Barry Robson – Another Waste?

This week saw yet another of the top players in the SPL outwith the top two, Dundee United’s captain Barry Robson, defecting to an Old Firm club.

Robson has been an ever-improving player at United and this season has been his best yet ever under the shrewd and watchful eye of Craig Levein at Tannadice.

Similarly to Paul Hartley under Levein at Hearts, Robson has become much more effective since moving into a more central midfield role from the wing, and such have been the consistent level of his performances this season that he has had many clubs interested in his services and has also been called into the Scotland squad.

Also similarly to Hartley, Robson’s higher profile has now resulted in a move to Parkhead, where the levels of expectation will be on an entirely different scale to what this player has been used to. He’s also going from an environment where he was the main man to being just another player, and it will be interesting to see if he manages to force his way into the Celtic first XI on a regular basis.

We have seen this sort of scenario many times in the past, and on the majority of occasions it has to be said that although the player in question always becomes financially richer, their careers tend to go into reverse.

Many years ago there was common belief that one of the reasons that the Old Firm continued to dominate the domestic game in Scotland was that they tended to go around weakening everyone else by nicking their top players. Then these guys would often struggle to get a game and as a result be effectively frozen out of football until their next move, whereupon their cutting edge had gone and the peaks years of their careers had been wasted.

We’ve seen this sort of thing happening recently as both Glasgow clubs have been forced to look closer to home for new signings. Players from other SPL sides such as Derek Riordan, Paul Hartley, Steven Pressley, , Chris Killen, Scott McDonald and Scott Brown have all found their way to Parkhead in the not-too-distant past, with varying degrees of success. Out of that lot I’d say that only McDonald could claim to have lived up to or more than matched expectations. There’s perhaps still time for Brown though.

We’ve also seen players like Kevin Thomson and Alan Gow moving to Rangers and not playing very often, although Thomson has recently been getting into favour there.

You really can’t blame a guy like Barry Robson for moving to Celtic at this stage in his career though, no matter what the consequences will be for his career. Here is a guy who is 30 years old and has never yet had a big money move in his entire career, so he’s hardly going to turn it down now is he? He’ll probably be thinking that he could just as easily get injured tomorrow and it’s all over, so you can easily see his logic here.

However with the Scotland national team in mind, I do hope that Celtic’s motives for signing this player are more than just to weaken United, and that Robson does get his fair share of games. He is potentially someone who could do a great job for Scotland as we try to qualify for the next World Cup, so hopefully he won’t be the next name in a long list of talented players who saw their careers wasted by taking the easy and lucrative route to Ibrox or Parkhead. We’ll see.