Celtic cannot ask Jota to save a team that is fundamentally broken

Last night on the podcast, we devoted a significant section to talking about Jota. And I was Mr Negative, the gloomy prediction guy on the show, because I genuinely wonder whether we are ever going to see the player that we had before.

As I said on the podcast, we are not simply talking about a guy who has been injured and out of the game for two years because of a knock he took. We are talking about a player who suffered a serious ACL injury, but who before that had already gone through a lengthy period without playing regular first-team football after leaving Celtic.

And that, for me, is where the real problem lies.

It is not simply that Jota will struggle to regain match fitness after a long absence. It is that he is starting from a baseline which stretches much further back. Even if you conclude that he has fully recovered from the injury itself, there is still a far larger mountain for him to climb.

I love the kid. I want to see him back. I want to see him playing regular football. We all do.

But the danger in putting too much hope on this guy’s shoulders is that he will never be able to live up to it. The injury itself is only one part of the problem. You have that lengthy period before it when he was not playing regularly, and even if you get beyond the injury, the layoff and the lack of genuine match sharpness, there is still one momentous hurdle to overcome before we start talking about Jota as the hero who saves this season.

He is not going to solve the real problem.

Even if he came back tomorrow, even if he was immediately close to his best, he would not fix where Celtic are broken right now.

As everybody should be aware, our biggest problems are in the middle of the pitch, not out wide. Out wide, we certainly have questions to answer. There may not be obvious answers to them either.

People may not rate Tounekti. They may not rate Yang. They may think James Forrest no longer has the legs to play regularly. They may look at all our options on the left and conclude that none of them is good enough, and therefore pin their hopes on Jota solving that problem.

But that is not our biggest problem.

Our biggest problem is exactly where we all know it is: central midfield.

Unless Jota suddenly turns into a completely different footballer, grows a couple of feet and fills out into a big hard ball-winning bastard, his return is not going to change that.

His return gives us depth on the left which we do not presently have, and that is unquestionably a good thing. If he comes back even close to being the player that we know and love, that would be fantastic.

But if you do not have midfielders capable of winning the battle, controlling the centre of the pitch and getting the ball to Jota in dangerous areas, what good does he do?

It seems to me that in looking to Jota for the answer, people are fundamentally asking the wrong question.

I think it is already unfair to put so much on his shoulders. We are asking an awful lot of a footballer who has not been a regular first-team player for a very long time. But if we are asking him to solve all the problems of this team, that becomes impossible even if he is physically capable of getting back to his best.

This is exactly why I did not want people pinning everything on Camilo Duran and pretending that he would arrive as the guaranteed starter who suddenly made everything okay.

It is also why those criticising Kasper Høgh for not scoring enough goals are wrong, wrong, wrong.

This is a fundamentally broken system. This is a fundamentally broken team. Until we fix where the actual problem is, we are simply going to keep looking for new scapegoats every time somebody fails to produce miracles.

It would be an atrocity to make Jota one of those scapegoats simply because he cannot carry an impossible weight.

I understand the completely natural desire to see a player who has been out for so long return and immediately make an impact. And let’s be honest, we know that a fully fit Jota, ready to go, can make an impact on this team.

He is a fabulous footballer. He has the technical ability and the flair which gets supporters out of their seats and makes you believe something is about to happen every time he gets the ball.

I also understand people inside the club wanting to believe that his return represents some sort of fix.

But we have to be realistic about this.

We may not see a genuinely first-team-ready, fully sharp Jota until next season, and that is assuming everything goes well. Asking him to rescue this season without a proper pre-season behind him, without the rhythm which comes only from playing games week after week, is grossly unfair on the player and grossly unrealistic.

It also has the smell of an organisation looking for an easy answer because it does not want to confront the harder and more elemental decisions.

Jota is capable of being a transformative footballer in the right team, in the right system and with the right players around him.

But just as I wrote earlier about Benjamin Nygren, there are areas of this Celtic side which demand attention before anything else can function properly.

Until those areas are fixed, the machine will not work as it is supposed to.

I was already concerned that supporters would put too much emphasis on Jota’s return, and that would have worried me even if the rest of the team had been functioning properly.

But for those who believe he can walk back into this side and fix everything that is wrong, we are setting ourselves up for major disappointment and setting the player up for criticism that he simply does not deserve.

He has to be brought back slowly.

He has to be brought back carefully.

Most importantly, we have to severely temper our expectations about what he can produce and how quickly he can produce it.

Without that, we are pissing in the wind.

To make Jota responsible for carrying this fractured team would be the worst offence of all. I would rather see him sitting in the stands than being thrown onto the pitch with the expectation that he somehow saves this.

There are no shortcuts here, folks. There are no easy answers. There is no one-player fix which is going to solve all of Celtic’s problems.

We are a minimum of one, and probably two, tough-tackling central midfielders away from being a properly functioning unit again. And even that only works if there is a coherent tactical plan underpinning everything else we do.

Jota cannot fix that.

Not even close.

Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.