Nobody will ever use the words “Celtic legend” to describe Scott Sinclair, but 3Treble would not have been secured, nor the Invincible campaign completed, without his incredible contribution to the cause. He has repaid his transfer fee and then some.
When the club gave him a one year extension at the end of the last campaign, I was over the moon. I believed at that time we’d soon have a new manager and that Scott Sinclair would get a chance to impress him, and win back his place in the side.
A fully fit Scott Sinclair, on form, confidence high … what a weapon to have in the arsenal. This was a guy who won the clean sweep of awards up here at the end of his first season … he was the best player in the country by a mile.
Even in the two campaigns which have followed, where he wasn’t at his best, he has scored goals and made goals. He has played his part in major triumphs.
His goal in Athens could have won us a Champions League reprieve last season.
It is now readily apparent that we gave Scott Sinclair that one year extension just so we could sell him, and in the absence of completing a deal which secured us an extra few quid – another ivory back scratcher for Lawwell maybe – we seem to have frozen him out.
Well shame on those at the club who are involved in that, who made the decision and support it. This is no way to treat a professional who has given his all over three years, a player who this campaign and the next one would have turned into that legend, and perhaps even a club icon; one of the footballers who secured ten in a row.
And I’m sure he wanted that. Scott could have left at any time after that first season; the English interest was real and hot then. He fell in love with the club and pledged to stay. That is the measure of the man and what he was willing to give us.
To see him side-lined so disgracefully … is that what we do now? Do we treat players the way the Ibrox club does, in its grubby high-handed manner, sending proud men to play with the reserves and the kids because they won’t leave when the board demands it?
If we didn’t want Sinclair we should have given him that news and let him go on a free; for what we paid and what we got back there was zero need for us to try and squeeze a few extra quid out of the deal.
Scott Sinclair has played 153 games for the club and he’s scored 60 goals.
That averages out to twenty a season of course; that’s a superb return for a striker.
It is a phenomenal return for a wide midfielder, and it is difficult to believe he could not score at least a dozen goals in the coming season and lay on perhaps ten more.
His talent for doing it in big matches suggests that some of them would be hugely important goals at that.
This would be a dire, dire way for him to be remembered at the club and it would be a shocking way for him to remember it.
From all accounts, he has no interest in moving during this window, but I am unconvinced that we’ll see much of him in this campaign, and that is lamentable man management from all at Celtic Park who should have treated this fine footballer and genuinely decent man with a lot more respect.
Dembele, De Vries, Gamboa and others arrived in the same window he did, and you could argue that he gave us more than all of them put together.
He stayed longer and contributed more on the park. Dembele got us a big transfer fee … Sinclair should have left with our total respect.
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