We’re nearing the end of February 2020 and Celtic already have a League Cup in the bag, topped their Europa group and created a ten point gap at the top of the SPFL table, not to mention they’re still in the Scottish Cup.
One man who can take an immense amount of credit for where we find ourselves this season is Fraser Forster. Celtic saved him from Southampton obscurity, playing games for the reserves and put him back into the limelight. They say player’s should never return to a club if they enjoyed great success there before, but Fraser is certainly making a mockery of that notion.
There’s no doubt we wouldn’t have the League Cup back resting in the trophy cabinet had it not been for the player’s heroics on the day against Steven Gerrard’s men. Then you look at the Europa league and some of the vital saves he made to ensure Celtic took some major scalps during the group stage. The penalty save against Copenhagen on Thursday, further proof this goalkeeper can make the difference.
Only here on loan, there’s a fear we will only get Fraser for this season and he’ll head back to Southampton where they’ll likely sell him to the highest bidder. As SunSport reports, the player is on a £70kpw deal at St Mary’s and Celtic won’t compete with that.
However, according to The Athletic’s Southampton correspondent the goalkeeper wants to take a pay cut to re-sign for Celtic on a permanent deal.
“This has been bubbling away for sometime now and Ralph [Saints boss Hassenhuttl] hasn’t given many comments outside ‘It’s nice he’s doing well, but I’m not focused on him’. The athletic report as cited by SunSport.
“But my understanding is Forster is willing to take a pay cut to stay at Celtic, so the chances of him staying in Scotland are pretty good.”
Fraser is in a place in his career where he wants to play and he’s made an enormous amount of money at Southampton. It’s not like he’d be getting paid chump change at Celtic either. It all comes down to Peter Lawwell, will the chief exec make an exception to put up a decent transfer fee for purely footballing reasons because there’ll be no resale value in Forster.
It shouldn’t happen players have run down contracts before and took us for mugs, we live with the rules sign and sell, but player’s have done us over a few even Henrik