Brendan Rodgers was giving little away about his plans to bring in a new striker to replace Kyogo Furuhashi when he met the media ahead of Celtic’s Champions League clash with Aston Villa.
The celebrations for reaching the Play Off stage of the competition had barely died down following the 1-0 win over YB Bern last week when very definite news emerged from France that Rennes had completed a deal to sign the Japanese striker.
After flying to France on Thursday it was late on Monday morning that the transfer was confirmed, for Celtic fans that news was cushioned by the return of Jota after 18 months away. The former Benfica man is a crowd pleaser and goal-scorer but not a striker.
With less than a week to go in the transfer window a new striker is expected but ahead of facing Villa with Adam Idah the only forward in the squad Rodgers wasn’t dropping any hints about Celtic’s next big transfer.
He did conformIt that a pre-contract deal has been agreed with Kieran Tierney, that development is welcomed but hardly a surprise like the suddenness of Kyogo’s exit.
Celtic weren’t in desperate need of an extra £10m but it seems that there are issues identifying and delivering on a new striker.
Rodgers repeated that Kyogo had expressed his wish months ago to leave Celtic but with time running out in the transfer window a successor to compete with and compliment Idah has still to be delivered.
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Asked about the impact of losing Kyogo, Rodgers said:
Clearly he has been a real iconic player for the club, he’s done absolutely brilliant in his time so it’s about getting a replacement. I think he made that clear, he is a player that has done a great job but he wanted to leave, we have to move on from that and look to the next player to come in.
QUESTION: How confident are you that that will happen?
RODGERS: Yes, well there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes, like I’ve said, we’ve known for a number of months what it was going to look like. Clearly we didn’t want to have sold him, certainly at this point but he made it clear that he wanted to move, when that is the case we have to find the best solution for the club so, and the club will work very hard, we’ll try to get in an able replacement.
Mathias Kvistgaarden of Brondby is the name most repeated in terms of Celtic signing a striker but it is unclear if the interest is genuine or whether it is simply reviving speculation from previous transfer windows.
With the Champions League Play Offs coming up on February 11/12 and 18/19 time is at a premium to get a new signing in the club and introduced to the style of play.
News of a deal for Tierney does close one long running transfer issue but it is the arrival of a new striker that Celtic fans are scanning the news sites in search of.
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Gary Keown of the Daily Mail can’t hold back his disgust at Celtic’s Champions League success
Gary Keown has produced one of the most incredible hatchet jobs on Celtic ever published, the win over YB Bern and the subsequent celebrations have reopened old wounds for the Daily Mail columnist.
Keown is paid for his opinion, it seems to chime very closely with most Ibrox fan media sites, even verging towards you know what with a claim that there has been a stampede to have a Sainthood bestowed upon Brendan Rodgers. I must have missed those claims.
Celtic’s success does of course cause the deepest of pain for many inside Scottish football, when Rodgers returned to Celtic in June 2023 Keown branded his first stint as a failure. Thankfully Mark Warburton, Pedro Caixinha, Mister Gerrard, Micky Beale, Giovanni van Bronckhorst and Phil Clement achieved real failure at Ibrox, none of them getting close to the ‘failures’ of Rodgers.
It seems that the phrase knock-out has given Keown something to get upset over, Celtic will be involved in knock-out ties next month but they aren’t the real ones according to the European expert from the Daily Mail:
Technically, it could be argued that Celtic are in the Champions League knockouts.
And there are certainly plenty advancing that argument in the breathless aftermath of their skin-of-the-teeth one-goal win against the worst team in the competition.
It’s just not true, though, is it? They’re in a play-off to get to the knockout rounds. The knockout rounds proper, that is.
And amid the stampede to have Sainthood bestowed upon Brendan Rodgers and Callum McGregor nominated to be the next First Minister, perhaps that ought to be remembered.
Celtic have done well to secure a place in the top 24 of the new-look league system. There is no question they have made progress in Europe this season — although, given the club’s previous reputation as a punchbag for the continent’s flotsam and jetsam, the only way was up, to be perfectly frank.
Punchbag? Must be getting confused with van Bronckhorst’s efforts in 2022. When his team finished with zero points and a -20 goal difference, that stat would have been much worse if Liverpool had put Mo Sallah on before the 68th minute of their trip to Ibrox, the Egyptian only had time for a hat-trick.
Those record breakers won’t be beaten, there will never again be four team Champions League groups, in their one and only Champions League season the Tribute Act formed by Charles Green in 2012 were the worst in the 31 years of that format.
Keown added:
For this campaign to be a real success — a real exercise in planting the flag after years of being manacled in a cave to be kicked around by the likes of Sparta Prague’s reserve team and Maribor — they need to go one step further and be back mixing it with the elite. Mixing it in the games that really, really matter.
This not an attempt to be harsh. It is not an attempt to belittle what this Celtic side have achieved.
Just a bit late to start back-tracking, your hurt, anger and pain from the last decade or so is overwhelming. Better to stick to the boxing if football is causing so much grief.
Slovan Bratislava are described as dugmeat, probably more apt for his Thursday night viewing than to describe the Slovakian champions.
And on we go, more anger from yer man Keown:
The goalless draw at Dinamo Zagreb, meanwhile, was like watching paint dry and last Tuesday’s 1-0 win over Young Boys, eked out thanks to a freakish own goal late on, will hardly have sent shockwaves around the planet.
It created a few more shockwaves than a VAR decision in the League Cup Final that Clement claimed was the talk of Europe because a few old Belgian chums sent him a text message.
People have been falling over themselves to lavish praise on Celtic this week. You’d think they’d landed a space probe on Saturn given the eagerness to scatter rose petals in their path for seeing off a team languishing ninth out of 12 in the Swiss Super League.
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No one is trying to play down what has happened here. No one is using Europe to beat Celtic over the head with a stick, as Rodgers claimed everyone wants to do just a matter of months ago.
Hopefully there will be a few more evenings of painful viewing for Keown to watch this season as he charts the progress of Scotland’s most successful club.
