It’s purely down to a lack of application Monday to Friday- former team-mate gives brutal Griffiths verdict

Kris Commons has delivered a devastating verdict on Leigh Griffiths as the striker prepares to start the post-Celtic phase of his career. 

Over the last few days news has emerged that Celtic have terminated the striker’s contract with only a five month pay off to compensate the 31-year-old. 

Griffiths leaves with his name in the record books but it could have been much much more following his January 2014 transfer from Wolves. 

In season 2015/16 Griffiths helped himself to 40 goals, played a significant role the following season in Celtic’s Invincible Treble then became a national hero with two goals past Joe Hart at Hampden. 

Both goalkeepers at Hampden that day are still playing at the highest level as is Scott Brown, Scotland’s skipper on the day. 

For Griffiths it has been a slow, painful decline broken up by the occasional burst of form and goals that have had supporters claiming that he is among the best strikers in the game. 

Commons played and trained alongside Griffiths for three years and paints a brutal picture of a team-mate that failed to show the dedication that ensured lesser talents went further and longer in their careers. 

Picking up on the former Celtic player’s column in the Daily Mail, Football Scotland reports Commons saying: 

The fall from grace from him scoring those two goals for Scotland against England to where he is now is just remarkable. It’s not down to bad form and not scoring. It’s purely down to a lack of application Monday to Friday. He now can’t get into a team. And, on the rare occasion he is, he’s just not scoring goals. 

I shared a dressing room with him and I was close with him but not to the extent that I knew everything he was up to the minute he left Lennoxtown. 

He was the sort of guy who’d walk on to a training ground without any warm-up and start blasting balls into the net. He loved scoring goals. And as long as he was doing that in a game, it was hard to pick fault. 

With hindsight, I don’t think it helped that he lived in Edinburgh and was travelling every day. I don’t think he’s ever had a settled life off the field. It all felt quite chaotic. That must have had an impact on how he was approaching his job. 

What’s beyond argument is that he has achieved a lot in football. He’s in the top 20 of Celtic’s all-time goal scorers. He’s won loads of trophies. He scored those two iconic free-kicks for his country. 

He was quick, his movement was good, he was exceptional in the air for quite a small guy. He was physical, was lethal on free-kicks, he could finish and he knew how to roll his sleeves up. He also had supreme confidence in his own ability. 

But it could have amounted to so much more. He should be in the peak of his career. Yet it feels like he’s had more lives than a cat and they’ve now run out. 

Any time in the past that someone has had a go at him, his response was always to say he’d prove them wrong. He took criticism the wrong way when often it came from people who wanted him to succeed. 

He’d go on social media to prove how hard he’d been training on his own, as if he had to convince the public. Why did he have to shout louder than anyone else? 

Where his career goes from here has to be a real concern. You would have thought that when he went to Dundee he would have walked into the team, scored goals and shown enough application to make Celtic still take notice. Instead, you wonder what his next move will be. 

No matter what anyone says, I don’t feel it’s too late for him to still do something, even if that’s not going to be at Celtic or Dundee. 

Look at Craig Gordon two years out of the game and considering a career in punditry. Since then he’s won an unbeaten Treble at Celtic, been outstanding for Hearts for two seasons and could play in a World Cup just before his 40th birthday. 

Leigh could still have three years at the top level if he applies himself. The problem is that it’s no longer just about his talent. Managers now feel that they can’t rely on him.