Charlie Nicholas has been peering through keyholes and listening with a glass pressed against closed doors. (Again?) I mean, the guy is persona non grata inside our club. He’s one of the guys who has so cheesed off the hierarchy you’d think he’d never played for us at all, far less twice. Think he gets regular invites to hang out? Can you see him doing a Paradise Windfall Draw any time soon? He doesn’t even get asked to play in the Celebrity Celtic teams.
This is a guy without the slightest understanding of what life at Parkhead is like right now. He is a non-person as far as our leaders are concerned, and that’s as it should be. This is a guy who never misses a chance to take a piss on us.
But he’s apparently aware of “noises coming out of Celtic Park” that say Moussa is on the way out of the club. I think the noises are coming from elsewhere, myself, because as I’ve said, he is the very last person who has the slightest clue what’s going on at our club.
“Listening to the noises coming out of the club in recent weeks it sounds to me as if the path is being smoothed for a January exit,” he said, in reference to Dembele. He needs his hearing checked I think because I’ve been reading everything that’s been said by the player and the club in that time and all I hear is the same line that’s been coming out of the club since Moussa first started to attract interest. The club will sell him if he wants to go.
But two things have to happen first; a club has to be interested and they have to make the right offer, and Moussa himself has to want to take the deal.
Celtic is not holding an auction, as some appear to believe.
What if the club who meets our valuation or offers the most isn’t the one Moussa wants to sign for? I know Nicholas is essentially brainless, but surely it has to have dawned on him, and others, that Moussa is the one who will decide on stuff like that, not us? Any deal has to be right for all parties … and I would suggest that clubs like Brighton and West Ham would be wasting their time.
Nicholas knows the sum total of nil about what Celtic is thinking.
I would imagine he knows less than zero about what Moussa Dembele is thinking. But an anti-Celtic story has a nice ring to it, especially before a Sevco game. Nicholas is attention seeking, and he knows the media always enjoys giving it to someone who’s having a dig.
But what comes through from his article is his own ignorance, and a reminder of just how far from the action at our club he really is.
Nicholas could have been a great at Celtic Park. He could still be welcome there to this day. He could have had a nice relationship with this club, but he’s made choices that have made that impossible, and this isn’t pique because he left once upon a time; Kenny Dalglish is still a legend here, but then he never took media money to swing the boot at us.