As One Journey Ends For Celtic Another One Starts

Article by James Payne

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And so 10 months and 10 days after it started in Reykjavik and with 61 games played Celtic’s season has come to an end. It did so with an emphatic 5-0 win over Inverness Caledonian Thistle whose minds were indubitably focussed more on Saturday’s Scottish Cup Final against Falkirk. Mind you, after the controversial semi-final last month I always felt that a big ‘revenge’ win was likely and this was a nice way to round off a season that probably scores 7 out of ten overall. The terrible first two months, the rarely impressive displays in the Europa League and that aforementioned Scottish Cup tie stops this judge from scoring it higher though it turned out a lot better than it looked as though it might on that day in early October when Hamilton Accies recorded their first win at Celtic Park in 76 years.

Celtic manager Ronny Deila and his coaching team have done well after that sticky start and they deserve a rest to enjoy the good work done. They are unlikely to get much of that rest however as Celtic will be back in Champions League Qualifying action in mid-July and with several of Celtic’s squad likely to be involved in the international matches in mid-June some of our players are going to get almost no worthwhile break from playing. Deila will be hoping the draw is kind to Celtic for that first round of qualification so that he is not forced to play his strongest eleven right away. The Norwegian will also be wondering who he will be able to call on for those early matches of next season.

It seems highly unlikely that reserve goalie Lukas Zaluska will be retained whilst none of the four loan signings- Denayer, Guidetti, Tonev and Wakaso seems likely to be around in July either. Denayer played well after an erratic first few weeks and he will be missed as he was one of our best players whilst Guidetti gave us a real shot in the arm in the autumn of 2014 and then misfired but the other two won’t be missed at all. The Serbian striker Stefan Scepovic scored twice on Sunday but his exit from the field fifteen minutes from time had something of a valedictory feel to it. Anthony Stokes – a potentially very good player who has mostly underperformed in his five seasons at Celtic Park- may well move also whilst at least one of the three right backs may move on. Most speculation surrounds central defender Virgil Van Dijk who some of the hierarchy at the club will want to cash in on irrespective of the effect his leaving would have on the team.

Virgil had a better season than his first one I thought. In his first season he looked a class apart in the first few weeks before rather cruising it for most of the rest of it but this season he played well after about mid-October. Whether any Premiership team will be willing to pay the kind of money Celtic is expecting seems debatable – I think he’ll play until the Champions’ League fate is assured and then be shipped out. Ronny Deila is likely to discover that whatever the Celtic Board may say to him long term team building is low on the list of the PLC’s overall priorities.

There have been the usual slew of rumours about who is coming in but I can only hope that Chief Executive Peter Lawwell and the club’s biggest shareholder Dermot Desmond are not thinking of repeating previous seasons’ follies by not investing what has come into the club in terms of money in new players only once the Champions’ League qualifiers are done with- and even then as happened two years ago forking out buttons for the underwhelming Pukki. Quite simply if Celtic wish to progress to even being considered a medium level force in European football then new players need to come in. Sadly the real controller of the purse strings- Desmond- may well decide that the policies which saw us barely make it to the Group Stages two years ago and totally embarrassed not once but twice last August are sufficient.