Chris Sutton, as you will all know, likes the sound of his voice. He’s worse than any of the bloggers when it comes to believing that if something is on his mind it is so important that it simply has to be said, and that we should all listen up and pay attention.
Listen up and pay attention to this, Sutton; your comments on Brendan Rodgers and Charly Musonda are attention seeking nonsense.
They are not remotely serious.
I very much doubt you believe them yourself.
Because they are so utterly dumb that I would be amazed – I would be astounded – if you gave them any more credence than most Celtic fans do.
There you go; glad I got that off my chest.
Sutton has talked contradictory nonsense here; first he has accused Brendan of signing Charly Musonda and then not using him … the guy has been in Scotland for five goddamned minutes and by the kid’s own admission he still has to adapt to the pace of the game here.
A perfectly reasonable proposition, unless you are an utter muppet.
Brendan has wanted Musonda in a Celtic shirt for longer than Sutton’s even known the player’s name … he didn’t bring him here just to “discard” him.
Sutton sounds so much like some of the anti-Celtic hacks out there at times that it’s painful.
I heard a BBC “journalist” ask at half time in Musonda’s third game if it was “too early to judge him.”
Apparently not for the national broadcaster, no.
That’s the company Sutton finds himself in here … that should worry him.
Secondly, he has repeated this oft-heard nonsense about us having a bad transfer window.
I have news for Sutton, Brendan’s signings shortlist for the window contained five names. He got four of them, and the other, John McGinn … don’t rule it out for the summer, especially if midfielders are going to be leaving. The manager rates him.
Sutton might not get it, some of our fans might not get it, but Brendan wanted Hendry from Dundee, Lewis Morgan from St Mirren, Compper and Musonda. Those deals weren’t thrown together at the last minute or forced down his throat.
I was told those were the targets just after the turn of the year. I had already written that I doubted anyone at Celtic Park saw “the boy from Dundee” as any kind of answer, but someone very close to the action assured me that Brendan did, that Jack Hendry was a signing he wanted as a priority. He told me – in fact, he had told me in December – that there were five players in mind … and then he named every single one of them. And he was right on the money.
We may not understand the reasoning, but these were the manager’s players and this was the manager’s decision.
Nobody has forced Brendan to swallow these signings or any of that nonsense.
He sees something in all of them.
I have no information about the summer and whether he intends or is able to spend big, but as I wrote at the time this was the first transfer window to deliver more than it seemed. We all got a little anxious in the final days wondering if the Musonda deal would go through and whether or not we’d get the central defensive player and goalkeeper … but Celtic worked hard to make sure those deals went through, in spite of Dundee trying to stall.
Sutton has said Celtic “must” spend big in the summer … this is a far cry from what he was saying back in 2016, when he suggested that we might want to copy – no laughing here – Sevco’s transfer policy, saying that signing Accrington Stanley players “might be the way to go” just in case they turn out to be half decent.
Now we’re doing something wrong for signing guys like Hendry and Morgan?
How can you take that seriously?
We all want to see top class players at Celtic, but some of us do realise that this is a process, a marathon and not a sprint.
Musonda is here for 18 months for God’s sake.
There’s no imperative to throw that guy straight in at the deep end. Sutton says he was signed for the Europa League … that’s so small minded and narrowly focused it’s no wonder he failed as a manager himself. Celtic had been tracking this kid for roughly a year.
He was not signed to play two games.
This is obviously hard for other people to understand as well, so let’s have it out there;
Celtic did not sign anyone – and would never sign anyone – based on one European tie. We think further ahead than that. We do things with long terms goals in mind. I ask everyone who thinks we should have spent big money to get through against Zenit what the objective there really was; did anyone realistically believe that one signing or a couple of them, even in the highest bracket, were going to take us to the final?
We strengthened for those games but didn’t go overboard.
The oft-slated defence got us through the home tie and Charley set up the goal.
That looked like job done.
Would one signing at the back have made that great a difference in the second leg? No, because as bad as some of the defensive mistakes were that night it was a collective failure on the part of the team … had they all focussed on the night we’d still have gone through.
That result was painful; we all felt it. But if I thought for a minute Sutton was concerned with managing pain as much as he is in shouting just to hear the sound of his own voice I would feel more inclined to listen, maybe, also assuming he wasn’t come out with arrant nonsense like he did here.
The guy does care about us, but that’s not what this latest rant was about.
He’s started to believe his own press, that’s the thing.
And I’ve got news for him; those comments don’t make him sound informed or educated or in any way knowledgeable about Celtic or football in general. They make him sound like a clown, and the media here already has too many of those.
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