I am absolutely certain that there would have been scouts from various clubs watching France’s Under 21 game the other night. I am also certain that they would all have been raving about one player in particular at full-time, our own Odsonne Edouard.
I am sure of something else too. All agree that he would cost a lot of money.
None believe he can be had in January.
I am interested in the names of these clubs; they are exactly the same clubs the media was touting as being interested in Edouard last month. In other words, this is a non-story, nothing has changed at all, they don’t know who the scouts were, what clubs they represented or what players they were there to actually watch.
It’s fair to say Eddie would have been the one they came back raving about, but this is typical lazy journalism and an effort to unsettle the player.
An effort, by the way, that won’t work at all.
There is exactly zero prospect of selling French Eddie before next summer. Zero.
It does not happen. Title challenging clubs do not sell the best player in the country in the middle of a campaign. Boards have been hounded out for less, and whatever this Celtic board might be they are not stupid. There’s something else; Odsonne Edouard doesn’t want to leave yet.
How many times must this be said before the media will stop writing fanciful nonsense?
Edouard does not have the same urge to get out of Glasgow as Dembele did.
He has said this repeatedly; his is a very different “career plan.”
He’ll be here a while yet.
And the word from inside Celtic Park has been equally clear; the player is not for sale.
I can be harsh on the board, and can point out the dire situation they would find themselves in if they contemplated such a sale, but I don’t need to because the mood music inside Celtic Park hasn’t changed on this one bit. The guy is going nowhere, and perhaps not for a while.
Indeed, our board should be offering him a new deal just to broadcast that message even more loudly.
We’re in a place, financially, where there’s clearly no need to sell him.
The club now has a surplus that would make Apple executives smile proudly, and whatever my arguments with them may be on cash being no use to the club sitting in a bank, it seems plain that we could ride out, without major cuts, several years when we didn’t even qualify for group stage football.
So much for Dave King’s idiotic “house of cards” prediction.
We knew the second Eddie put Sevco to the sword at Ibrox that this was the order of business. We knew we’d need to get used to these kind of stories the moment the press realised that he is what some of us were saying he was after all … the best footballer in this country miles.
But be comforted.
The club itself has no intention of giving the hacks what they want here, and Eddie isn’t going to demand it.
He’ll be here for nine at the very least.
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