Football Life Far From Intolerable

Martin O’Neill has returned to the subject of our homesick Shaun Maloney and says he is hopeful he’ll be able to settle and make an impact.

On the reports that Maloney was due to return to Celtic barring the Villa managers approval, he retorted:

‘That’s absolutely not true – I’ve never received a phone call from Celtic about Shaun Maloney – ever. I don’t know where it came from. But I understand the story doesn’t read so great if it doesn’t happen. The stories were mentioned to me on Monday and I saw the comments attributed to Shaun. It’s absolutely no different to what he has already said to me.’

On the Scotland international, he added, ‘I’m not here to imprison anybody, but by the same token, people sign contracts and for the most part, unless they’ve been really hard done by, they have to abide by these things. Shaun’s done very well and I’ve been very pleased with him. He could easily have started against Chelsea after his efforts in first scoring the winner against Fulham, and then being our best player against Wrexham.’

And the last line really does make good reading and echoes what so many of us have said: ‘So we’ll monitor all these situations. I don’t want life to be intolerable for people – but this is professional football, and it’s far from intolerable.’

Lets face it, most of us would give an arm and a leg to be in Maloney’s position. That said, if we gave an arm and a leg, we might actually have blown our chances ??

Lets hope come January Maloney will have had time to settle, he looks like he could be a star for us, would be awful for him to miss the chance.