Abby Brammell

By Michael Walker

No joy: Goalkeeper Bell denies Keane on his Celtic debut

He arrived last thing on Monday, on loan at short notice and having made a long journey so that he could turn out for his new club at Rugby Park on Tuesday night.

Yet somehow Chris Maguire’s transfer from Aberdeen to Kilmarnock did not receive much attention. But Maguire scored on his debut last night and in doing so he made Robbie Keane’s perplexing move from Tottenham to Celtic look even odder.

Keane’s first act in a Celtic shirt was to flash his winning smile at the late-night press conference at Celtic Park on Monday. He was being marketed as a saviour then.

His second act was to sell his Kilmarnock marker a dummy. A question had already surfaced: has he been sold a dummy himself with his latest career move?

Celtic lost to a Kilmarnock team that had not beaten them in 31 meetings stretching back nine years, 29 of which had been defeats.

Kilmarnock had won three games this season and were second-bottom. Celtic remain ten points behind Rangers, who are being run by banks and who have not bought one player in the last three transfer windows.

Keane will have heard half of the 9,308 crowd present last night singing: ‘Hello, hello, we are the Killie boys.’ And he will have wondered, just as his namesake did.

This was every bit as red-faced as Roy Keane’s Celtic debut four Januarys ago, when they lost at Clyde in the Scottish Cup.


Seeing Roy Keane on the outskirts of Cumbernauld that day was as strange as seeing Robbie Keane here.


A re-arranged fixture on a Tuesday night at Rugby Park, Kilmarnock, with a 7.30pm kick-off.

As Robbie looked at himself in the mirror a year and a day ago, still a £20million Liverpool player, still in a Champions League squad, he could hardly have foreseen that his return to Tottenham would so soon be followed by Harry Redknapp’s cold shoulder and a misty night in Ayrshire.

But here Keane was. This former Inter Milan player, the captain of his country, a man who has cost some £80m in transfers down the years, making himself part of a club enduring painful introspection in a league in crisis.

Paradise lost.

Had he so chosen, Keane could have been with Spurs preparing for tonight’s trip to another of his former clubs, Leeds, in the FA Cup.

If that thought went through the 29 year-old’s mind on the bus to Rugby Park, then it will surely have done so again on the way back.

Around 4,000 Celtic fans followed Keane south from Glasgow. His presence will have swollen that number and illustrated, presumably, the main reason the club have apparently extended themselves financially to pull off the deal.

Keane described it as ‘an arrangement that suits me, Celtic and Tottenham.’


Great start: New signing Chris Maguire delivers on his Kilmarnock debut scoring against Celtic


Celtic is a club known far and wide for its fanbase, a fact it bathes in and trades upon. Who does not think of Parkhead and see 59,000 fans throbbing on an epic European night? Well, those who go there every week, for a start.

They see something different. Increasingly they see empty seats.

For the recent home game against Hibernian — not an unattractive fixture — the estimated attendance was 41,000.

The numbers have to be estimated as Celtic have stopped publishing attendance figures. ‘Unknown’ it says on their official website.

Unconvincing could be added to that description this morning.

Reflecting on the defeat to Kilmarnock, dejected Celtic manager Tony Mowbray said of Keane: ‘At times he made the team tick.’

At times he didn’t. Keane wore the same brand of boots as Wayne Rooney, but that is where any comparison ends.

He was meant to lift Celtic up. They may well drag him down


source: dailymail