If you woke up this morning pleased to read the Charley Musonda story, a deal Celtic have been working on for more than six months, you’ll also have noticed a rash of new ones about our own young talent Kieran Tierney, stories linking him to yet another team south of the border.
This time it’s Manchester United. Previously it had been Spurs or Arsenal or City or West Ham or Newcastle … you get the drift. I could go on and on.
And all of these stories have one thing in common, above and beyond being unsubstantiated guff; in every one of them a club is said to be “preparing a move.”
How does “preparing a move” work these days?
Isn’t a simple matter of switching on the computer or the fax machine and sending across an offer? How long does it take to “prepare a move” like that? A few minutes? Err on the side of caution, give them some breathing space, call it a few hours … what’s the delay?
Kiernan Tierney is a player of sufficient quality; if there was any doubt about that at all then he wouldn’t be the target of all this speculation.
Minds appear already made up on this, and they should be.
The £15 million the press is talking about is easily within the price range of these teams; in fact, an offer like that should, and will, be read as a direct insult to Celtic when one considers the nameless wonders who English clubs have already paid more for.
So I ask again; what is the delay? Where are these offers? If clubs really want to “test Celtic’s resolve” then isn’t it about time they got on with it, instead of just talking about it? Isn’t it time they put up or shut up? Isn’t it time for Celtic to tell them that?
I don’t care whether we do this privately or publicly, but this is beyond a joke now.
There’s a lot of noise about our players – it is fairly constant – but zero actual action.
It’s as if clubs are trying to unsettle our boys to drive down the eventual asking price.
And knowing that, we need to do something about it.