£7m worth of reasons why Spurs will laugh us out of town

Football FanCast guest columnist Shaun Wallace thinks Celtic need a reality check if they think they can entice Robbie Keane to Park Head

If I had a penny for every time that Robbie Keane has been linked with a move to Park Head, then I'll be a very rich man indeed. The media have shown great zeal for this move and are seemingly almost willing it to happen and won't stop until they see it done, despite the likelihood of it happening are closer to zero. Like most skilled journalists in Scotland they see that he is Irish and therefore presume that he must be desperate to play for Celtic; a theory that rarely rings true.

I don't know too much about Keane and whether he does have a great ambition to move to Celtic, but the reality of it is the club simply cannot afford him, in terms of wages or the actual fee. The Daily Mirror today claimed that Celtic is going to offer Tottenham £7m in January in hope of signing him; a fee that I find laughable, and I could only imagine their chairman's face will be, if we faxed through such an offer. They paid around £15m to bring him back to North London from Liverpool, so why are they going to settle for under half here? I have heard about going in low, but it is somewhat of a joke, especially when we were reportedly asking around £12-15m for someone like Scott Brown. The paper even suggested a £12m swap, with Tottenham paying us £5m plus Keane. I love Brown as a player, but he is no way worth £12m and I would question whether he would cut in the English League, especially as Hutton, Gordon and Ferguson have all struggled to make the transition. Keane is the more valuable out of the two; therefore it would be us having to top up any such deal.

I can understand the whole motivation of this move and how desperate the SPL is to see a top class footballer move north of the border to highlight the strength of our league, but we have to realise what we want and what we can achieve is entirely different things. If Keane was over 32 then you could argue that we can entice him up to Glasgow, but being that he is in his prime he won't want to play in a league as uncompetitive as the one we currently have here in Scotland.