I wasn’t terribly impressed with today’s display at Celtic Park, as the earlier article will have made plain, but there was one very bright spark, the performance of Kouassi Eboue. I thought he performed very well indeed, and that’s good news for the future.
We signed him during the January window last year, in a show of force and power that was pretty breath-taking.
We were well ahead in the SPL, we had already won the League Cup and we had dispatched Sevco with an ease that suggested Warburton wasn’t long for this world. Whilst the whole of Scottish football’s media was waiting, with baited breath, to see the colour of Dave King’s money, in response to our supremacy, we spent big; £3 million on a kid.
It was a risky signing.
It was a punt and an expensive one, the sort that you wouldn’t have blinked at had a huge EPL club did it, but one which put sharply into focus just how strong we are in Scotland. It was more than the combined spending at every club combined, and we barely saw the guy during the campaign.
He played a handful of games and that was it.
He then suffered an injury which has hampered his chances in this campaign so far.
Now, fully recovered, he is at last getting an opportunity to shine.
He was clearly a long-term “project” signing, but when you spend that kind of money you have to get it right on the nose.
We’re seeing signs that Celtic did.
Eboue plays in that most difficult midfield position, the holding role, the anchor.
His job is to watch everything happening on the pitch and to break up the opposition attacks.
He has the physicality for it, but that role requires more than just muscle; it requires a sharp footballing mind. Scott Brown plays that role right now, others who’ve assumed it in recent years include Neil Lennon and Joe Ledley. It is a specialist job, and hard to fill.
Scott Brown will not be part of our club forever … unfortunately.
He is one of the best players at Celtic, and especially since Brendan came in.
It is important that the future is being worked on right now, and in giving Eboue game time this season we’re clearly grooming him for a big role at another time, and quite possibly that means replacing Scott long term.
Kouassi is young, but he has already proven that he can settle in faraway places. We got him from Russia, after all, and he moved there from Armenia and there from the Ivory Coast. He is not afraid to make major career decisions.
He is extraordinarily mature for someone who’s still a teenager; he is still only 19, which makes this all the more remarkable.
It is too early for us to know exactly what we’ve got here, but the signs are good. It is not quite a year since he was brought to Parkhead, but we’ve seen in flashes what he will bring to the club. All the evidence suggests we’ve got ourselves a heck of a talent.