Derk Boerrigter’s Absurd Celtic Comments Are Nothing But Contemptable Garbage.

Yesterday I read one of the most ridiculous articles of the year; a Daily Record (of course) reprint of an interview the long lost Derk Boerrigter gave recently about how Celtic ruined his career. And it was utter self-pitying garbage from start to finish.

Celtic fans do not have what you might call “fond memories” of this guy. He was a joke. He was never fit and when he was fit a lot of us wished he wasn’t.

He came to Celtic Park with a wholly credible CV, but how he attained that is a complete mystery because that wasn’t the player we watched, not even close. And in spite of his being made out of glass or some other fragile substance that shatters on impact I would stipulate that we did see enough of him to make that judgement.

He was miles off having the talent to be a Celtic player. Miles off it. He never looked plausible as a top talent, and that’s what we were told we were getting. All of that is forgivable. Perhaps his mentality wasn’t quite right. Perhaps the injuries sapped his morale. Perhaps he just couldn’t handle the pressure at a big club. Perhaps a lot of things.

There is mitigation for not making it. That’s what I’m trying to say. There is no reason for anyone to feel defensive or bad about that. Better players with much more experience have come here, flopped and vanished into without trace. We do not hold it against them.

What makes this guy slightly different is that Celtic terminating his contracted brought the end of his career, in his late-20’s. He never signed for another club. He never played competitive football for one minute longer. For that, he has some anger towards us, and whilst that is understandable, I’m certainly not going to let him away with his more lurid claims.

We didn’t end his career. Whatever was going on with him ended his career. When Celtic released him from his contract there was, on the surface, nothing to prevent him going and getting another club. If there was a fitness issue it preceded his turning up at our club, and it would explain a lot about what went wrong with him at Parkhead.

If it was a mental issue, then as sad as that makes me it certainly wasn’t caused by us. He might have found it difficult to handle the spotlight but that didn’t need to mean the end of his time as a player, unless it was a really bad issue – and sympathies if it was – but that clearly wasn’t something we played any part in creating.

Fans did used to say, whenever we saw him, that he was one of those guys who seemed to have issues that were psychological than physical. If you sneezed on this guy during a game he’d be out for four weeks citing discomfort somewhere. The speculation at the time was that much of it was in his head. Again, that’s sad, but it’s not our fault.

He also says he fell out with Ronny Deila; yeah, because he questioned the style Deila wanted him to play. Which doesn’t fly in any dressing room. If you’re at a club and you can’t get behind the manager’s decisions and openly question them then finding yourself out in the cold is the least that will happen to you. How someone who had missed over a year of football had the balls to tell a manager what position and role he wanted to play is unfathomable.

His suggestion that we should let him go to Utrecht for a knock-down fee and still make up the difference between what they wanted to pay him and what he was getting at Celtic – getting for doing damn all by the way – is equally risible. We were mugs for parting with money for him in the first place; we’d have been even stupider to do that.

In the end we gambled on finding another buyer and didn’t. Of course not. Because he wasn’t worth another offer. He wasn’t worth the deal we put in front of him, and it was his own hard lines that it turned out to be the best he was ever going to get. He was clearly delusional. He was very obviously arrogant in spite of very little justification for that.

It was perhaps that arrogance and that desire to leech every penny he could out of Celtic instead of going to Utrecht and rebuilding his career that virtually guaranteed his stagnation as a footballer, but again, it shouldn’t have ended it completely. He was only 29.

So whatever it was stopped him from having those three or four extra years in the game, or the kind of earnings he thought he was destined for, that certainly wasn’t anything to do with us. He says he saw a path to the EPL like Virgil Van Dijk; again, that’s deluded. He was 27 when we signed him and the kind of development that would have got him that move was over with, by at least two years and perhaps even more than that.

A lot of the criticism we get as a club is, of course, perfectly valid. Some of it is not. Much of it is not. And his terrible comments about Celtic were bad enough, but his comments about Ronny, who he had the cheek to refer to as “a really worthless guy”, are grossly insulting to a fine man and a manager with titles on two continents and at three different clubs.

That sums up the interview for me. That sort of personal abuse, against someone who absolutely doesn’t deserve it. And that sort of stuff spreads in the game. That sort of stuff can get you blackballed if you don’t have the skill to make people overlook it.

And he didn’t. Not even near it. I suspect that, as much as anything else, is why his Celtic contract was his last.