Boyata crucial part of CL planning, failure to emulate Gretna
I know Ronny Deila was delighted Dedryck Boyata pitched up at Glasgow Airport last night. He’s a player the manager has known about for some time and one who was not on the Man City available list when we secured the loan deal for Jason Denayer a year ago.
The mechanics of the deal are interesting. It’s quite possible it wouldn’t have happened at all without the success Jason enjoyed in Glasgow. A year ago Jason was a complete unknown, below the pecking order than Dedryck, but we gave him a platform and now he’s a full Belgian international. The pitch we put to Dedryck was along the lines of “Look what Jason achieved here”. If we’d singed Dedryck instead of Jason a year ago, Jason would still be an unknown and Dedryck would be a Belgian international.
Assuming no late hiccups, Ronny will know his central defensive pairing for the Champions League qualifiers is sorted, allowing him to concentrate on other areas.
There are no guarantees in football, least of all with Champions League qualification, where we have three awkward knock-out rounds, but we’re starting the summer from a good place.
There’s so much to discuss about yesterdays’ Fir Park hilarity, the consequences of which will be profound. More on this later in the week, but a few points on Motherwell. For a team with such glaring shortcomings they deserved the scale of their victory. Barraclough took a squad who finished 11th in the league into two challenging games and out-thought his opponent.
However, if Celtic fans behaved the way Motherwell fans behaved yesterday your Government would be all over it by now. I’ve seen flares thrown onto pitches, I’ve seen pitch invasions (although I don’t remember seeing one congregating in front of opposition fans), but I’ve never seen a player smacked in the face and leg by a spectator’s flag, and I’ve never seen anything close to this entire repertoire from fans at a single game.
Who knows what the score would have been had Newco faced the team who finished 10th in the Premiership! Their attempt to emulate Grenta in winning three successive promotions always sounded like a tall order. They came close, but they’re no Gretna. Not. Nearly. As. Good.