Mikey Johnston Looks A Better Player The Longer He’s Away From Celtic Park. Let Him Stay There.

There is a strange phenomenon in football which Celtic fans are experiencing right now, and not for the first time; how players who leave a club suddenly become better footballers for no longer being under your roof.

Some folk mention a similar phenomenon with ex’s; they get better looking after they’re no longer in your life.

That’s led to many a mistake being made.

Mikey Johnston is flying. Oh, Hell yes. In a good league surrounded by good players. He is playing brilliant football and scoring other-worldly goals.

He deserves a lot of credit for how he’s grabbed his chance by the scruff of the neck and started to produce. He’s getting good headlines and West Brom have already expressed their desire to keep him.

Johnston seems to like it there. Why wouldn’t he?

He’s playing first team football now, the fans love him, life seems good and he’s playing like a man who had been carrying a bag of bricks and for the first time has been able to put it down and just walk around and take in the sunshine.

I am happy for him. I never wished him other than the best of everything.

His current form has led, not unexpectedly, to suggestions that he be brought back to Celtic at the end of his loan and given a real chance in this team. Let me tell you, it’s hard to imagine him being a worse option than Luis Palma at the moment.

But you know, it’s just like that thing with the exes. When people go back there is invariably a short honeymoon. Then folk start to remember why they couldn’t put up with the other person. All the old bad habits and negative personality traits start to become obvious again, and those who have been through it know what stress that leads to.

And I suspect that’s where we’d be.

Mikey is thriving explicitly because he’s no longer under the spotlight at Celtic Park.

I know West Brom fans flirted briefly with the idea, some years ago, that they are a bigger club than we are because they were playing in the EPL at the time, but that’s a distant memory and they’ve been revealed again as what we said they were. They are back to being a club which considers loan deals for our reserves to be good business.

Mikey will never be under the kind of pressure there that he would be under here, and I don’t think he copes well with that pressure. He’s capable of being a fine player and I’ve always said it, but he just can’t produce it when he’s in a Celtic shirt.

This is not unique to him. This happens to players who get a chance to play for their boyhood teams and find it suffocating.

I know he wants to. I know he wouldn’t have gone anywhere if he was getting these opportunities here at home, but we have to be honest and admit to ourselves that whenever he’s had those opportunities, he has succeeded mainly in frustrating us and himself and I cannot shake the feeling that if he did return to Celtic it would just be more of the same.

I want the boy to do well. He should net us a very nice transfer fee, either from West Brom or someone else, and we should allow him to go out and do his thing.

Rodgers likes him, sure, but I don’t see Rodgers guaranteeing him first team football even if he stays as boss beyond this season; you would have to think he’ll have plans for a major rebuild and that leaves Mikey even further out of the running.

He wants, he needs, to be playing regularly.

So as nice as it is to see him doing well, we ought to let him go. For his sake and for ours. The boy is wasted sitting on the bench and that’s where he’d end up all over again. He’s having the time of his life right now.

That’s ultimately for the best, for him as well as for us.