for still worship him to this day. In fact, his career provided a great inspiration for the last of the players I want to look at …..and should provide the clearest warning he has about its potential direction.
Leigh Griffiths: Will He Heed Brendan’s Warnings?
I never thought I’d write about Leigh Griffiths in this manner, but Brendan Rodgers clearly has concerns on this score and they ought not to be ignored.
Leigh has already done a lot in his career, more than the players named above.
He is well on the way to scoring 100 goals in a Celtic shirt, but the Derek Riordan comparisons are haunting, and troubling.
Both players played at Hibs, of course, and scored plenty of goals in their green shirts before coming to Celtic Park.
Both are worshiped by the Hibs fans, and are considered “part” of that support.
Both have also been slammed for singing the same stupid song, the one about Rudi Skacel which offended much of Scotland and our pro-immigrant sensibilities.
Leigh Griffiths is 26.
He has clearly made more of his time in the game than Feruz, Watt, Miller or Riordan. That’s not even up for debate. He has a talent in front of goal that far surpasses any of those players. He has won more in his career thus far than Miller or Riordan ever did or Feruz and Watt ever will. But if you accept what Brendan Rodgers is saying he runs the risk of seeing his career cut short, perhaps by years, because he doesn’t look after himself right. It means that for all the talent he has we may on the verge of seeing him as good as he’s going to get, and to many that means a player who’s yet to prove it on the biggest stage of all.
I think that verdict would be harsh; Leigh has already shown he can score regularly here and in Europe.
He is short of the Champions League level – indeed, Brendan laments that because he believes Leigh can make that grade – but few players can honestly be said to have reached that height anyway. Yet I agree with Brendan; he’s perfectly capable of being one of them.
His career will not end, I don’t think, the way that of Feruz looks to be heading, and which Tony Watt will come to if he isn’t careful. Nor will it end with him playing out what should be his best years in a football backwater like Miller settled for.
There is no doubt he will still be a good player at 28, when Riordan effectively chucked it.
But Leigh Griffiths can be more than just a good player at 28.
He can be a great player.
He can go on to be not simply a Celtic legend but an icon at a club where that confers genuine immortality. He has that skill-set, and nobody doubts for a second that he’s dedicated to getting better as a player. But Brendan clearly thinks certain lifestyle choices are affecting his fitness and general conditioning, to a troubling extent. How troubling? That Brendan has mentioned it to the media, in an effort to give Leigh a jolt, should tell you everything you need to know.
This is where we’re lucky with this guy in charge, and where Leigh might be lucky too. Brendan wants the whole club to be all it can be, and he wants Leigh to make the right decisions about his future. He’s a man who’s clearly worth listening to.
Leigh was one of those guys who got enormous stick in the press for a wee while, and all of it was grossly unfair. He’s not the bad lad the media has sometimes made him out to be; you don’t hear stories of him being involved in pub brawls and other such nonsense. He’s also a responsible dad; he may have kids to several different women but he hasn’t abandoned any of them; his relationship with them is there for everyone to see.
I love this guy; I’m delighted that he’s a Celtic player and I want to see him stay at the club for a long time. His contract has four more years on it; by then he should be chasing goal 200. He’s that good, which is why I hope he pays attention to what Brendan has to say.
I could have written about other players in this piece; every club has its own horror story, but Watt, Feruz, Miller and Riordan are especially prominent as we had such high hopes for all of them at one time.
Watt’s goal against Barcelona is one of the most famous in the history of our club; that goal and that moment deserved a better ending than what it got. But it was no less significant than the one Liam Miller scored against Lyon, in defining a “what might have been” narrative of a career. We saw flashes of it with Islam Feruz, including some wonderful performances in the dark blue of Scotland’s youth teams when he was still a Celtic player. Derek Riordan in his two spells at Hibs showed us exactly what he might have done in the Hoops had he been a little more willing to toe the line and had Gordon been willing to cut him a little slack.
(Oh there was blame on both sides there, and no doubt about it.)
They are the case-studies every aspiring player should look at.
I am confident that Leigh Griffiths won’t be joining them in the Big Book of Regrets.