Well, the winter break will soon be over and Celtic will return to action this Saturday evening in the 4th round of the Scottish Cup where we will begin the defence of our trophy away at Championship strugglers Partick Thistle.
Off the field, the £3.5 million capture of 21-year-old Polish striker Patryk Klimala from Jagiellonia Bialystok appears imminent and another 21-year-old, Ivorian midfielder Ismaila Soro, should be not far behind him as the conclusion of a £2 million move from Israeli side Bnei Yehuda also draws near.
Meanwhile heading out the door in a move that blindsided pretty much everyone young winger Lewis Morgan, who had been deployed regularly during December as a makeshift striker in the absence of the injured Odsonne Edouard and even got a starting place in the League Cup final, is about to complete a £400,000 move to David Beckham’s new MLS franchise club Inter Miami.
It’s a surprise but there’s a general apathy to Morgan’s departure.
He pulled on the jersey 31 times for Celtic, mostly as a sub, and scored two goals both of which came in this season’s Europa League campaign. Indeed he may go down as the only players in the clubs history who only ever scored in a continental competition and never domestically.
When Morgan came in from newly-promoted St.Mirren 19 months ago nobody really expected much as running the show in Scotland’s second tier is a bit different from doing it week in and week out in the top flight with a massive support demanding victory on each occasion.
Alas, Lewis pretty much lived up to expectations or the lack thereof and despite undoubtedly trying his best he was far too lightweight, going to ground it seemed at every possible opportunity.
A loan spell out to Sunderland last season under his former boss in Paisley Jack Ross it was hoped would be the making off him but he also failed to make much impact in England’s third tier and returned last summer pretty much no better off than when he’d left us.
I wish him well in a league that will see him come up against former Celtic manager Ronny Deila, who rather surprisingly was appointed manager of New York City FC last week.
But to be honest the big departure is without a doubt that of Scott Sinclair.
The English winger left without much fanfare to Preston North End last week which is a shame but not much of s surprise considering he’s been gradually frozen out of the first-team picture over the last year.
Indeed it was widely accepted he would depart in the summer what with his contract having run out and Neil Lennon not appearing to have him in his plans based on him never actually getting a game under him.
But a one-year contract extension was offered in the summer and Scott duly accepted.
That understandably fuelled the belief that Sinclair would once again be playing an integral part though some of the more cynically minded claimed that the only reason for the new contract was so that he could be punted before the end of August for a decent transfer fee when the apparently inevitable offers from down south came in.
In the end, neither conviction was right. Scott wasn’t sold and was rarely seen again with his final foray being a pretty ignominious run out in a meaningless Europa League tie away in Romania against Cluj back in early December.
Of course with so little of him seen over the last year his departure will make little if any impact on the first team but we shouldn’t forget his contribution to the Celtic cause.
He was one of the main catalysts in Brendan Rodgers first season in charge as Celtic swept all aside domestically and captured a historic treble in which we never lost one domestic match.
That season the ‘winger’ scored an incredible 25 goals in 50 matches – four of which came against Rangers – and finished the season as the league’s top striker and deservedly picked up both the PFA Scotland Players’ Player of the Year and the Scottish Football Writers Association’s Footballer of the Year awards for 2016–17.
It was always going to be difficult to recapture that sort of imperious form and to a certain extent, Scott was a victim of his own success with the bar set so high.
Yet he still delivered 18 goals in 55 games in his second season and 17 in his third from another 55 appearances.
When you add in his two strikes from this season in total, he scored 62 goals in 167 games and lifted ten consecutive pieces of silverware.
An incredible return by anyone’s standards.
I suppose no player ever leaves under ideal circumstances whether they get a fitting send-off or not. It’s either acrimonious, at the peak of their powers or when they’d fallen into obscurity.
But history will be very kind to Scott and deservedly so and he’ll be welcomed back with open arms when he inevitably returns to visit us in future years.
A low key, even slightly aloof character he is a rarity in modern football in that he did all of his talking on the pitch and even when completely frozen out he never had a bad word to say about the club.
For me his greatest run out was on the day we sealed the league back in early April of 2017 with a 5-0 thrashing of Hearts at Tynecastle.
He scored a hattrick that day and his spectacular opener, in particular, was symptomatic of a player in the form of his life.
I’ll leave that footage at the bottom but let’s also not forget that he also had one of the best fans songs of recent times composed for him which conjured up fond memories of the belters that used to be conjured up back in the Tommy Burns era for the likes of Jorge Cadete and Paulo Di Canio.
Goodbye Scott. Thanks for the memories. You’ll Never Walk Alone.
“Oh, he’s Scotty Sinclair and he is so wonderful,
when he scores a goal oh it is beautiful it’s magicalwhen he runs down your wing he is fast as lightning, it’s frightening and it makes all the bhoys sing….
doh do doh dodo do doodododododod.”
....Always A Tim! 