Today Barry Ferguson was bumping his gums over the Ryan Christie contract situation, saying that he’s never heard anything like it in his life, that a player’s deal would expire in December instead of in June when it usually happens.
To be honest, I’ve never heard of anything like in my life either and throughout all the last year or so when the rumours about Christie have been rife, I didn’t hear even a whisper of this story until it appeared out of nowhere earlier this month.
The weird thing is, by some odd quirk of timing this one landed during one of those periods where we are between games for longer than usual, and so nobody from Celtic has actually sat in front of the cameras and been asked about this directly.
So although this story has generated a ton of media attention, I would bet that nobody really knows for sure if it’s actually true or not.
If this isn’t hard information, then it’s one of those weird things plucked from an obscure website or somewhere like that and held up as fact when it might not be.
Kennedy will be asked about this tomorrow.
It’ll be interesting to see what he says.
From my vantage point on this the whole story seems to have arisen because when Christie signed the new deal it was in December, and I suspect that it’s a case of someone putting two and two together and making five, and the reason they’ve done so is that when a deal is signed at that point in the calendar the club usually announces it as either an extension or a “and a half year” arrangement, and in this case nobody has done so.
The very fact that Christie is still a Celtic player should be enough to cast doubt on the veracity of this story.
Was nobody at our club aware that he was already in the last year of his deal?
Would we really have hung onto him through the summer if that was the case?
Even with the best will in the world, even with the club wanting ten in a row, would we have let a valuable first team asset depreciate in value to the point where in two months we might get nothing for him?
Is that really what happened here?
Tomorrow, John Kennedy will finally sit in front of the press corps and there’ll be a chance to ask him.
If he confirms the story, then we’re really off to the races and fans will demand to know why this was allowed to happen. Christie will find himself under pressure as well; is he really going to walk for a nominal fee and have the fans remember him for that and for the last year’s dire performances? Is he really going to hang around until December?
I just think this story sounds suspect, but one way or another we’ll find out.