Let’s not beat around the bush here, Marvin Compper is done. If he hasn’t played his last game for the club then I’ll be very surprised. The question is why. Is he injured? Unfit? Just not interested? Or is there something more here than meets the eye?
I have heard stories, of course, stories that I’m not going to write. Stories which would explain why this guy, who has barely kicked a ball, is persona non grata with the manager who signed him. I have no idea if they are true or just West of Scotland tittle-tattle, but he is a £1 million signing whose fate nobody at Parkhead seems terribly animated about, which alone suggests that they’d prefer it if he was no longer there to bother them.
Indeed, the longer he goes without playing the more credence those stories seem to have. He can’t be injured all the time, surely? He can’t be so unfit as to never have featured at all save for one game in the Scottish Cup where he didn’t look too bad?
There are those who say we should have seen this coming, that he played only a handful of games for Leipzig in his final season there, but that’s not because he was injured but because they bought a slew of new players and he couldn’t get into the team.
Here, he was expected to be a first team footballer, here he was expected to play every week.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the guy is finished at Celtic Park, and not just because he’s not been named in the European squad, although that’s a fairly big hint. He’s finished because we prefer Boyata, Simunovic, Hendry and Ajer to him at centre back and still went out and signed the boy from Leicester on loan. He’s our sixth choice central defender … which most people regard as the position where we’re weakest, and this before we consider that Lustig and Tierney could easily play there if they had to.
There’s no way back from that. Compper will probably never pull on a Celtic strip again and that’s a shame because he has caps for Germany and can’t be a mug. But something big and bad has happened behind the scenes, it seems to me, and the player is done. Perhaps we’ll get rid of him in January, although I doubt it.
This is going to go down as a mistake.
An inexplicable mistake, but only because the average fan doesn’t know any of the facts.
It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. We just have to write this one off and pretend it never happened, including the fact that it has cost us a transfer fee and there and wages on top. At least there’ll be no appearance money or win bonuses.
Look on the bright side; we’ll never have to hear some wag in the stands trying to get a “Go Compper” song started.
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