Has The Ross Barkley To Celtic Rumour Finally Been Put To Bed? It Looks Like It.

Whenever I slag the mainstream press – which is nearly every day now – I try to remember that they have their uses, and they perform a function that the bloggers as yet cannot.

They can do what we can’t, and pick up the phone to someone inside Celtic and get a comment about a story which is doing the rounds on the rumour mill.

That’s what Mark Hendry did, when he asked someone outright about the Ross Barkley rumour, the one that refuses to die although it’s as daft as anything that has been in the media or on the Celtic sites in quite a while.

His answer? It came in a tweet.

“Ross Barkley to Celtic rumours swirl but as far as my understanding goes, nothing has changed. Checked it out last time and, dare I say, heard a giggle down the phone.”

A giggle down the phone.

About the same as my reaction to it when I heard the story.

None of the pieces fit, and no matter how many people try to find ambiguity in that statement it reads very much to me as if Hendry is calling it a joke.

Which is what we’ve been calling it on this site since the start.

Honestly, he played 14 times in total last season, only six of those games in the league, he’s 28 years old, he’s on a fortune and in spite of those unflattering facts he’s got English Premiership teams interested in him, with whom we’d have to compete for his signature.

Are we going to pay a guy like this an EPL level salary to get him to come up here? Too many of these guys have travelled up to Scotland and thought that this was a holiday destination, been found out and cost a fortune in wages for doing not very much.

Exhibit A washed up (literally) at Ibrox last season and we know how that turned out. The only difference is that this guy will have actual offers from elsewhere in that over-bloated ridiculous league of theirs.

West Ham are rumoured to be in the running.

He was Aston Villa two years back and they have expressed an interest.

There’s talk Everton might jump in and he was once their youth academy player, although they’ve recently signed other players.

None of it suggests that Celtic would make the move or that he would be prepared to take the momentous pay-cut that would be necessary.

Guys like this don’t enhance a dressing room, they disrupt it. They come in on gigantic salaries and expect things by dint of their name and their bank account. Very rarely do they roll their sleeves up and get into the fray. Only a handful ever have.

It would be a risk, an expensive risk, and at a time when we don’t need to take one. This is as likely as Kyle Lafferty turning up at Celtic Park for signing talks.

If it happens I will be astounded, and not terribly impressed. It would not be a forward step, but a piece of shiny bling. We’ve seen how that ends. I cannot see anyone at Celtic thinking that something like this was a good idea, even as a loan deal.