Did Celtic dodge a bullet over Kyogo’s injury issues? And did Rennes get hit with it at the weekend?

Ever since I first heard the story, I’ve been fascinated by the apocryphal tale of how King Dionysius chose to demonstrate the perils of power by having one of his courtiers, Damocles, sit on his throne for a while.

The danger of that position was made clear when Damocles looked up and found that, hanging ever over the king, was a sword suspended by a single hair.

That story has been passed down through the generations. Cicero, the great Roman senator, orator, consul, and statesman, was fond of it and used it as part of his range of allegorical tales to highlight the pressures of leadership. Nowadays, the “sword of Damocles” is used as an idiom for just about any situation that carries an inherent degree of known risk.

As everyone knows, I was a little upset with the sale of Kyogo—but I was more upset with the timing of it than the fact of it. I was even more frustrated that we didn’t replace him, although we certainly had plenty of lead time to get our house in order.

But the sale itself was something I more or less could have got behind at any other time, under any other circumstances. And one reason stood out above all others: we had our very own sword of Damocles hanging over us every minute he was on the pitch.

At the weekend, he played briefly for Rennes before being taken off injured. The injury was to his shoulder—the same shoulder injury that had been a ticking time bomb for us the last couple of seasons.

It amazes me that we rode our luck and got away with it for as long as we did. And oddly enough, it was watching the third season of Sunderland ‘Til I Die that really brought home to me just how big a risk we had been taking.

If you’ve seen that season, you’ll know that one of their best players, their homegrown star Luke O’Nien, had a very similar injury to the one Kyogo had been carrying for the last couple of years. Opponents, knowing about O’Nien’s shoulder issue, frequently and regularly targeted him with all manner of roughhouse treatment designed to pop it out.

O’Nien got very used to coming off the field and having the physio pop his shoulder back into place. Like Kyogo, he was told that if he chose to have an operation, he would be out for many months. At the same time, he was warned that if he didn’t, he risked an even longer spell on the sidelines if one of those injuries turned out to be serious. O’Nien eventually opted for the surgery.

Last season, Brendan Rodgers told us what many of us had feared all along—that Kyogo needed that operation. And that if he didn’t get it, we were taking a major risk. But what was worse was that Rodgers pointed out that the recovery time could be as much as four months. That was when the risk of retaining Kyogo—knowing that we could face a four-month absence or even worse—became unacceptably high.

That threat hung over us, like the sword of Damocles, in every game he played for the last couple of years. And indeed, his shoulder has taken knocks during that time. Luckily, none of them resulted in a layoff that long, but some of his injuries were bad enough on their own. The signs were that they were only going to get worse, last longer, and become more severe.

It’s always a huge concern when you have a player operating under a cloud like that. Every single time he took a bump, your heart was in your mouth. And we were very fortunate that opponents in Scotland didn’t seem to target him in the way Luke O’Nien was at Sunderland. Or maybe they did target him, and they just couldn’t stick the landing—that’s not impossible.

Perhaps—and I certainly hope this is the case—his injury at Rennes is not serious. Maybe it’s one of those things he can recover from quickly and won’t require major surgery, ruling him out for months.

But I can’t help feeling that bullet was meant for us—and somehow, it missed and hit them instead. I can’t help but feel that we had a close escape because imagine we had retained Kyogo in January, turned that £10 million down, and then he’d gotten that injury anyway. No one benefits in that scenario. Certainly not Celtic.

The timing of his sale was still lousy. Our failure to replace him is still shockingly bad. But as I said before, when that risk is hanging over your head, ever present, ever concerning, that’s an untenable situation. I felt sure we would have moved him on in the summer anyway, and that one of the foremost considerations would have been the possibility of that shoulder popping at the worst possible time.

It was a risk we had been taking for too long. The longer you persist in taking a chance like that, the more the odds stack against you. As sure as I’m sitting here right now, it would have happened—and it probably would have been a serious blow when it did. Even a scenario where he voluntarily went and got the surgery in the close season would have ruled him out for preseason training and at least the first month of the next campaign.

The risk was unacceptably high, and it was only going to get higher. His departure had a certain inevitability about it. And if we needed any further lessons in that, Rennes got those lessons at the weekend.

Hopefully, the injury is not serious. Hopefully, the little man can get back to playing as quickly as possible.

But there is some comfort in knowing that it’s no longer something hanging over our heads. That sword now hangs above their club and one day it will fall.

Photo by JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER/AFP via Getty Images

Our latest podcast episode is up. We called it Just Another Saturday.