After ten substitute appearances, Karamoko Dembele joins a long list of other prodigies, released by Celtic (or a later club) without achieving their hoped-for level. Unlike many of the others, Karamoko stayed, hoping to make the breakthrough here, but despite attracting global attention as a 15-year-old and making his debut soon after turning 16, it looks likely the London-born player is set for a career as a jobbing player.
Islam Feruz is just seven years older than Dembele. Chelsea beat off a host of competitors to sign him when he left the Celtic structure at 16. A career totalling 20 appearances ended five years ago with a loan spell at Swindon, remembered mostly for his conviction for driving his Porsche while disqualified.
The body of evidence grows that a player’s potential cannot be reliably assured I his mid-teens. Ben Doak (16), who made his Celtic debut, played in that memorable 3-0 win over Newco, then signed for Liverpool, has it all to prove.
Barry Hepburn, now 18, who left Celtic for Bayern Munich two years ago, or Liam Morrison, who we lost to the same club a year earlier, have it all to prove in Germany. Morrison has made just four appearances for the Reserves in three years since joining Bayern, two from the bench. Hepburn has made the Reserves’ bench only once in two years, but was unused.
Football is absolutely brutal when it comes to inflating and ending the hopes of young talent. A tiny percentage of those considered near certain to make it, actually do. No judgement on Doak, Morrison or Hepburn. They would have gone with dreams of Champions League glory and no doubt an unbelievable wage. Their next contract offer may be less attractive.
323 Comments- Pages:
- «
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- »
aribo is a far better than the £25m Bassey
I will second that,come on Novak.
If that hun wins it the vermin will have him at the lavvy showing off his trophy and doing the fifty quid draw at half time
Philbhoy.
You getting into practice for the first live comments of the noo year ? 5.30 pm k.o time
:-)
Fresh season,phasers to Malky , setting out the path to a good season
HH.
The Cult for the obsessed Ernie
https://youtu.be/ZCOSPtyZAPA
B78 @ 8.13
AM and his ER connections.
I thought it had come primarily from his dad.
Appreciate the direct Judy connection but AM seems to suggest in some comments that that it came from his dad.
Dad on the books @ ER — never mentioned .
I thought he had a career on the railways — CE / Track stuff.
AM’s uncle seemingly followed in his footsteps and he did work for BR in the 80’s.
CFC affiliations — Not sure if the family were true believers.
Possibly not that engaged by the “Old FIrm” angle of the 50’s / 60’s — the BB from the Raploch scenario.
From memory his uncle was not very outspoken regarding football — over 40 years ago so the memories have dimmed.
He was very talented though at most sports so I would suggest the tennis gene came from Kiltoon and not Dunblane.
If only AM would bung the town a few quid to upgrade the local courts — only in Scotland / only in Kiltoon.
Philbhoy
You stick with the establishment. That is your right. I am sure Cameron won’t need your following on Thursday.
For me Novak is a consummate professional and wins his games fair and square on the court.
That he has the temerity to stand up for his rights rather than be bullied in an ever changing political circus makes me more inclined to side with him.
Personally I always prefer the rebel than those who staunchly fall in line and are championed by the establishment and especially the BBC…..but I guess if we all saw things the same it would be a boring world.
Seem to recall reading on here
Tommy Burns always advised young players that they had to take their chance the very first time they got picked for the first team.
What a sad day when Tommy passed.
I have the red haired gene, please be aware that people with the red hair gene are more susceptible to skin cancer.
St Stivs
Got sent this wee docu on Montserrat(the Irish isle)
It is called The Black Irish
https://youtu.be/PzxRuSh4bXo
HH
mad mitch
When was Andy Murray’s dad on the books at Easter Road?
Looking forward to the pre-season matches.
Just hope we don’t get any serious injuries. Karamoke Dembele and Dylan McGeoch spring to mind. Any others in recent times?
Ernie’s perception of all Scottish independence supporters without exception
https://youtu.be/GT2yrmyNGM0
‘A fourth characteristic of a group that has become a cult or is behaving in a cult-like manner is that there will be a persecution complex. A group of outside forces will be identified who are “the enemy”. A little fortress will be built in which all those on the inside are the “faithful ones” while all those on the outside will increasingly be demonized and feared. There will be no real effort to build bridges or get to know those on the outside. There will be no real effort to treat the outsiders as real people. Instead they are the enemy to be kept at arms’ length and against whom the faithful will usually project their fears and suspicions. At worst the enemy will have all the sins and fears and dark negativities projected on them.’
I think both Novak and Rafa are fantastic. Incredibly talented athletes with an amazing desire to win. Anytime I’ve heard them speaking off court they’ve come across as decent men with a good sense of fun. Roger Federer also amazing, just don’t warm to him in the same way
When they meet in the final I’ll be wanting both to win.
Hot Smoked
Total respect for Rafa as an athlete and for his incredible mental strength and for his tennis ability.
For me he plays the system and the umpires to the limit and leverages his media popularity to the max.
It falls just short of cheating, maybe, but watching the clock on his serving last Tuesday against his young argentine opponent was revealing. He took the full 25 seconds and beyond on 5 occasions amd was never called or warned, all when he was struggling a bit in the 3rd set. Nothing was said of course. Again on Saturday when his opponent had broken him and was working up momentum and he calls him to the net which was breaking normal protocol and broke his opponents focus.
None of it is cheating as such but these are 2 recent examples of playing the umpire and his popularity to the max.
He is an incredible athlete, probably the best ever, which is why his gamesmanship disappoints really.
You were right to challenge me on outright cheating. The drugs / steroid / doping accusations remain just that until proven.
Hopefully that is a fair response and acknowledgment of your ‘challenge’.
Yup Still Tony Blair
All over it.
Dissent you say? Yeh that cut the death toll didn’t it.NOT.
An apologist for somebody not even a socialist.
Thatchers biggest success – Tony Blair
HH
Hot Smoked
Thanks for posting The Declaration of Arbroath theater night.
👍
HH
The other night
burnley78
Looks like the Scottish Open will have a full line up teeing off on Thursday after ban lifted.
Good news from a golf point of view and for an event preceding the 150th Open at St Andrews.
Doesnt end the debate on sportswashing mind.
CM @ 9.48
AM’s dad on the books at ER.
That came for our good friend Stx2 @ 8.48.
I have no recollection of his career in football anywhere.
The only info I got was that he worked in the railway in CE / trackwork and did nightschool.
My Kiltoon info gathering operation is/was only interested in his career.
His younger brother did work for BR back in the 80’s.
From memory he was not vocal about CFC.
Good at sports though.
Didn’t watch sevco very often last season, only against us and a couple of other games , on those occasions Aribo seemed to me to be comfortably their best player.
nine
Looking forward to a bit of the gane tomorrow
My hero nearly checked out last night
Probably won’t make
CF this season
Celtic Mac- i think what’s happening is the Tours need the players, more than the players need the Tours,they won’t sell tickets, unless the top guys are playing, money wins as always…
First their top striker and now Putellas their top player are ruled out of the Euros for Spain.
It seems to be falling into the lap of Engerland before the tournament even starts.
MM
I think it was AM grandfather who played ?
Origins of Scottish Nationhood
Neil Davidson
The Origins of Scottish Nationhood
Pluto, London 2000, pp. 264
ALL nationalism is based on mythical history, and the Scots version is no exception. For example, the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath is presented as proof that Scotland is the oldest nation in Europe. The Act of Union with England in 1707 is presented as a catastrophic defeat, while the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 demonstrate that the Scots can still hope to be, ‘a nation once again’, as the song has it. Most of the time, admittedly, the struggle took less dramatic forms. The nation survived, thanks to the Gaelic language, the rich folk memory of a pre-capitalist culture, and the music and traditional dress, which lift Scots’ hearts whenever we see our Highland regiments march past. While union with England was a disaster, fragments were saved from the wreckage. Scotland retained its established church, Scots law, and its educational system, all significantly different from the English versions. So, while Scotland is still subject to the English yoke, the nation is not dead, but sleeping. Why did the sleep last so long, and what made the nation awake when it did?
Davidson’s important study provides a very different version of Scots history, showing that the signatories of the Declaration of Arbroath were asserting their claim to rule over their own tenants and serfs, not leading the liberation struggle depicted in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart. The claims made for the Declaration are as spurious as those made for the Magna Carta. Davidson’s demolition of nationalist myths is very convincing. He argues that the Act of Union, usually presented as the defeat of the nation, was one of the preconditions for the emergence of national feeling. The 1707 settlement ensured that the Scots élites retained their traditional privileges. Davidson refutes the standard claim that Scots national identity was secured by the trinity of Kirk, Law and Education. Education is not mentioned in the Act of Settlement, not surprisingly as most of the population had little contact with it. The Church of Scotland failed to establish a religious monopoly, while most of the population dreaded contact with the legal system. Incorporation into the developing Empire was much more important than any of those for developing a Scots identity.
National consciousness, as distinct from nationalism, had begun to develop in the Lowlands in the period before the union with England. The social system of the Highlands, feudalism with large pre-feudal elements, was a huge obstacle to the development of Scots capitalism. To the Lowland farmer, the Highlander was a cattle-thief, not a fellow countryman. A bourgeois society was created by brutally smashing the pre-capitalist Highland social system, which was good practice for future repression further afield. When the threat from perceived Highland barbarians receded, Scottish élites invented a national identity from the romantic idealisation of the society which they had so recently helped to destroy. Davidson is very informative on Scots economic and political participation in the British Empire. Far from being junior partners, as is so often claimed, Scots capitalists were disproportionately important. Scots also played a key rôle in the Empire’s military, police and administration. The stereotype of the stiff-upper-lipped colonial official could hardly have been modelled on the relaxed and garrulous English.
Nationalist movements have to create their ideologies from such scraps as come to hand, but Scots nationalists are luckier than most. The British state promoted a picturesque Scots identity within and beyond Scotland’s boundaries. Monarchs from Victoria onwards have encouraged grotesque Highland ceremony, and no imperial occasion was complete without Scots regiments with their tartan and pipe bands. Scots national identity, a subdivision of British imperial identity, was available when needed. Radical nationalists now insist that the Scots were among the first to be colonised, and like to quote Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth to demonstrate that they were and remain oppressed, just like Africans and Asians. Does anyone in the Third World believe that story? Davidson refutes the loopy radical nationalist historians in the Scottish Socialist Party, who see early nineteenth century workers’ struggles as rebellions against English rule, although the workers made no such claims, and the employers were also Scots.
Scots nationalism is a modern phenomenon. The Scottish Nationalist Party was established only in the 1920s, and had little electoral success until the 1960s. Stories from the fourteenth or eighteenth century are used to stitch together an essentially new garment. Nationalism remains essentially limited, posing few problems for the British state or, so far, for the Scots labour movement. The SNP, which wants the British Army to retain its Scots regiments, and presses the merits of Scots airfields as bases to bomb the Serbs, is hardly a subversive force.
John Sullivan
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/backiss/vol7/no4/sullivan.html
!!bada bing!!
Good line up in Ireland at the weekend, but I hardly knew anybody at the John Deere.
Probably know more players at the upcoming CQN Open.
Let’s hope we’re talking footie tomorrow night
Till then
Burnley78 @ 9:48
Agreed, on all points 👍
HH
Djokovic is a proven liar and a cheat, that tried unvaccinated to sidestep the pandemic and flagrantly flaunted the rules from the very beginning of Covid. His anti vaxxer stance ( just so that he could continue with his career ) ended in his lying his way into Australia, from where he was rightfully deported. Presently unable to get entry into the USA, his initial response to Covid was to organise a grand scale tennis tournament in total denial, and at which many people caught Covid.
The temerity to claim he has simply a right to choose doesn’t dissassociate him from the thousands of anti vaxxers, you run with the craw you get shot with the craw. Everyone has the right to choose, good ones didn’t go about asymptomatic and spreading the thing.
The graveyards are full of Djokovic’s.
Evening all….not Dickson of Dock green here. Just this boring auld fart David66.
So we were joined today by my son in laws auntie Mel and her partner Bret a couple of cockney geezers, but Mel is fluent in Turkish. So now i can learn the phrase of Hail Hail the Celts are here in Turkish. Bret doesnt like football but was brought up beside West Hams ground …aye right yar matey.
Going to just watch the game tomorrow on the ipad in 1 of the 14 bars.
On a different note the fruit and veg in this country in the markets is incrediblle.
Oh and the beer from the 14 bars helps.
Already seen fake new away tops for sale here….wtf
So a treble for me this year and tomorrow morn.
Good to see my big pal big Jimmy posting. Keep well Amigo.
D :)
Regarding Nadal’s “gamesmanship ” isn’t he just using every tool available to him to gain an advantage over his opponent surely if he is breaking any rules its upto the umpire to ensure he is punished.Watched most of Norrie’s match tonight thought he wasn’t 2nd best but showed great resolve to win.
He was 2nd best….doh.
B78 @ 10.26
AM’s Hibbee GF — would that be on his mum’s side?
My limited info only covers his dad’s side of the family.
No info on that GF or what his past was.
As noted earlier — fading memory — his uncle was not very outspoken about football.
So not sure if his dad / dad’s family had affiliations with our friends in the east @ ER.
If they had then they were very posh Kiltoon — Easties rather than Westies..
Celtic Mac- there was a better field at JP McManus Charity Tournament last couple of days,than both tournaments at the weekend….
Aribo’s fee is apparently £4M raising to £10 M with lots of add ons which seems pretty realistic for a guy that could sign a pre-contract in 6 months time….big loss to Sevco..their best player last season imho.
Heh David66
Hope yir mob having a great time.
HH