Celtic are desperate to avoid a repeat of October’s Covid call-offs as Neil Lennon admitted the club could look to lay on private planes to get players safely back to Scotland from international duty.
Vasilis Barkas was almost stranded in Greece for the Glasgow derby a couple of weeks ago due to a workers’ strike in the country that affected the aviation industry. Celtic, however, swooped in to get the goalkeeper back to Glasgow on a private flight having already suffered a host of call-offs for the derby due to Covid.
Odsonne Edouard, Nir Bitton, and Hatem Elhamed all picked up the disease on international duty with France under-21s and Israel respectively. Ryan Christie, meanwhile, was deemed a close contact of positive-testing Stuart Armstrong – keeping him out of the Rangers game too.
It was an absolute nightmare and one that Lennon is “desperate” to avoid as we get ready for another international break in just two weeks’ time.
As quoted by the Glasgow Times, Lennon said: “It’s a major concern when they go away again. We’ve been pretty stringent inside our own bubble and have had no positive tests for a long, long time. It’s difficult. We can parley with associations and say ‘can you give us a bit of leeway here?’. Whether that falls on deaf ears is another thing but there’s no doubt that the damage that was done was difficult to take.
“It’s something we can look at (private jets). With Barkas, they were going to shut the airport in Greece because they had a strike over there, and we got him back on a private plane.
“It’s not ideal, but it’s something we can look at. It’s a big undertaking when you’ve got maybe 15 or 16 players away, but we desperately want to avoid a repeat of what happened the last time.”
No guarantee that private planes will do the trick
It’s important to remember that Barkas’ situation wasn’t down to anything Covid-related. It was simply down to an economic situation in Greece that meant he couldn’t travel. That’s why Celtic forked out on the private plane.
It’s difficult to see how using private jets for specific players is going to help halt anything. Yes, Edouard may have picked up Covid when he was travelling to France, but Elhamed and Bitton caught it slap bang in the middle of their international camps. Private planes wouldn’t have done a thing to halt that.
You can tell by Lennon’s comments here that the club doesn’t have a sure-fire solution to get their players through this. And they shouldn’t be expected to either, such is the nature of this deadly disease.
All we can really do when our top players go away with their countries is hope things go as smoothly as possible. Lennon and Celtic can’t control what their stars do once they get into their international bubble. They become the responsibility of their respective football associations at that point.
Looking back on the last international break, Celtic were just struck with some god awful luck. It’s something you simply can’t expect to happen again – not to the extent that it did in October.
Celtic remain powerless to stop their players from going away to play for their countries at the moment, and that creates a big problem. But ahead of a crucial period in our season, it’s time to start praying all of our players come back fit and health to play when they depart in a fortnight.
In other news, Lennon stated that he was “hopeful” a vital process for one Celtic star will begin next week.
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