SELLING your best players can have consequences. Back in July Toulouse picked up £7m from Celtic for their best defender and may well have regarded that as a good piece of business.
Yet the manager who sold Jullien to Celtic lost his job in October and his replacement has now also been sacked after Saturday’s humiliating 1-0 Coupe de France round of 64 defeat to amateur side Saint-Pryve-Saint-Hilaire which extended the club’s worst-ever run of form.
The 56 year old Antoine Kombouare managed two wins from his first three matches in charge before a run of ten straight defeats across all competitions, was only appointed in mid-October as Alain Casanova’s replacement, the boss who sold Jullien to Celtic.
Jullien’s former club are now out of the French Cup (current holders are Rennes, who Celtic knocked out of the Europa League) and adrift at the bottom of Lique 1 and heading for relegation with just three wins and three draws from 19 league matches this season. Those Thirteen defeats will have left the Toulouse fans wondering if it would have been better if they’d kept their best central defender rather than sell him to the Scottish Champions.
Things are very different for the former Toulouse central defender as he looks ahead to the rest of the season. He played a huge part in Celtic’s table topping league form in the first half of the season , scored the winner in the League Cup Final against the Rangers at Hampden and grabbed the glory of the winning goal against Italian giants Lazio at Celtic Park in the Europa League.
Now he wants more of the same.
“Coming to Celtic was about becoming a winner for me,” Christopher Jullien told the media, as reported by Scottish Sun. “Toulouse was a bit difficult. We didn’t have the same mentality, because we didn’t expect to win every weekend.
“It was really hard. We had a trainer who wanted us to sit back on the field, defend and play counter, so it was a different approach.
“Coming here to a totally different approach — pressing high, having the ball a lot, playing technically, playing a lot of passes — is enjoyable. I am just so happy to be at this club. I came to challenge myself, to be around really good players. I am just pleased everything is going well. The team are in a good mood.
“The players are just unbelievable, some of the best I have played with. For now, I am really happy here, but it’s the mentality of the players I really love. I saw that feeling first when we drew with Hibs. The mentality of the guys in the locker room was that it felt like a defeat.
“I see the feeling they’ve got when they’re not winning. I was just happy to see that and happy to be the kind of guy who wants to win every game.”
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