Kvistgaarden Was A Mark Lawwell Target. The Celtic Boss Cannot Trust That Judgement.

Earlier in the week, The Record ran a bunch of reports on the Danish striker Mathias Kvistgaarden, reports which suggested that his club might be willing to let him go during the summer. The Record seemed to think they’d want a fee ranging from £6 million to more than £10 million.

This was supposed to be exciting news for Celtic fans. I can’t be the only person who was entirely unmoved, and much less than excited by it. It would be over-paying to a fare-thee-well in either case. It raised the question again; do Celtic see something in this guy that justifies that kind of transfer fee? I have looked over his stats, and I genuinely don’t get it.

I see this player as belonging to the Mark Lawwell era; he’s one of the names who emerged during his brief tenure. When you look at the state of the summer business, you have to think all his target lists are pretty much null and void. Certainly, Brendan Rodgers has no basis on which to trust a single one of the names on them. That bizarre experiment in nepotism failed so spectacularly that everything about it is tainted, and none of it should be relied upon.

I think we need to quite literally rip it all up and start again.

Rodgers will have fresh ideas, and I would be astonished if this guy made the shortlist.

There’s nothing in his record which suggest to me that he’s anything special.

He’s playing in a league which is poorer by every measure than the one we’re playing in, and he doesn’t score on anything like a regular basis in it, at one of the better teams, so he’s hardly blazing a trail to our door, is he? He’s hardly a player we can’t afford to lose out on.

We made a move in August. During one of the worst transfer windows in living memory, and we should all remember that. The man who identified him has been the sacrificial lamb for the disaster of the summer, although I do believe other heads should have rolled.

To the best of our knowledge, this never went further than an inquiry. I certainly do not believe there is any real interest in the guy now.

For me, I’d spend the much more modest sum that Idah would cost us, bring him in as a backup, get shot of Oh, and keep looking for the guy who will add real firepower for the Champions League. A striker from Bronby who is 5’8 and who ticks none of the boss’s “pace and power” boxes isn’t going to cut it, especially not when he barely made it into double digit goal territory.

This one reeks of “project signing” and that would be bad enough.

But to suggest that we spend proper money on him, the kind of money that the papers are talking about and which Bronby appears to want, makes it sound insane. That’s way too much to spend on a footballer who has achieved nothing of note in the sport.

This is football. You cannot buy certainty. But Celtic will not, Celtic must not, spend £6 million plus on uncertainty, and especially not when everyone who looks at it can see clearly that he is not the sort of player the manager has told us repeatedly that he wants.

If he’s such a great player, Mark Lawwell will sign him for whichever mega-club he winds up at next, if in fact he ever again finds himself in a role like that at a club of any note, which I have serious doubts about.

As with Lennon, this is the biggest gig he’ll ever have in his life and if it wasn’t for his second name he would never have got it.

But we should be aiming higher. We should be going for better.

We should – and this is a crazy notion, and I freely admit it here – be giving the manager the things he says he needs, not deciding that for him.

That’s what Mark Lawwell and his Daddy did last summer and in doing so they have jeopardised this campaign. They still might bear their share of the responsibility for ruining it … the manager is more than capable of bailing them out, and I think he will.

But we all know what they did, and this player was one of the names on their list.

Even if you knew nothing else about him, isn’t that enough to pass on the idea?