Legendary Celtic manager Martin O’Neill conducted a Twitter Q&A this afternoon and revealed some very interesting information about a number of topics, including of course his time in Glasgow.
One of the questions put to Martin, was about Brazilian World Cup winner Juninho, who O’Neill signed from Middlesbrough on a free transfer.
Despite only being 31 years old, it was clear Juninho was well past his prime during his time at Celtic, despite the fact that he had flourished in the English Premiership with Boro.
He only made 14 appearances in the hoops, scoring once and since leaving Celtic he had blasted O’Neill for not playing him enough and not playing his in his preferred position of central/attacking midfield, with O’Neill opting to player the younger, more dynamic Stiliyan Petrov in that area.
But now, many years later, O’Neill has finally opened up about Juninho’s time at Celtic.
When asked by a fan, “Juninho signing. What went wrong?”, O’Neill responded:
“It was evident that Juninho was not the dynamic midfielder that he once was at Middlesbrough.”
Well, Martin can’t make it any more clearer than that!
Football can be strange sometimes, where players can move club and suddenly looked past their best and just never recover, despite looking far sharper just the previous season.
Another one that is similar is Andriy Shevchenko’s move to Chelsea, when he went from being arguably the best striker in world football at AC Milan to looking like a Sunday league player the next season at Chelsea.
I think most Celtic fans are much happier that we have moved away from these ‘marquee’ type signings, as they tend to be very expensive in wages and most of the time are short lived and don’t often work out great anyway!
We can leave our rivals to these types of signings, their last one worked out tremendously…
Check out the tweet below.
