Celtic Might Yet Get An Auction Going For Mikey Johnston. Who’d Have Thought That?

Whenever a player leaves Celtic to go on loan somewhere, we always wonder whether he’ll come back or whether the club which takes him will bother to submit a bid. Rarely do we see one go away and do so well that we literally have an auction on our hands.

Nobody thought Mikey Johnston would be one of those players.

Nobody. I refuse to believe that there is a single fan who thought that the young winger was sufficiently talented enough not only to be a hit at West Brom but one on such a scale that other clubs would come back to us and ask “Is he going to be available in the summer?”

And yet, the better he does down there the more likely it looks that this will happen.

West Brom are not the only club interested in his signature. By the time the season ends, we might even have a couple of Premiership clubs willing to take a punt, depending on how crazy we want to go with the fee. Depending too, of course, on how he does.

That’s going to be crucial. How will Mikey Johnston do? Can he continue to put together those big and impressive performances, or does this have a shelf life? We saw him occasionally play very well for Celtic. He even went on little runs of form which made people wonder if he’d finally clicked and we were on the brink of seeing the real player.

So, it’s not inconceivable that we might yet see Mikey Johnston revert to type as the saying goes, that we might end up seeing him fall all the way back.

I hope not. For his sake as well as ours, I very much hope that he’s got the bit between his teeth and continues to crack on, but that worry is always there, and it will swell massively if he suffers a drop in form. That would, of course, virtually wreck any hope of an auction.

Yet there are signs that this will not be so. He has been brilliantly for West Brom, and it’s not just in the scoring of the goals. He’s thrilled their fan-base. He’s got the confidence of his team-mates. The manager is a big believer in his ability to keep it going … and he’s not got the pressure there of worrying about how might be hanging on his shoulder.

He has made the position his own, and that’s a crucial psychological thing for him, and he’s talked about this himself.

He sounds more confident than he ever has, even if I do think that his comments where he seemed to blame people at Celtic for not having such faith were badly misplaced.

But in one way it plays into our hands; if people believe that there is an explanation for what happened to him at Celtic he is all the more likely to be judged based on what he is doing now … and that’s what might get us the auction, and bring in the an unexpected windfall.