I’m still firmly in Lennon’s camp, as I believe we have a lot of potential showing and have a relatively young squad at our disposal. But the one thing Lennon needs to drastically improve on for next season is his tactics, and preparation for the big games, particularly in Europe and against Rangers. It’s all fine and well beating the fodder we face week in, week out in Scotland, but we need to put a show in against the big teams. If Lennon can do that, then who knows, it might just be like 10 years ago…

 

I find the signing of Olivier Kapo an odd one. Not for the fact that it’s most likely a decent signing if he can keep fit and get a consistency going, something which he’s seemingly struggled with throughout his career. But it’s an odd one for two reasons: Who were the ‘other big clubs’ interested, and if he gets fit and plays most of the season with the likes of Forrest, does that mean he is McGeady’s  replacement?

While I’m all for a bargain or two, this seems a decent, low risk signing; if he gets fit and a run of games, then it’s a good signing. If it doesn’t work out, no fee was involved so no bad came of it for Celtic. But the cynic in me is thinking that if we sign Kapo, we don’t need anyone else, so virtually we have replaced McGeady, a £10 million playmaker, with a 30-year-old free transfer who couldn’t get in the Wigan team last season.

I hope he does well, as he’s played for a few decent clubs in his career and seems a genuinely nice guy who just wants to get his career back and at a long shot get back into the France set up. But I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come in regards to Celtic’s future transfer policy…

The recent, and excellent, South American articles on this site has me wondering about Celtic and it’s non-relationship with South American football.

Thanks to the ever reliable Celtic Wiki (Link – http://www.thecelticwiki.com/), we’ve only ever had three South American players don the hoops: Juninho Paulista, Rafael Scheidt (Both Brazil) and Fernando de Ornelas (

Given we’re a club that has paraded players from every corner of the world, I find that absolutely staggering that we’ve only had three players from South America play for us, given the wealth of talent that came from the continent over the years.

I thought one of the benefactors in having Dr John Reid at the club was that we could have a better chance in getting more foreign players into club that we wouldn’t be able to get due to work permits, like Koki Mizuno for instance a couple of years back being a good example.

Considering we’ve ransacked the Asian market for talents (Excluding the commercial value of the players), surely we have at least acknowledged the South American market for scouting purposes? Nations such as Uruguay, Chile and Paraguay are vastly overlooked in Britain, and only the big two – Argentina and Brazil are given any thought in terms of players. The former nations mentioned have some astounding talent at the moment, and given if we challenged a few work permit issues, I think we could be successful in some cases.

The counter argument for this is that they wouldn’t be suited to Scottish football and they wouldn’t develop properly as footballers.

Rubbish. The single biggest misconception about British football, more so Scottish, is that it’s too physical for the smaller, more technical players and they get hustled and bustled off the ball way too easily. It’s completely not the case, and the world’s best midfielders show us week in, week out that if you’re in trouble, just pass your way out.

Football is all about taking risks. Sure, you might sign a few duds from the continent and take some flak for some dodgy signings. But for those couple of Federico Nieto’s that you might sign, you could always either unearth an absolute gem right at your disposal.

Well, it’s either that or sign more players over in Leith in the capital…