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Derek Riordan – “My Celtic Hell (sic!)” (Apr 08)
(Source: Scotland on Sunday Apr 08)
Derek Riordan opens his heart on his Celtic hell
DEREK RIORDAN believes the only way he will get the opportunity to prosper at Celtic is if he outlasts Gordon Strachan. The frustrated former Hibs striker says the situation has reached stalemate, with his manager so concerned with protecting his own credibility that he is unwilling to risk giving him an extended run in the team.
“I only get chucked on if we need a goal so he must think I can get him a goal but he obviously doesn’t want to do it unless he really has to because he doesn’t want me to prove him wrong. He knows I would score quite a lot if he played me as much as he has played the other strikers but I don’t think he wants proved wrong,” says Riordan. “When I speak to him, he’s nice to me and says all the things players want to hear about me being part of the plans but you know by his actions that he’s talking rubbish.
“It is frustrating. I was left out the squad (against Motherwell yesterday] and was training with the reserves on Friday. I’ve virtually chucked it at Celtic, what’s the point when I’m not getting a chance.”
Signed in June 2006 after his 64 goals in 146 appearances caught Strachan’s eye, the striker was considered one of the brightest homegrown prospects. Voted Scottish Young Player of the Year by his peers the previous year and handed his first full Scotland cap against Austria by Walter Smith, he was confident he could cement a place in the Celtic starting line up. While the champions enjoyed a wealth of attacking options in Maciej Zurawski, Kenny Miller, Craig Beattie, Stilian Petrov, Shunsuke Nakamura, Shaun Maloney and Aiden McGeady, and added Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink to the squad as the 2006/07 season got under way, Riordan says he was assured he would be considered for more than a role in the chorus line.
“I went there thinking I was going to play. It’s not like I just went there for the money, I wanted to play and I thought I would do well at Celtic with the amount of chances that teams like Celtic and Rangers create. I thought I would score a lot of goals and if I was given the chance every week I still believe I could. But I’ve just never had the chance.”
A player at the end of his tether, he feels he has wasted two years of his career and the situation has left him feeling depressed and humiliated. Especially when he is sent on in the final minutes of games against his old club. An 89th minute sub against Hibs earlier this term, he said he was hurt. “That was a kick in the teeth. That was embarrassing. I did well when I was there and some of the Hibs fans said I shouldn’t go, so that was embarrassing, but it’s always the same, it’s the last few minutes if I do get chucked on.”
He says there are times he does regret leaving Easter Road. “You see loads of other young players getting in the Scotland squad and everybody has gone ahead of me so it’s very frustrating. I’m not being big-headed but I was one of the well-known ones at Hibs because I was doing so well and scoring so many goals but now you see all of them, they are the ones who are playing every week and in the Scotland squads and it’s annoying. Depressing.
“I feel let down by the manager. I remember him sitting in my mum’s house trying to sign me and he said I could play anywhere in his midfield or up front. It was the same in the press conferences but now I can only play left midfield for some reason and that’s not even my best position.
“I have a year left of my contract in the summer but I can sign a pre-contract in December. I’m 25, I want to be playing. It will just depend if the manager is still here or who else comes in. I’ll see who the next manager is before I decide. I don’t want to be here and not playing but I would like to stay at Celtic if I thought I had a chance to play. I know I won’t get that chance with him. I’ve been here nearly two years and it’s not happened yet so I don’t see it happening now. But Celtic are brilliant. I like it here and would love to prove myself but the nasty thing is not playing.”
Fully aware that his career has stalled, he says the most upsetting aspect is that he is still at a loss to explain why. Compared to the other six strikers who have vied for the two forward berths during his period at Celtic, his goals to minutes on the park ranks him ahead of Zurawski, Miller and Beattie and only marginally behind Vennegoor of Hesselink and McDonald, who have had the luxury of extended runs in the team in a central striking role, while even Georgios Samaras has had more starts since his arrival in January than Riordan has enjoyed all season. Sitting in amongst the Celtic support at Ibrox last week – denied a place on the bench because he had a day off after his grandmother passed away – he was buoyed by their comments. “They were saying ‘you should be out there playing’ and that helps. The Celtic fans have been brilliant. They know something is not right. They are the only people I will thank at Celtic if I leave.”
Something certainly seems awry when a club fails to score in four consecutive Old Firm games and draws a blank in four of their last six games, yet still doesn’t include one of the club’s form strikers in the squad. “Willie McStay was saying that I’m now top scorer in the reserves but to be honest it doesn’t seem to really matter how well I do while the gaffer is at Celtic, I just don’t think I will get in the team anyway for some reason. I don’t know what it is. Everybody is always wondering what it is and I can’t tell them because I don’t even know myself. There have been loads of rumours, I’m supposed to have slept with his daughter or sister or punched him on the training ground but they are all a load of rubbish. There’s nothing that I can think of I’ve done wrong to him. There’s been no bust ups. I don’t know what his problem is with me.”
But there is, undoubtedly, some issue unresolved. Since joining Celtic, the player has made just 13 starts and 19 substitute appearances, amounting to a meagre 1,036 minutes of first-team football. So inexplicably out-of-favour Only An Excuse ridiculed the situation in a sketch with Strachan choosing between a blind man, a granny, a drunk and Riordan. The drunk got the nod.
“What was really hard was when we won the league last season and I didn’t feel part of it,” says Riordan, who made just enough outings to earn a champions medal but didn’t feel he had earned it. “And the Scottish Cup final, when I didn’t get on, I didn’t feel part of it when we won. That was the biggest kick in the teeth because when we played Hibs in the last game of the season, I played up front with Craig Beattie and scored our only goal but the next week in the cup final Craig Beattie got on before me. I didn’t even get on yet I’d scored in the game before it. Explain that one to me.”
In the semi-final of the competition, against St Johnstone, Strachan was booed by the Celtic support when he took Riordan off. It offered him some solace at the time but he now fears it backfired. “A lot of people have thought that was one of the worst things that could have happened, they think he’s not playing me because of that. He doesn’t want to look like he is giving in to people.
“The thing is I don’t mind being behind guys like Aiden McGeady, because Aiden has had a brilliant season but with other players, he just doesn’t seem to change the team. They are all supposed to be big star players and that’s what bugs me. Even if they play rubbish for three or four weeks on the bounce, they still get a game. The only ones he really does change are Massimo Donati and Paul Hartley.”
Having bided his time, the player says he could be ready to throw in the towel. “But that doesn’t matter because they are not letting me away. I don’t understand why. They got me for near enough nothing, I think it was £170,000 and clubs have offered to pay a lot more than that so they would make money on me. Why not let me go instead of me wasting away in the reserves. What’s that about?”
Prepared to leave in the January transfer window, the £400,000 offer tabled by Burnley was rejected by the Parkhead club, leaving the player even more downbeat. While reports suggested the club had made the decision based on finances – apparently seeking a fee closer to £1m – the forward was told it was a football decision and that he would be needed in the title run-in. Since then he has played just six minutes, sent on in the vain hope of salvaging the Scottish Cup quarter-final replay last month.
One suggestion is that the player’s off-field antics have annoyed Strachan but Riordan argues he has kept his nose clean since December 2006, when he was charged in relation to an assault on a pub steward. “And I was found not guilty so that proved a point. I’ve not done anything wrong.”
The other theory is that, like Kris Boyd, another goal-getter, the player doesn’t contribute enough in all-round play. Quizzed pre-season about Riordan’s projected involvement, Strachan said he didn’t need convincing that the Edinburgh lad was a good player but hinted that more was required. “He has ability and talent. But it was Gary Player who said that he did a thousand press ups a day and ran up hills. When he was a kid he had talent but he enhanced it. There are people like that with talent and there are people who enhance it. There are a lot of good players here and that’s why everyone needs to prepare properly, do everything right and take no chances.”
It is an area of discord, with some close to the player claiming it unreasonable to expect him to improve on his weaknesses without the kind of coaching that helps born attackers embrace defensive nuances. “My game is about scoring goals. The bad part of my game is defending but it always has been and it was when I was at Hibs. He would have known that from watching me and he still signed me and said he thought I could play for Celtic. But I think I have worked hard since I went to Celtic. I think I work a lot harder than I did at Hibs. I have done everything I can to impress him.”
Matters have reached a denouement following the death of both grandparents within the space of a month. On both occasions, Riordan took the following day off to be with his family and was left to languish in the stand come match day. “It just gave him another excuse to leave me out the squad. That’s the way I see it. He did it when my grandad died so I expected it again last weekend.” To stave off such an outcome he did consider going in but was too upset and decided in the end that his family had to come first. “I don’t know what he expects. But it was just one day and it seems to be fine for other players to miss out on a day’s training and they actually get put in to play the games.”
Over the past two years, he has learned he is apparently subject to a different set of rules. Yesterday, as his team-mates attempted to get their title bid back on track, Riordan was away getting his hair cut. There was a time when he was considered a cut above his peers, now the disheartened talent is on the periphery, pulling the stuff out.
Interview: Derek Riordan plots his return
http://www.scotsman.com/sport/football/top-football-stories/interview-derek-riordan-plots-his-return-1-2944412
By AIDAN SMITH
Published on 25/05/2013
THE SPL’s all-time third highest goalscorer is scowling and it’s a look many of us will remember from those moments when a team-mate failed to deliver a pass, spot his run or trust in his abilities to make the net bulge, even though he had big-lump defenders grappling with him like so many rule-crazy nightclub bouncers.
Unfortunately it’s not a football scowl because Derek Riordan, one of our game’s special, can’t-teach-it, maverick and maddening talents, hasn’t figured in a while.
He meets me on what he says is the only day for the foreseeable that he’s not playing golf, though when he shows up at the Toby Carvery in Edinburgh’s Silverknowes dressed in shorts and T-shirt it transpires he’s just sneaked in a round on the local public course. “I cannae believe it,” he says. “My mate’s ball just hit a stane. It was going miles to the left then it veered back, not sheepish at all, bounced off the back rim, up in the air and back doon into the hole. So the match was halved. Nightmare. I was ragin’ … ” This is his golf scowl, then, but it soon disappears.
Sad? Bitter? Fallen out of love with the game? Fed up of being dubbed one of its lost boys? He’s none of these things. It should also be said that he doesn’t seem over-burdered with regret, that he bears no scars from a frenzy of self-criticism while wielding a three-iron. I meet a chatty, cheerful, friendly, funny Deek who sips his Coke unenigmatically.
This is his manor. Football has taken him to Bristol, China and, yes, even Glasgow. But – you can take the boy out of Pilton etc – he likes it best round here. His mum lives near the golf course, his little brother is a regular playing partner and so are various cousins, while his Aunt Maria and Uncle Frankie run The Gunner, his local pub. You know you’re getting old when Derek Riordan turns 30, as he did in January, but he still looks remarkably boyish, like he could be set for a long, carefree summer of golfing with his mates, which used to be working-class north Edinburgh’s equivalent of the gap year.
Did his apprenticeship on this course begin at the toerag stage, hanging around the 17th green and pinching the flag? I don’t ask because that would be regional stereotyping. In any case, the 17th isn’t so accessible from the tower blocks anymore and it’s the 15th which presents the unusual local hazard. “That’s the wee par three down by the Commodore Hotel. You have to dodge the motorbike tracks.”
Riordan got into golf about seven years ago, the time of his ill-fated move from Hibs to Celtic. He plays the public courses rather than the posh or nouveau riche ones and the capital’s Braids is another favourite. “Me and the guys, the friends I’ve had for ages, were playing snooker and having wee gambles but now the weather’s better we’ve got the clubs out. You know, I might be better at golf than fitba now.”
He’s joking (I hope). “I’m still better than some guys I see playing in the Premier, I know that.” SPL or England’s Premier? I don’t ask, but wouldn’t put it past him fancying himself in the league where Garry O’Connor once performed, and where the Stevens, Fletcher and Whittaker, still do. Of all those Hibs Kids with their blond plumages and silver boots (not as prevalent then as now), he seemed like the most gifted, a scorer of blazing goals with both feet.
Right now, though, in between the golf, Riordan’s football is confined to kickabouts with his pals. He’s doing this to stay in shape but also because it’s a laugh. “What am I like? Frightening! Too good! Wooden floor, hard walls so you’ve got to be careful but I take my turn in goals where I don’t mind saying I’m a bit of a cat.”
The five-a-sides are only temporary. “I want to be back playing next season, definitely. Nothing’s fixed up yet but hopefully soon. I want to play for as long as I can.” Nevertheless, this is quite something, isn’t it? To glimpse Scotland’s former Young Player of the Year, Hibs’ top scorer for three seasons in a row and Celtic’s best finisher of the Gordon Strachan era according to the manager who rarely picked him, you must get down early to the gym hall at Craigroyston High School – and even then a good view may require the removal of some small boys. It pains me to say this, but: Derek Riordan, where did it all go wrong?
“I dinnae think it did,” he says calmly, not riled by the inquiry. “Folk say to me I should have done a lot more with my career. Obviously I could have done, but I don’t think it was down to the trouble that I didn’t.” By “the trouble” he means the headline-grabbing football downtime, the uptown partying – and the subsequent life ban from Edinburgh’s nightclubs. He continues: “I believe as a footballer you have to be lucky and at certain points I just wasn’t. Aye, I could have done more but, you know, it was a dream for me to pull on a Hibs shirt. For me that was huge, as it is for loads of laddies round here. They never quite get to play for their boyhood heroes but I did and I also turned out for my country.”
Time for some re-capping, and I don’t mean additional retrospective Scotland honours (three caps is a paltry figure). Riordan was last mentioned in connection with Brora Rangers. “No offence, but that would never have happened. Some funny stuff gets written about me. Mates who’re on the websites have told me about some amazing nonsense.” Most amazing? “That I do drugs. Folk who know me ken I’m not like that. I like a drink, as do 90 per cent of footballers, but I’m only out once every couple of weeks. I’m a quiet laddie.”
His last club were Bristol Rovers, managed by Mark McGhee, and he played 12 games in England’s League Two without scoring a goal. “Great bunch of guys, great boss but maybe the worst time playing-wise in my career. To be honest, it was more like rugby. There were all these big boys and the ball just kept going whoomph.” Another issue was the commute back to Scotland where Riordan’s partner Suzannah was expecting their second child. The family home is in Airth, near Falkirk. “It’s a wee Rangers toon with a lodge and an Orange walk but dead quiet and we love it.” Riordan’s daughter Ruby, 3, has since been joined by baby Romy. “Another girl. I’m probably going to have six of them until I get a boy!”
Before Bristol, and just as briefly and unsuccessfully, there was a stint in China with Shaanxi Chan-Ba – a gobsmacking move for a homeboy reckoned to have held himself back. Did he go at least partly to prove the doubters wrong, albeit that his two-year contract was mutually terminated after only four months? “No, it doesn’t bother me what folk say about me – they say so much, how can I? But when the offer came up I thought about how I’d turned down Lokomotiv Moscow when maybe I should have gone there. Gaz [Garry O’Connor], my best pal in football, was desperate for me to buddy up with him. But he had the girlfriend and the bairn at that time and I wondered if I’d end up playing gooseberry.
“Anyway, China was okay for the first month or so but then everything fell apart. There was corruption. There was a different manager every month – two Serbians and a Chinese. And as for the standard of footballer, I was playing with guys you could have grabbed out of The Gunner and that’s not a joke.” The misadventure in X’ian came to a head when news reached Pilton and the rest of Scotland that Deek had apparently dematerialised. “The man has disappeared,” reported the club. “I was back in my hotel, training on my own,” he explains. “I got a row for swearing. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that if I shoot and miss I might swear – I’m a huffy, angry guy when I’m not playing well. I wasn’t swearing at anyone that day but they’re pretty strict about that sort of thing over there.”
Culturally, over there, Riordan struggled to adapt and he laughs as he tells stories against himself. “I had terrible problems with the food. There was a big welcome meal for the new foreign players at a fancy restaurant, Chinese obviously, and I was glad when I spotted chicken fried rice on the menu. But when the plate came the chicken was basically running aboot. There was some team bonding in another restaurant, Chinese again, but this time it was chicken feet, what I was told was frog and other no’ right stuff. I reckoned it probably caused offence not to eat but I couldn’t choose anything. X’ian isn’t the most westernised place in China but there was a Subway so I was able to live off their sandwiches until this Italian boy, Fabio Firmani, took pity on me. He was a former Lazio captain and I ended up moving next to him so he could cook me tomato pasta every night.” Ultimately, he missed his family too much. And what of Bruce, his faithful bulldog, so attached to our man that tripping over the mutt and injuring himself caused him to miss an Edinburgh derby? “He passed away when I was in bloody China. I was devastated.” Now I wish I hadn’t asked; he looks like he’s going to cry.
Travelling back through Riordan’s story we’ve reached the crucial juncture: the (non-Subway) sandwich of two spells at Hibs either side of Celtic. A different decision – he had “tons” of offers to join other clubs including Anderlecht, Kaiserslautern and Nuremberg – or a bit of that elusive luck and his career might have worked out differently, better. But was he not, at least in part, master of his own downfall through attitude – he’s pleaded guilty to sullenness and stroppiness – and a hectic lifestyle? “Well, I think I quietened down at Celtic, to be fair. I moved to Glasgow to put a lid on things and hardly ever went out. At Hibs the first time, the young ones under Tony [Mowbray], we used to hit the town three or four times a week. But that team – Broony [Scott Brown], Thommo, [Kevin Thomson], Boozy [Guillaume Beuzelin], Deano [Dean Shiels] and the rest – had such frightening potential that if we’d stayed together we’d have won the league easy by now.”
His bizarre Celtic interlude has been well-documented, in as much as anyone knows what went wrong. Strachan hardly needed another game-changer but couldn’t resist signing him.
He was an unused sub so often that Only an Excuse spoofed him being considered alongside a one-eyed man, a pensioner and a flute-playing Orangeman before the manager ordered a drunk to get stripped. “Brilliant sketch,” says Riordan. I remind him of the time, with Celtic going out of the League Cup to Hearts, that big, lumbering Evander Sno was sent to the rescue. He counters with big, lumbering Craig Beattie getting the nod against Milan in the Champions’ League.
I ask if distance has resulted in any more perspective on Deek: The Wilderness Years; he shakes his head. Yes, everyone thought he’d get on well with the manager – “although he’s not really from my bit, more Muirhouse”. There were bust-ups with Strachan “but you get them anywhere”. No, he never had a problem with left-midfield, although goals have always been his business and energy should be conserved for them.
What of the story that Riordan was stepping out with Strachan’s daughter and the boss wasn’t best-pleased? Yes, heard that one “but I’d never met the lassie”. The Scotland boss had been at the Silverknowes clubhouse the previous evening; maybe just as well Riordan left early and missed him. Press for further insight into why this scorer of goals of often brilliant nonchalance is currently without a club and he apologises for offering up the line that, truly, football is a funny old game. His cult status is assured; so to his own chapter of an updated edition of Hampden Babylon, should Stuart Cosgrove ever find the time to write it. But, with a family to support, Riordan would much rather still be out there, scoring and scowling.
He’s envious of Broonie and another ex-teammate, Anthony Stokes, trying to win the Scottish Cup with Celtic tomorrow – and he’d love to be in the Hibs team. Some think he’s been a money-grabber in the past, he says, but after Bristol he offered to play for the Hibees for nothing. “Pat Fenlon said he had enough strikers,” adds Riordan, but maybe there’s another reason. The manager is much preoccupied with persuading Leigh Griffiths of the benefits of a having a long career free from waywardness. Perhaps he thinks Riordan and Griffiths’ strike partner last season, the also currently clubless O’Connor, can’t help in this regard. “I know,” he shrugs, “and if I’m being held up as a bad example I’m no’ happy.” The nightclub ban is ongoing, as he found out to his cost – £800 – when fined last November for a breach of the peace, a teen-era reunion party proving too seductive to resist. But, he insists, the blackballing is punishment aimed at drug-abusers and knife-wielders and he’s neither.
What of Griffiths, does he rate him? “Of course, he’s fantastic. He says I was his hero growing up and I’m flattered.” And O’Connor – post-Siberia, how’s doing? “Funnily enough, I got a text from Gaz last night while I was in bed. I tried ringing him this morning but he’s an awfie man for keeping his phone off and not getting back to you for three months. I hope he’s all right.”
Just then Riordan’s mobile beeps, flashing up a photo of his daughters. On this non-golfing day does he fancy another round? Ach, why not? Before he goes, I ask to see his tattoo, half-hidden by a sleeve. “It’s Hibs, kind of in instalments: the ship, the harp, the castle. I don’t know where I’m going to be playing my football next – hopefully somewhere – but I’d love to finish up at Easter Road. The club have done loads for me and I love them to bits. Just one more season, not even playing every week, just coming on when needed, that would be brilliant.”
If that were to happen, surely any drunks would have to defer to Deek.