Robert Snodgrass admits that his dream of playing for Celtic is on hold.
The Scotland star was brought up in the shadow of Celtic Park, attended St Annes school but his professional career has flourished far from home at Leeds, Norwich and briefly at Hull City after an £8m summer transfer move.
With another telly deal further distancing the game in Scotland from the riches in England it’s less and less likely that Snodgrass will pull on a Celtic jersey professionally.
The laws of economics dictate that his best years will be spent down south but in an ideal world there’s only one place that the 27-year-old would be playing the game.
“Attending school, the dream of playing for Celtic was always in your head,” he admitted. “But, and I’m being totally honest, it wasn’t something I thought was going to happen.
“For me, it was just a case of seeing what stage I could actually get to. For every kid it’s the same, you don’t know how far you can go until you get a bit older and things start to become a reality.
“The first thing I remember was going up to Celtic Park to watch Celtic, feeling the full effect of the stadium. When you see the players on the park for the first time, you get sucked in and it’s like a dream.
“There’s always that element in the back of my head, thinking if it’s meant to be that I will play for Celtic one day but it’s no different for me now at Hull than it was when I was at Leeds and Norwich.
“The Hull fans have been terrific, sticking by me during a difficult time, and the first thing I’ll be doing when I’m fit again is trying to repay them and show what I can do.”
He added: “When I started going to see Celtic, it was just before Henrik Larsson signed. We used to try and skip into the games. You would stand outside, waiting for someone who had a spare ticket and then give him the wee puppy eyes in the hope he’d give it to you! We didn’t have the money to get in otherwise.
“I still love going back to Celtic Park now, whether it’s for Celtic or Scotland games, and seeing the atmosphere.
“I trained at Celtic when I was a kid. I used to train at Rangers as well. I wore my Celtic shorts underneath my Rangers shorts when I trained there! That’s the truth. James McArthur posted a photo of me from those days on Twitter recently.
“I remember speaking to a Rangers coach a few years later, asking him if I wasn’t good enough for them because they never offered me anything. He said the fact I was wearing Celtic shorts to training, they felt I was trying to wind them up but they were the only training shorts I owned at the time.”
