Scottish Premiership champions Celtic reportedly wanted to sign Fortuna Sittard’s Eredivisie star Mark Diemers this summer.
The Wikipedia page of Fortuna Sittard midfielder Mark Diemers have received an unexpected spike of traffic in early May. Being linked with the reigning Scottish champions does wonders for your online profile after all.
But four months since Voetbal International claimed that Celtic were interested in signing the floppy haired Dutchman with an eye for goal, one player in Neil Lennon’s squad has stepped up to show that Diemers was a solution to a problem that already had an answer; Ryan Christie.
A man who not long ago looked like the odd one out in Brendan Rodgers’ midfield is quickly becoming indispensable in green and white. No one epitomises the so-called ‘Lennonball’, fast, direct and heavily reliant upon individual moments of magic, quite like a former Inverness starlet who joined The Hoops for £500,000 when Ronny Deila was still pulling the strings, as reported by the BBC.
With nine goals in 15 games this season, Christie is just two away from matching his tally from the 2018/19 campaign already.
He’s outscoring the much-admired Celtic striker Odsonne Edouard by three and, perhaps most tellingly of all, Christie has found the net more often in the last two months than Diemers did in the whole of last season.
In fact, while Diemers has averaged a goal every 4.4 games in the Eredivisie, a league which still seems to regard defending as optional, since the start of 2018/19, Christie finds the net every 2.1 matches.
That’s a record most centre-forwards would be proud to call their own with Christie making goalscoring look easy from any angle and any range, be it crucial penalties away at Rennes or a hat-trick of screamers against St Johnstone.
If Celtic thought that Diemers could provide a reliable source of goals from midfield, the kind of which they had missed since the Stuart Armstrong days, Christie continues to prove that you don’t always have to throw money at a problem to find a solution.
A bit of patience and trust goes a long way.
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