The importance of Ryan Christie (24) to Celtic is difficult to overstate. He arrived on the scene at the League Cup semi-final at Murrayfield in October last year and reinvigorated a Celtic team that had stuttered their way through the early months of the season.
Christie joined Celtic in the summer 2015 transfer window but was immediately sent back to Inverness on a season-long loan. When that arrangement ended, he spent 18 months of the next two years on load at Aberdeen. His first three years as a Celtic player produced one 90-minute appearance and four where he appeared for part of the game.
Had he not gone on loan to Inverness and Aberdeen the subsequent blossoming of his talent would be very unlikely.
Ryan will be an inspiration to players like Lewis Morgan (23) and Marian Shved (22), who both hope to emulate his patient rise to first team regular, but at their age, Ryan was sharpening his skills with 90 minutes of competitive action every week. Apart from his brief spells on the sideline at Celtic, he has been a first-team regular for six years.
Mikey Johnston was ahead of both before injury and his return, together with the reduced load of European games ahead, makes it less likely Morgan (in particular) or Shved will see more game time. It both get a move in January that allows the regular football, the chances are no better than 50/50 one will make it at Celtic, but that chance disappears if they remain spectators.
99 Comments- Pages:
- «
- 1
- 2
- 3
” Hun lovin ” right enough.
The huns can`t get a win on the park.
They may well get a win at the AGM .
That being the case , the huns and their sycophants in the Scottish media will love it.
The resolutioners have a point. How they press that point home will determine whether their resolution gains any traction whatsoever .
A barney at the AGM will do nothing but harm Celtic and energise the hun .
That`s too high a price to pay for Celtic supporters who have the interests of Celtic at heart .
The **** ghost at the back post.
Wow.
Ìncccvreidibiblr.
Love id . Love is the Law.
RIP kèith.
Celtic is good macjay1.
You know that and I, me mySelf and I, realise Celtic under Neil Francis lennon…..
Pete i owe you an apology i called you a Trumpist on here last night. I might be the polar opposite politically but i believe your heart is in the right place, your love for your bhoy shines through as does your beliefs & love for Celtic. I humbly apologise for my post, letting myself down. The anger i have for hun lovin Criminals got the better of me.
Only love will set you free. HH 😉
Wow.
CLP,
You owe me no apology,
God Bless you Ruud Bhoy.
PETEC on 19TH NOVEMBER 2019 1:16 AM
We`re good on the park , Pete.
In fact , marvellous on the park .
We need to take care off the park .
No idea howmany have chucked it due to the corruption at the top of our game and the apparent buy in by the Plc but from those I know there are quite a few.
These are/were dyed in the wool tins whose support is/was not dependent on maintaining the old firm financial model. The Plc made a strategic decision to play for the snaw aff a dyke old firmists who will disappear if/when the Hun disappear and that becomes more likely with every financial failure, how often will they go into administration before their supporters realise they are a failed and flawed entity?
Without that illusion of superiority they will chuck it and that will lead to their final demise.
Meanwhile the Plc whose strategy is/was to make hay while the sun shines off the back of old firm will watch the old firmists walk away leaving them without their target clientele And those who placed integrity above cash. This strategy does not protect the club but in fact damages our long term prospects.
When you worship at the alter of Amon there can only ever be one strategy, money at all costs.
The Plc could very easily assess how many walked away because of corruption by simply asking a few questions of those who have not renewed since 2012, I suspect they do not want to know through the sheer arrogance that they know best.
Celtic Plc is not a learning organisation
Good morning CQN from a very cauld Garngad, -4 again.⛄️⛄️⛄️
I hope our Scottish contingent get through tonight’s game unscathed and indeed all of our international bhoys this week come back un injured. We have a physical game on Saturday.
Bring on the Hammer throwers of Livy.
D. :)
Two hours and twenty five minutes without a post (This one does not count) ?
What is happening to CQN ?
Surely it cnnot be just because it is International Week?
….or is it because I cannot spell `cannot` ?
Saracens & The Shaming of Scottish Football Governance
by Mark | Nov 9, 2019
On Tuesday, Premiership Rugby Limited (PRL) announced that their reigning champions Saracens face heavy sanctions for breaking the competition’s salary-cap regulations in each of the last three seasons.
The general reaction of England’s sports media was approving, especially from football journalists wearying of English football’s considerable financial governance issues. The Guardian’s David Conn, perhaps the most wearied coverer of English football’s financial maladministration, called Saracens’ 35-point deduction and £5,360,272.31 fine a “thumping judgment,” hailing it “a spectacle of a sport robustly applying its rules.” And this spectacle drew inevitable responses from Scottish football fans, which, in turn, drew wearyingly inevitable responses from Scottish sports journalists.
From within rugby union, Exeter chief executive Tony Rowe made a headline-grabbing but not entirely illogical call for Saracens’ relegation, citing “professional sport in America” where “you get thrown out completely” for salary-cap breaches. His analogy isn’t exact. American professional sports’ tend not to countenance relegation. Incidentally, a 35-point deduction would not have relegated Saracens last season, although it would have prevented them “(ending up) at Twickenham” in Rugby’s Premiership final, via its play-offs, which Rowe asserts could yet happen this season.
Exeter have particular cause to be miffed at Saracens’ activities, which former England and current Harlequins captain Chris Robshaw intriguingly called “cheating to a certain extent.” The Devon club lost the last two Premiership finals to Saracens and their boss Rob Baxter claimed it was “pretty obvious that these titles have been won unfairly.”
However, he stopped short of suggesting that Exeter be awarded those titles, despite Saracens’ narrow, come-from-behind victory in the 2019 final. Displaying admirable integrity, he said “the whole truth” was that while Saracens might not have made the final “with a different group of players,” another club “might have outperformed us on the day.” Anyway, “title-stripping” was not an option, regardless of whether the titles were awarded elsewhere or not at all, as the salary-cap regulations do not facilitate retrospective sanction, or sanction at all beyond points deductions and/or fines.
Ben Chisneros, author of the “Rugby and the Law” blog, found it “really odd” that retrospective action was unavailable. But he added that “it would be incredibly difficult” for clubs to win legal claims for titles or compensation as “the issue of proof would be so complicated.” They would need to “establish that they lost something” or “could have won the Premiership had Saracens not broken the rules. How on earth do you prove that?”
Saracens’ financial misdemeanours are complex. An appeal might have good grounds. And, my hurting head has decided, they are not the concern of this piece. Suffice to say they were thoroughly investigated by a PRL “Independent Panel” without fear or favour. And, after a five-day hearing during September and October, the Middlesex club were found to have “failed to disclose payments to players” and “exceeded the ceiling for payments to players” in “2016-17, 2017-18 and 2018-19.”
Saracens are English rugby’s biggest club and current European champions. The points deduction could conceivably threaten their financial future, as they may struggle to qualify for lucrative European club competitions, especially the Champions Cup. And here (at last) we get to the reason for Scottish football fans’ interest in and reaction to PRL’s robust rules application. The contrast between PRL’s willingness to apply the rules, regardless of the club involved, and Scottish football authorities’ willingness to bend/ignore the rules, BECAUSE of the club involved.
You know the drill. Rangers went unsanctioned for their misdemeanours. Partly because they drowned in a sea of debt anyway. And partly because Scotland’s football authorities covertly agreed that the assets of the liquidated Rangers could transfer to a new club but the liabilities, including sanctions, would not.
Predictably, Celtic fans were especially quick to suggest that PRL had put Scottish football governance to shame. And, predictably, most Scottish football journalists said next-to-next-to-nothing, aware that the Saracens scandal was uncovered by the sort of proper investigative journalism (take a bow, the Daily Mail newspaper’s Laura Lambert and the ‘Sportsmail’ team) which seems far beyond their capabilities.
One exception was the BBC’s Tom English, a rugby man, who seemed to react wholly appropriately, tweeting within an hour of Tuesday’s announcement: “Wow! England’s ‘model’ club exposed. The Saracens success story has a giant asterisk beside it. Should some domestic titles be stripped?” Yet there was a sense that he was taking the p*ss, raising the spectre of title-stripping to raise the hackles of Celtic fans.
It worked, because of course it did. One politer tweet labelled English’s hypocrisy “astounding” and suggested he had “no shame.” English suggested that the tweeter “keep your insults to yourself.” And he noted: “The governing body of the league has found Saracens guilty. Did that happen with Rangers?” This, presumably, was a reference to the then Scottish Premier League’s investigation into Rangers chaired by Lord Nimmo-Smith, among whose many flaws was treating two Rangers player remuneration schemes as one, despite one being unlawful and the other being lawful…at the time, anyway.
And English added on Wednesday that he had been “bombarded by both sides of the Old Firm” in an outbreak of “peak Celtic and Rangers cyber bonkerdom.” He insisted that “not everything is about your clubs, lads. ” And he advised that “sometimes a rugby tweet is simply about rugby and not a subliminal call to arms for the paranoid.”
This would have been easier to believe if English hadn’t specifically asked about title-stripping, He could have answered his own question by checking PRL’s salary-cap regulations. As decent journalists would do; especially as the Mirror newspaper reported Saracens’ sanction as the “maximum,” before his tweet, while the Guardian newspaper directly answered his question just after it. I mean, it took me three minutes to find the relevant paragraph, number 14, which details said penalties.
Unlike many of his Scottish football colleagues, English is a decent journalist. So, I suspect he knew what he was doing (he tweeted that this was “the most predictable response ever,” which was a non-denial denial). And he almost seemed to delight in Celtic fans’ frustrations that Rangers had gone unsanctioned, even for “(failure) to disclose payments to players,” of which Saracens were specifically found guilty. English properly pointed his critics this week to his commentary track record on Rangers finances. Which merely made you wonder what’s changed.
Because it isn’t “bonkerdom” or paranoid to highlight the contrast between PRL’s robust rule application and Scottish football authorities’ robust rule disregarding. Indeed, it is a natural, legitimate response. And EXACTLY what you would expect from a journalist doing their job properly, as Lambert did. That a well-regarded journalist such as English disregards these concerns gives succour to clubs looking to circumvent good governance. Which is the antithesis of responsible journalism.
This still matters. Rangers’ latest accounts reveal a club travelling the same overspending path to financial ruin as its pre-2012 namesake. A lucrative Europa League run is their current main hope of salvation. But the old club’s over-reliance on European revenue proved fatal. Out of Europe entirely in August 2011, they were in administration in February and newspaper sub-editors were writing “Rangers RIP” headlines in June. And the Scottish Football Association (SFA) granting Rangers a licence to play in Europe at all in 2011/12 still rankles with those (of us) who have seen all the paperwork.
However, this isn’t just a Rangers thing anymore. After years of crap TV deals and the like, gate receipts remain a far more significant tranche of Scottish clubs’ incomes than has been the case in England for even more than the Premier League’s financially disfiguring 27-year existence. And two clubs share xx% of the top division’s ground capacity. Thus, Scottish football’s business model is now so over-reliant on those clubs that you suspect rules would be bent backwards for both.
This point is argued all-too-rarely, especially by the other Scottish professional clubs, none financially significant enough to have rules bent for their benefit (although co-incidentally, honest, it was well-made this week by “Fans without Scarves,” a website promoting Scottish football governance reform). Which is another stark contrast between Scottish football and Premiership rugby.
Where Scottish football clubs have largely acquiesced, Premiership rugby clubs have largely not, with representatives from Harlequins, Sale and Northampton joining Exeter in backing Saracens’ sanctions. “Saracens have never courted popularity but they have never been more isolated than now,” noted the Guardian’s Paul Rees on Thursday.
Meanwhile, on the Scottish parks, the ‘Old Firm’ may only be ‘back’ due to Rangers’ salary and transfer overspends. But off the parks, it is very much back, as Celtic chief executive Peter Lawwell vividly demonstrated recently. When Rangers went pop, Celtic made great play of ceasing to use the phrase “Old Firm,” and Lawwell made great play of Celtic’s “stand-alone financial plan” (“we don’t rely on any other club”). But this is now just window-dressing.
Lawwell spent years asking for proof (a “smoking gun”) that the SFA should not have granted Rangers a European licence in 2011. Celtic shareholders who have doggedly and admirably pursued the issue since submitting ‘Resolution 12’ to Celtic’s November 2013 AGM, provided that proof. And Lawwell and the Celtic board will tell this November’s AGM that further action is “not in the interests of the company.”
So, there you have it. Proper Scottish football governance? Not in the interests of its champions. While we watch the “spectacle of Premiership Rugby robustly applying its rules” to ITS champions. And Scotland’s football media stay silent, or take the piss. While English counterparts expose wrongdoing. The contrasts have never been more shameful.
Divided, then conquered……..?
No 6 page summaries, no 8 page reflections (with addendums)
What is it we all want?
Fix Fitba: Empty Hampden………………….
HH
Hot Smoked,
Celtic is Cruising.
Magical so it is.
GOALS GALORE.
Has there not been a post since0933?
CADDINGTONCOMMON
It appears not.
🍀⚽️
Caddingtoncommon, Surprising after that fantastic post from Henril1967.
Oops, Henrik.
I missed this morning’s weather report. Like yesterday, except a new low was recorded for my back garden (this winter so far). Minus 8c. Brass monkeys are all indoors.
🍀⚽️
Yes HENRIK1967, thanks for posting that. Excellent.
🍀⚽️
new article posted.