For His Own Good, Leigh Griffiths Should Not Return To Celtic Park As A Player.

Leigh Griffiths being linked with a move to Morton, at just the moment we draw them in the Scottish Cup, has an odd kind of cosmic logic to it. It would give the game extra juice, that’s for damned sure, and the press would have a field day with their “you just know what’s in the script” nonsense, in the hope that he produced something and knocked us out.

Actually, most of us do know what’s in the script and that’s the real reason I would hope that this never, ever happens. It would be a bad day all round.

For openers, Griffiths will get booed by a section of our support, and perhaps a big section at that. I can’t blame them for doing it, but I wouldn’t join them. Because the guy does not deserve that, not to return to the club where he was a hero and face that kind of reception. He was an idiot, a complete clown, but let he without sin cast the first stone and all that.

Worse, to me, by far, than the booing would be the irrefutable proof of the sheer waste of the player who might have been. For him to return to Celtic with a lower-league team in what should be some of the best years of a glittering career would be awful to see, especially if it was the Griffiths who has made several attempts at a comeback, none of them good, none of them even remotely close to what you might call successful.

Leigh Griffiths scored twice against England, for God’s sake, and it doesn’t feel like it was that long ago either. He scored over a hundred goals for this club. In 2015-16 he scored 40 goals in just over 50 games, an astonishing accomplishment which we would have been devastated to learn would be the high point, and one he’d never get near again.

That was under Ronny Deila, the first of three Celtic managers to warn him that he had to apply himself better off the pitch and work harder or see the best years of his career pissed away. Brendan Rodgers was to offer similar advice, and so was Neil Lennon. Two national coaches said exactly the same, Gordon Strachan and Steve Clarke.

An out of shape has-been, huffing and puffing his way around the turf on which he once strolled like a king … that would be almost an obscenity, something truly shocking, unacceptable, something that should never be and which I hope never to see.