When we appointed our brand new head of recruitment earlier this month, one of the thing he said at his opening press conference was that part of his focus would be on the domestic game. That didn’t raise as many eyebrows as I thought it might.
I’ve interpreted that, in part, as a response to the possibility of a “hard Brexit”; for sure that has featured in Celtic’s thinking about transfer policy. How could it not? That will have far reaching effects and wide ranging implications for how we do things in the future.
Our history of going for domestic players is hit and miss. We’ve signed some right crackers and a bunch who haven’t come up to snuff, but I’ll tell you; the same applies to the players we’ve signed from overseas in the same time frame.
Leigh Griffiths has proved to be worth the sum total of Pukki, Balde, Kazim Richards and Carlton Cole. It’s Stuart Armstrong, not Nir Bitton, who looks like the indispensable player in our central midfield … after Scott Brown.
The failures in recent years comes down to two who stand out; Gary Mackay Steven, who’s injury problems coupled with a chronic lack of confidence have robbed us of a footballer who initially looked tremendously promising. He was scoring goals and exciting the fans. Some think it is too late to write him off, and I have spells when I think he deserves the opportunity to show us he still has that player inside him.
But then I think that the opportunity to find out might never come because at the moment it would be taking a game from James Forrest or Patrick Roberts or Scott Sinclair, and that can’t be justified. The sad truth is that it looks as if he’ll have to leave to fulfil his footballing ambitions and I’m sure he’ll find a club where the skills that brought him to us will be seen again. He’s a young guy. Injuries have already cost him too much of his career. Sitting on the bench won’t help.
The other player who haunts us is Scott Allan, the most baffling transfer of recent years, one I could not understand then and cannot understand now. Clearly a talented player, Scott was signing for a club who’s central midfield area was already over-bloated, and if he had no chance of getting into it then he has even less chance of doing it now.
We’ve signed Eboue since then and Liam Henderson has shown flashes of his own quality. Then there’s young Ryan Christie who can play out wide or in a central role. Allan’s chances are somewhere between slim and none.
I hope Scott Allan has a good career somewhere; it will not be at Celtic Park.
The irony of all this, of course, is that there’s a lot of talk about who our next Scottish signing might be, and the manager is known to hugely admire one talent in particular; the Hibs midfielder John McGinn, who’s growing in reputation and has already attracted English interest. John is a top prospect, and would fit beautifully into Brendan’s style of play. The problem with Scott Allan is that he was an attacking midfield player when what we needed was a guy more like Brown; an industrious ball winner. That’s McGinn.
Would he be wasting years of his career at Parkhead? I don’t think so. I think the writing is on the wall for Nir Bitton. His natural replacement might already be in the squad in the shape of Eboue, but the long-term future of Brown is that he doesn’t have one. He’s in the closing years of his Celtic career, and he has been a magnificent servant to the club and deserves the greatest praise and our thanks. His place in our history is secure.
A smart club looks beyond the here and now, and we have to be thinking about life after him as Ferguson started planning for life after Ince when he signed Roy Keane. There’s no question as to who the better footballer turned out to be either.
Whether McGinn would scale the heights like Brown and be a natural fit is hard to predict; but the kid has a bit of class and right now he wouldn’t be terribly costly. If we wait a year or two and then decide to take the punt on him I suspect we’ll be buying him from England if we can get near him at all. The second he’s down there his value doubles. If he starts to impress it could quickly be out of sight. We might then be forced to watch him blossom as we looked on enviously.
Better to act early, and if this seems somewhat predatory then so be it.