Yesterday Celtic published the details of their Champions League squad, and there were two notable exclusions from the team; there was no place for Efe Ambrose, who the manager didn’t need to watch more than a handful of times to realise he wasn’t going to cut it, and there was no place for Kris Commons, which to many is more of a surprise.
I’m a movie buff, and there’s a scene at the end of the Godfather which gets me every time; it’s the one where Sal Tessio, Michael’s waspish capo, is about to leave the Corleone compound for the meeting in Brooklyn where he’s “made all the arrangements.”
Those include the murder of Michael himself, and Tessio’s own coronation as head of the family.
He never gets there. Another Corleone solider comes over and tells everyone that the arrangements have changed and there’s a new order; Tessio is to travel to the meeting separately. He doesn’t need more than a minute to get the point and understand that Michael was 100 steps ahead of him the whole time. But he takes the one shot he has; he turns to Tom Hagen, who he’s known for years, and asks “Tom, can you get me off the hook? For old times sake?”
Hagen shakes his head, and Sal Tessio is led away for his final car ride.
I thought that was one of the most ruthless things I’d ever see, until Brendan Rodgers.
He has redefined the word as it applies to running things at Celtic, and I couldn’t be happier about that. Rumours of dressing room cliques, all that has fallen into silence since he started cleaning house. To use another movie analogy, it’s like the early briefing on the activities of Walter Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, who’s unit assassinated a bunch South Vietnamese army officers (allies, remember) and thus reduced enemy activity in their sector to virtually zero.
You have to think, as Willard does in the movie that “Guess he must have hit the right people.”
Yet Kris Commons deserved better. I’m not talking about in terms of his treatment; as Michael says repeatedly in The Godfather, “This is business, not personal.” In football, these things happen. Look at Yaya Toure, left out of the Manchester City squad for the same tournament.
He deserved better too, but this is the nature of the game.
No, Commons deserves to leave the club having fulfilled those things he very nearly could have; he has given so much to Celtic that it makes me kind of sad to think he’s probably done just ten goals short of the magic 100 mark that would elevated him to a place in our history.
He earned that; this is a guy who has given so much for the cause.
Kris Commons arrived at Celtic with a reputation. He’d flitted from club to club.
Someone said to me at the time that we’d get three years out of him if we were lucky; he was a nomad, a guy rarely satisfied with life in one place. “One good year,” I was told, furthermore, as some said he had a tendency to chuck it midway through his contract.
Yet something happened there; Kris, like so many players before him, came to Celtic and found not just a new employer and a new club to play for. He found a home. He became an integral part of the Celtic Family, on and off the pitch. His good lady became involved in our charitable wing, and she’s made friends everywhere for her warmth and good nature. These two were accessible, bright people who loved being part of all this.
And on the pitch, Kris Commons very rarely let us down. His loyalty and his embrace of this Family brought goals, loads of them, and big performances in important games. You didn’t have to be an expert in body language and able to read the runes to know his relationship with our previous management team was strained; it all exploded onto the TV screens that night in Malmo, and although his misgivings were wholly reasonable, the way he expressed them wasn’t and I really thought he’d never pull on the Celtic shirt again.
But of course he did, and once again he never let us down.
By December last year he was just ten goals short of the 100 mark. He’s never got there.
It looked a certainty, it looked like he would join that elite group of footballers who have achieved that for us, a handful of them in our whole history. The next player to reach that milestone, and without a doubt he will, will be Leigh Griffiths, but Kris ought to be there before him, and I don’t think he will be now. And that’s a great shame; it’s a tragedy in many ways, because he has something still to offer and if he was in Brendan’s first team plans this year then I think he would almost certainly get those goals.
But Brendan runs the show, and I applaud him for having the determination to see this team succeed come what may. He makes the decisions and so far every major one has been 100% right. This isn’t second guessing the manager; on the contrary. The way he wants us to play, with that pace, with that energy, I don’t know if Kris still has that, if he still has the ability to reach that tempo and it’s either play him anyway or change the whole system to suit him.
Neither of those things will happen, and they shouldn’t.
In some ways it would have been better had Kris left in this window, perhaps to Hibs, where he and Neil would have been a great partnership once more. It’s just possible that where there’s life there’s hope; he’s still at Celtic and as long as he is there’s a chance he’ll play and a chance he’ll get the goals he needs to join that special group.
He needn’t worry either way; his place in our history is secure and he’s going to be very fondly remembered. On his game he’s one of the most exciting players I’ve ever watched in the Hoops. For a midfielder, his goal record is extraordinary. He has 91 for us, in all competitions. He also has five title medals, two League Cups and a Scottish Cup. Even if he never makes the 100 goals, he has a good claim to having been a club legend.
Can you call it a happy ending when someone falls just short like that? I don’t know. I can imagine Kris will be disappointed, but he has never rocked the boat, never shown disloyalty to the club, and I don’t think he’ll start now. Whatever issues he’s had, he kept them internal. The media has always sniffed around him, hoping to pick up on something, but aside from his public anger in Sweden he gave them absolutely nothing at all.
The man is a class act.
If his time at Celtic really is up, I am sure his public reaction will be to wish us well and take it all in good grace.
I know everyone in our Family would wish him the same.
At the end of Unforgiven, as Gene Hackman prepares to meet his maker, looking up at William Munney, who’s appeared in town like The Grim Reaper with a shotgun, he spits the words up at him, “I don’t deserve this … to die like this.”
“Deserves got nothing to do with it,” Munney says, and pulls the trigger.
Quite.
This is business, not personal.
But I wish it looked like it was heading for a happier ending.
Kris definitely deserves it.
In Brendan We Trust.