“Top players just will not come to Scotland anymore,” is a familiar refrain in much of our media.
I remember some years ago hearing it for the first time, curiously enough in the aftermath of the Rangers collapse.
It slips neatly into their favourite narrative, that of how our game was lessened by that club’s demise, how it will not be the same again until a side bearing that name sits at the top of the SPL, or at least challenges us there.
Yet what is Scott Sinclair if not a top player?
Moussa Dembele didn’t arrive at Celtic Park a raw talent who we moulded into a fine footballer; he was that already, which is why he arrived at Celtic Park.
The same can be said about Ntcham, who shows all the signs of blooming into another.
Kieran Tierney remains committed to the long-term project here, but he was produced by our club in the first place.
All of this benefits from having a top manager.
Brendan could quit tomorrow and have his pick of almost any job in the EPL, including, if Wegner hung up his boots, the one at Arsenal.
Top football people will come to Celtic.
It’s as simple as that.
And because they will, the profile of our game is raised.
Because they will, we qualified to play in the Groups of the biggest competition there is.
Because they will, every club in the top flight will benefit to the tune of roughly £300,000 … which is more than some of them made by their own early European endeavours.
When top players do come to Scotland, every single one of us should be applauding that and welcoming it, as I applauded and welcomed the way our clubs were able to hang onto some of their best talents during the window, or at least were able to get a fair price when they were sold, instead of settling for English crumbs.
All the game is better for it.
Aberdeen, Hibs, Hearts and Motherwell are better for it.
I know it rankles some in the media that one club has bucked this trend and it’s their favourite club, the one at Ibrox, which emptied its dressing room of a whole team and didn’t get enough between the lot of them to have let them offer Hearts a fair and equitable price for Jamie Walker … but you know, Sevco is a basket-case club which has been afforded more credibility than it was ever due and their current mess is all of their own making, aided and abeted by hacks who push the line that they are ready to take on all comers.
I welcome the trend.
I welcome guys like John McGinn staying here.
I want to see those types of players in our game.
Because our game has been improving steadily for about five years now.
Attendances have gone up and up and up. Clubs are now in good financial health. They can hang onto the talents they unearth, and the kids they develop are getting game time and growing into their roles. It’s a steep climb, but our clubs are making progress.
Which makes Gordon Parks article in The Sunday Mail this morning even more offensive than it would otherwise have been.
I got up to find that a half dozen people had emailed me the online link to it.
I read that article in slack-jawed amazement at the open, obvious, bitterness that seeped out of every single word in it.
Had the writer’s name not been prominent in the headline I would have sworn that it had been penned by one of their in house Sevco bloggers.
In a way, I guess it was.
And whilst we’re on the subject, unless you’re a world class scribe – and Park ain’t that – no writer’s name belongs in a headline in the first place. Does The Mail think Scotland hangs on this muppet’s every word or what? Seeing that name on a piece is not a positive advertisement for it; quite the opposite. It tells me it’s something better avoided.
One thing we can’t accuse Parks of is lacking ambition; there is not a serious publication anywhere in the western world which would give this guy a gig. What he lacks is talent, the talent to step up in his own career to, say, the Stoke On Trent Sentinel or something like that.
Honestly, the article stinks worse than something your dog left on the living room carpet overnight after getting into the kitchen and eating the cat-food.
It has the whiff of spite and unconcealed jealousy about it, sure, but also an underlying waft of cheap NHS disinfectant, which fills your nostrils and conjures up images of a psych ward. It’s as if the full potency of Celtic’s attacking unit has now dawned on this guy and sent him over the edge.
Patrick Roberts “lacks ambition”.
Had he left it at that, it would have been enough for me to have dismissed the article as one would wave away a particularly noxious fart.
It’s distasteful, but you can’t have lived your life and not experienced worse.
But he opened the thing with a Jackie Chan quote.
I mean, Jesus.
That was the best he could come up with?
If the point he was trying to make is that the guy will never get out of his career all he could, realise his potential and maximise the bucks, playing in Scotland, he could have gone with something high-brow, like Marcus Aurelius, “A man’s worth is no greater than his ambitions.”
Had he wanted to make a general point about aiming downward, he could have chosen Edmund Burke; “Ambition can creep as well as soar.”
Had he wanted to be succinct there was always William Shakespeare; “Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.”
But to crib a quote from a Chinese movie star – who, by the way, cribbed it himself from Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher “big results require big ambitions” – is a pretty weak start, and the article goes downhill from there.
Patrick Roberts has, apparently, “chopped a year off his career” by coming back here.
That’s an insulting suggestion for so many, many, many reasons.
The ignorance in it is manifest.
The spite in it is totally undisguised.
The slight isn’t just against Roberts, it’s also against Celtic and it’s against the Scottish game itself.
There is no merit in a word of any article which comes after a gratuitously offensive line like that one. It has one redeeming feature; it lets you know you’re on the low-road, it allows you to judge the whole thing as a product of frustrated envy.
Parks calls his assertion an “inconvenient truth”.
Most of us would call it what it is, a barefaced lie.
A gutterball in the dirt.
He accuses Roberts of retreating into “a comfort zone.”
He clearly reads the same things I do, like the Manchester City website which used the identical phrase last week.
He clearly has no problem cribbing their lines as well.
A comfort zone.
Where top teams are waiting for us.
“Champions League games aside …” is the qualifier Parks uses to blithely dismiss matches against Paris St Germain, Bayern Munich and Anderlecht, all playing out in front of a vast television audience which will give the player all the platform he needs. Six top games between now and Christmas; three months in which Roberts will come up against players every bit as good as he’d play in the same timescale in a top flight league.
“The well-established trend of talent flowing away from Scottish football has been bucked by Roberts and it raises a question mark,” Parks says, which makes me wonder if he actually reads this blog, because as I argued on Friday, and as I pointed out above, that “trend” actually was reversed in this window, but not just by Roberts or Celtic.
His use of that phrase does raise a question mark; is there any part of Park’s article, any idea in it, which he didn’t nick from somewhere else?
If this guy has an original thought in his life, I trust he’ll let us know, with a headlined piece.
The next bit tickled me, I have to admit.
“Absence makes the heart grow fonder but the clamour from Celtic fans to get Roberts back said everything about their starvation of genuine star names being recruited …”
That could have come right off a Sevco website.
I read similar nonsense on some of them, and frankly it’s a suggestion that makes me wonder if Parks wasn’t half cut when he started writing and worked the bottle faster than the word-processor.
He wants to make up his mind what the argument is here;
Roberts is either a top player wasting his time in Scotland or he’s a player we’ve over-hyped because we couldn’t get anyone better.
The next paragraphs are a rehash of the fees which players went for to the clubs at the very apex of the game; I have no idea what point he was trying to make regurgitating all that. It reads very much like he started to go somewhere with it and lost the thread and just filled space with numbers.
Until he arrived at this, a line which has no relationship to the point he seemed to be making;
“Bluntly, our game is where bigger names arrive for career rehabilitation or last resort.”
Like Bruno Alves, presumably. Who left Italy to sign for Sevco. Or Graham Dorrans, who could have stayed in England.
Odd that I can’t recall Parks writing that at the time.
I wonder whether he thinks John McGinn lacked ambition in not orchestrating a move out of Hibs in this window. I wonder whether he’ll mount the same argument if Jamie Walker turns down inevitable offers from down south to sign on for the next Sevco boss.
I rather think not, because the article ends with this;
“As Paddy and his pal Kieran Tierney are about to discover, Paradise is no place to reach for the stars.”
Is that anything other than a piece of Sevconite malice?
There’s literally no way to interpret that other than a drunken attempt to take a swing at Celtic, as a club, and am I the only person who detected a slightly unsettling undercurrent beneath that line? I also got a kick out of the way he’s already started to frame an argument that Kieran should be seeking to leave Scotland as soon as possible, although young Tierney wasn’t the point of the piece.
In that line Parks completely throws off the convenient cloak of this article being about where Roberts sees himself as a player and the true agenda behind it reveals itself.
It’s not that Roberts is back playing in Scotland that irks Parks; it’s that he chose to come back and play for us.
It’s that he gets how big a club we are.
It’s that Celtic retains the ability to attract good footballers and keep those we have.
This piece was the sort you would expect to see printed on novelty bog paper, so you could treat it exactly as it deserves.
At a time when Scottish football should be celebrating a window in which most of our best players stayed in-country and a few special talents came in from elsewhere, there are some who are openly mourning. They try to pass it off as contempt, as scorn, but their anger and frustration is born of stark terror about how much bigger, stronger, healthier, we look coming out of the last few months. As I said yesterday, we’ve assembled the best attacking unit the game here has seen since the days when Larsson, Hartson and Sutton were lining up together in the Hoops, and Parks knows it … and that’s what he just can’t stand.
GIRFUY Parks.
Your pain would be delicious if it didn’t leave us with such a bad taste in our mouths afterwards.