Does the number 37 mean anything to you? Have a think and try to use our subject, 22 year old Ismaila Soro, and you should come to an answer fairly quickly. Yes, 37, it’s the amount of minutes this young man has played for Celtic this season. We may have many other issues going on at this floundering club at the moment, some which I will come to in future articles you’ll be glad to hear.
The issue I want to concentrate on here is, we have a player in our team at the moment who is 35 years old and has played 24 times for the team already and it’s not even January. The disparity in this brings me to a conclusion that this young man is being mis-managed by the club. He’s not a promising 16 year old who would benefit from half a dozen games to boost his chances of progression, Ismaila Soro is 22 years old and should be in the team more often.
I am not advocating we hang our hat on Soro being the answer to our burgeoning list of problems here, but surely he deserves to have played more than one half of a game of football, cumulatively, in the space of four months?
With a dead rubber game against already qualified Lille on Thursday in the Europa League, can’t our leader give Soro his chance to show what he can do? I have seen him come on in the two games against Milan, and for the fleeting period I did so, I actually thought that this lad looked athletic, mobile, and could play a decent pass.
Soro was signed for a reported £1.2 million, and when I think back to when Neil Lennon made some of his previously successful signings in his first term as manager – Wanyama and Ledley being the two that spring to mind – I can make the comparison to Soro and think that he could be a really decent player for us.
Whether Lennon’s current predicament will allow him to make such a decision is something which I am not sure about but, and with his impending departure given this catastrophic run of form and results, we may not see get the chance to witness the boy from the Ivory Coast. We can live in hope, however, that out of this disastrous campaign, that there may not be much joy, but there may be some Soro.
Brian McVeigh