It Is Celtic, Not Norwich, Who Are To Blame For This Insane Adam Idah Impasse.

Adam Idah was in the news last night, and we all know by now I think what the story was. He missed the flight when Norwich flew out to Austria, because of an unknown issue, and when the manager got on the phone and told him he had to come out he did in fact go and at that point he was told he would be dropped from their friendly over there.

The manager was obviously angry and after the game said whatever was bothering him, the situation involving Celtic was certainly a major factor in it.

I’ve read a lot of comments suggesting that this is Idah’s fault. Players shouldn’t be spitting the dummy when they don’t get their way, and it makes me nervous, but I’m not ready to heap all the blame onto his shoulders, not when we have situations close to home where we’re walking on eggshells every day wondering if O’Riley’s head will be turned.

I’ve read comments suggesting that Norwich should not be standing in the way of his dream move. But that’s self evidently rubbish, and if someone in the media was writing that about our stance over Matt O’Riley I would be furiously telling them to mind their own business.

No, clubs know what our valuation of O’Riley is. Do we even know what valuation Norwich put on Idah? I’ll tell you this; we know it’s not as low as £4.5 million.

When a club gets serious about Matt they will make a serious offer and then sit down with us and negotiate in good faith. At that point a deal will either get done or it will not. Two teams have made bids, both are insulting. We all know this is the case, just as we all know there’s a deal to be done with Norwich … but only when we get real.

I’ve said right from the start that they had to be careful not to set a ridiculous fee we wouldn’t meet here and risk an unhappy player, but the offer we’ve made doesn’t come close to being serious, we’re at least £1.5 million short of that, and so what we’re actually doing is insulting the club that holds his registration and making them even more reluctant to talk.

Nothing about this makes us look good.

We’ve made a derisory offer and then walked away from the table. Last night we found out that Idah is still in the “Celtic WhatsApp group”; I see no reason why that would be the case and find it pretty ridiculous and I’d be extremely pissed off if this was one of our players, because it adds to the impression that people are playing games.

Whenever something like this happens with a player we’re trying to sign I always try to put myself in the shoes of the people at his club, and think about it as they must see it, and I would not blame them one bit if they were extremely pissed off by all this. It’s our club that is hanging this kid out to dry along with our manager who wants him signed.

We’ve behaved abysmally towards him and in the shabbiest possible manner towards his club. We had a responsibility to him, to the manager, to our own club and theirs to either make a proper, serious bid and to sit down with them and talk this through to see if a deal could be done, or to walk away from the table if one wasn’t possible.

For God’s sake, it’s been evident for over a month that we’re dragging our feet here when we could be moving on to other targets and we ought to have either came back with a real offer or made it known that we were looking elsewhere. That would have brought the closure to this which everyone involved needs in order to prepare for the season ahead.

Instead of doing this right, and trying to get it done quick, it seems we’ve tried to chart some shady middle ground, where we’re working on the player in the background and refusing to make a better offer to the people who control his future.

Nobody is to blame for this but us.

The way we’ve conducted ourselves in this whole window looks like we’re a club going through the motions and pretending that generating a few headlines counts as progress. If I were the Norwich chairman I’d be telling Celtic, and the player, in no uncertain terms, that whatever his future might be that no bid from our club will even be entertained at this point.

And you know something? If they do that, I don’t think we have a Plan B.

Today we might announce the signing of Bernardo.

Believe me, at this point I have no intention of greeting the announcement with fireworks and party streamers, not over a deal where we had a right-to-buy clause which we then re-negotiated downward and still messed about for more weeks when the manager wanted to get him in with others and get them up to speed.

The way we do business must be off-putting for clubs as well.

This might well be the last player Benfica loans us with a right-to-buy option, because they won’t trust us to honour it. And why would any club loan us a player anyway knowing that if the guy does well that we’ll play these sorts of games to unsettle him and then put in some low-ball bid? We do ourselves no favours at all.

But in this case, we’ve done Adam Idah no favours. We’ve encouraged him to believe we’d do everything we could to get him here and then submitted one derisory bid followed by a long radio silence and now he’s at loggerheads with his own manager and his own club and he’s pissed off their fans and made a rod for his back.

What a terrible way to behave. It’s like what the Ibrox club is attempting to do right now with Lawrence Shankland at Hearts, and what at least one club is attempting to do to us with Matt O’Riley and I can’t defend it and I won’t defend it.

For weeks now, this site and others have been almost begging the club to settle this issue, for our good, for his good, for the club’s good; either get it done or move along. Now our foot-dragging and our utter lack of respect for everyone involved has had a real-world consequence for the player, and we now cannot and must not let this drag on any longer.