I wrote earlier this week about our man Moussa Dembele, and how we will struggle to keep him once the interest from the big boys in the EPL makes itself known. I have no doubt he’s already being scouted, and that some insulting offer is being prepared, probably less than what some of them would be willing to pay for the much maligned Chris Martin.
But Dembele is too good for that to last. Sometime, a tempting offer is going to come and we’re going to need to deal with it as a club.
It’s inevitable, and I am going to enjoy the player in the meantime.
What’s harder to take is all this rumour-mongering nonsense about Kieran Tierney, who people in the media have been linking with a move for months, in spite of his having pledged his future to the club with a long term deal, and no actual offer materialising.
I tell you, it’s getting old this one. It’s getting boring.
English clubs have more money than they know what to do with.
If there was genuine interest in Kieran I have a feeling we’d have gotten some kind of offer by now, and that we haven’t is less to do with the abilities of the player than it has to do with the position he plays in. Left back isn’t sexy. It doesn’t sell season tickets. It doesn’t get the juices flowing.
But Kieran is clearly an exceptional emerging talent. He has already experienced big games, and although he suffered in Barcelona he was one member of a whole team that did, a team that was going up against the most terrifying football machine of all time. That night will have taught him much about himself and where his talent is on the grand scale; it will have been searing but it will have been character building, a positive in the long term.
He will make the grade.
He is becoming a footballer who belongs on that stage.
Just watch his run – and more than the run; the positioning, the knowing where the ball was going to go, the waving for it, the calling out for his team-mate to deliver it at the right time – in the game against Manchester City in the Champions League. Think of the confidence, the self-belief, it takes for a young kid like him to do that, in such a high profile match … and if he’d been a winger that would have been impressive in itself, but this boy adds attacking options from the full-back role.
Kieran loves Celtic; this is his boyhood club, the one he always wanted to play for. He can be a rich young man here, and get to experience being part of history making teams. If he wants to define his career by how much money he can make in it then there’s little doubt he can do that; he’ll get the big offer, from somewhere, and probably not too far in the future. Yet I get the impression there’s more to this boy than that; he appears to want to stay.
You know, I would be a little more tolerant of what’s going on in the media if I thought it was more than just talk, if I believed that someone out there was willing to test his loyalty and our will to keep him with a concrete bid. That, at least, would show him what others think he’s worth and let him decide where his heart lies. But this stuff is about messing with his head, and unscrupulous sods know they can get away with that for free.
This is how it works in football; the kid is happy at Celtic and everyone knows that, so the objective is to unsettle him, to get him dreaming of sports cars and the bright lights of London and elsewhere, to make him forget that here, and now, he’s playing in a great team where he already has the respect and the recognition he’ll have to fight for there all over again.
Last week, our club was getting a hammering for “exploiting” the talents of our young protégé Dembele Jnr. But the real exploitation comes with the kind of stories we’re reading today, and have read over the last few months; attempts to make a young man forget the fundamentals and chase the cold hard cash. It is reprehensible, especially when it’s designed to unsettle him so someone has a better chance of getting him on the cheap.
The people allegedly behind this “interest” ought to be told straight; put your money where your mouths are and give the club something concrete to decide, and reject, or keep those mouths shut. Enough young players have gone to England and languished in reserve teams or been farmed out on loan to lower league sides. Kiernan is playing for a top tier team, a title winning team, and competing in the Champions League.
When everything’s said and done it would take one Hell of an offer to beat that.