Scottish Premiership champions Celtic reportedly want to sign Josh Murphy from Championship promotion hopefuls Cardiff City.
Suddenly, Josh Murphy looks worth every penny of his £11 million price-tag.
Cardiff City’s mercurial talent is in the form of his life in South Wales, with the jet-heeled winger rediscovering his golden touch with a blitz of goals and Man of the Match displays.
Finding the net with a lethal finish in Saturday’s 2-2 draw with Wigan Athletic on Saturday, Murphy now has five goals in his last six Championship gamesfor Neil Harris’s side. In his previous 19 matches before this ongoing purple patch, the 24-year-old had hit the target just once.
And with the Scottish Sun reporting that Murphy has emerged as a summer target for Celtic, who tried and failed to sign him on loan in January, he is clearly not allowing himself to get distracted by all that pesky transfer talk.
Neil Lennon’s Celtic are a different beast to the ‘death by a thousand passes’ approach of the Brendan Rodgers era. These days, the Hoops are a more dynamic, direct side, reliant upon dazzling wing-play and goals from all over the pitch.
Murphy, on current form at least, looks tailor-made for Lennonball. Though his future, it seems, could be tied inexorably to that of Moi Elyounoussi.
Southampton could cash in on their out-of-favour Norwegian international next summer, according to the Independent, but the fact that he shares Murphy’s favoured left-wing role suggests that it could be a case of one or the other.
And with Elyounoussi’s fabulous start to life at Parkhead being disrupted by injury problems, Murphy may be in pole position right now.
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