Ryan Christie Is Happy. So Why Is He And The Media Still Trying To Justify His Celtic Exit?

Yesterday I did a piece on our former French contingent. It was an unusual piece in many ways, and it was sparked by recent reports around the disappointment many at Palace feel in Odsonne Edouard. What was unusual about it is that I very rarely write about people who are no longer at Celtic Park. Most of the time, I just don’t care.

Take Neil Lennon. I’m aware that he won a trophy with the Cypriot team last week. I’m also aware of his touchline tantrum. Neither of this things concerns me in the least; Lennon ceased to have any significance in my life as a Celtic fan a while ago. I wish a lot of our former players well – like big Bitton and Rogic – but I can’t honestly say I’ll be looking out for their results every week because to be honest I won’t be.

Some people took issue with my contention that Moussa Dembele has flopped at Lyon. They quoted chapter and verse of his stats from the season past. Know why I was only half aware of them? Cause I didn’t care that much. I am aware that he’s never scaled the heights that I thought he would when he left. Other than that, I had little interest in the precise stats.

Ryan Christie is in the papers today. Either he or whoever was interviewing him brought up his critics amongst the Celtic fans and elsewhere who thought he had taken a backward step, and he was in bullish mood although he said those people weren’t foremost in his mind. He thinks he’s proved that he was right to make the move. Good for him.

He would have believed that whether they reached the EPL or not. We know this because he’s told us this a hundred times. When did I personally stop listening? The first time. He defended the move as being forward progress. I know the words of “I do like to be beside the seaside” but I’ve never taken them literally. Fair play to him if he does.

But Bournemouth is not a bigger club than Celtic no matter what league they play in. He didn’t gamble for a football move; he went where the money was. Celtic has no regrets. We got a tidy sum for him and his promotion netted us more.

There’s doubtless a sell-on fee which will get us more still to come. We paid a pittance for Christie; unlike some he gave us several good years before he decided to go. There are no hard feelings on this end.

That some of us wrote at the time that he was moving for the money is fair comment. He went to a lesser club, which wasn’t even playing on the EPL stage. We are entitled to say that cash was one of his motivating factors. I don’t know why he is so angered by that.

Because for anyone to pretend that he went to Bournemouth for “football reasons” instead of just being straight that, primarily, he went there for the cold hard cash on offer … it’s kind of insulting to our collective intelligence.

I don’t know why he and the media don’t just let the matter drop.

He’s happy. We’re happy. He thinks the promotion vindicates him. But he didn’t need that to vindicate him, only what’s in his bank account. He made the right move, because he got out of it what he had sought to get out of it.

So I dunno why he keeps on trying to explain it to us. I don’t know why the media keeps asking him the question. It’s not that I don’t agree with anything that he says, it’s just that I don’t particularly care about anything that he has to say on it.

Good luck to him next season in the Premiership, I mean that. But I’ll be too busy watching Celtic to give him more than token consideration.