Record running with “Kasper Høgh written off as Celtic transfer flop after 90 minutes” GARBAGE! Anybody writing Høgh off after one game needs their head checked!

Ninety minutes.

That’s how long it took.

That’s how long Kasper Høgh got in a Celtic jersey before the Record decided the man was a ‘transfer flop’.

Not ninety games.

Not ninety days.

Ninety minutes.

Here’s the headline Gavin Berry’s Hotline went with this morning:

Kasper Hogh written off as Celtic transfer flop after 90 minutes as Martin O’Neill’s tactics obliterated on Hotline

Anybody writing this boy off after one game needs their head checked.

And I mean that sincerely.

The Hotline is not journalism, it’s a fishing expedition, and this morning they landed exactly the catch they went out for.

Let’s be honest here about how this thing actually works.

Gavin Berry doesn’t go looking for the balanced take.

He goes looking for the angriest man in Coatbridge with an email account.

Mention the price tag – check.

Mention Iheanacho and Giakoumakis – check.

Then mention the dithering in the transfer market – check.

And finally, make sure at least one of them tells us a Celtic player wouldn’t get a game in the second division – check.

Job done, headline written, on to tomorrow.

Charles Maxwell told them he was “interested to see what £11million was going to get” us, and concluded that “on first impressions, it appears to be less than we had before.”

First impressions.

Of a striker who has been at our football club about five minutes.

John Caw emailed the thing in during the first half, which tells you everything you need to know about the level of considered analysis on offer here.

The most abysmal football he’d watched in a long time, apparently.

Then Benjamin Nygren went and won the game after the break.

Funny how that bit didn’t make the headline.

But here’s the part the Record won’t tell you, because it doesn’t suit them – the £11 million was always going to be the stick they beat him with.

It was inevitable.

Absolutely inevitable.

And it isn’t Kasper Høgh’s fault.

It’s ours.

Or rather, it’s theirs.

When a football club spends the guts of two decades operating like it’s still 1998, an £11 million fee stops being a transfer fee and starts being an event.

It becomes a number every single supporter carries into the stadium with them.

Every touch gets weighed against it.

Every miscontrol gets priced up.

That is what happens when you make big spending such a rarity that the fanbase treats it like Halley’s Comet.

We paid £5.75 million for Eyal Berkovic in 1999 on a turnover of £36 million.

Nobody in 1999 was standing at the front of the Jock Stein shouting about how many millions had just misplaced a pass.

Because it wasn’t a novelty back then.

Now it is.

And you can thank Silent Mike and the absent meddling golfer for that, not the Dane.

Let’s also not forget that the £11 million everybody is waving about isn’t even really £11 million.

As I pointed out before Flag day, close to £17 million had already been generated in player sales before the Høgh announcement was even made.

The real net transfer spend at Celtic this summer is close to zero.

Zero.

So the outrage about what “£11million was going to get” us is aimed at a figure that the board have already recouped, and then some.

But sure, let’s all pile in on the centre forward.

Then there’s the small matter of what the boy was actually asked to do on Monday night.

As I said in my article earlier today, Høgh showed flashes of what he can do, but the supply to him left an awful lot to be desired.

He led the line in a 4-3-3 that Martin O’Neill didn’t want to play, because he doesn’t have the personnel to play anything else.

Is that his fault?

He had a right winger playing on the left and a left winger playing on the right, meaning neither of them could get to the byline and put a ball into the box.

He had Camilo Duran, a man who does his best work around the 18-yard box, shoved out wide where he was no use to anybody.

Paul McCormack of Coatbridge called those tactics “baffling, absolutely baffling”, and do you know what, he’s got a point.

But that is an argument about O’Neill’s options and this board’s failure to give him any.

It is not an argument that our new striker is a flop.

The man was feeding off scraps.

You know the way a bicycle won’t work without pedals?

A similar concept applies to a centre forward.

And credit where credit is due – one man on that Hotline was talking absolute sense, and naturally he was buried at the very bottom of it.

Stephen Mulhern emailed in to point out that another Scandinavian striker had a fairly underwhelming debut for Celtic at Easter Road once upon a time.

He gave the ball away, Hibs scored, and the Celtic support went home muttering.

Henrik Larsson.

242 goals later, there’s a stand full of people who’d tell you he turned out alright.

Imagine if the Hotline had existed in its current form on the 3rd of August 1997.

Imagine the headline.

‘Larsson written off as Celtic transfer flop after 90 minutes.’

Sorry, my mistake – they’d have needed a bigger word than flop, he cost us £650,000.

Look, I’m not here to tell you Kasper Høgh is the next Henrik Larsson.

I have no idea whether he is or he isn’t.

Neither do you.

And neither, crucially, does Gavin Berry.

That’s rather the point.

One game.

Against a well organised Dundee side who came to defend, in a system his manager didn’t want, with no service, in front of a support already at the end of its tether with the men upstairs.

If you can call an £11 million striker a flop on that evidence, you can call anything.

Judge the boy in December, judge him in May, judge him after he’s had a striker’s supply behind him and a proper squad around him.

By all means write somebody off this week.

You can write off the board who sent him out there on his own.

Write off a recruitment operation that has given Martin O’Neill two players and a shrug with the LASK tie a fortnight away.

Write off the CEO who has had all summer to build a squad and has instead built a fixture list of excuses.

But not the striker.

Not after ninety minutes.

Give the man a chance.

Sweet Jesus.

Give the man a chance.

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Make sure to join us on the Trinity Tims this evening, where special guest Des McLean will be chatting and promoting his comedy show, “And if you know your history”