ED SHOULD FORGET PRICE TAG – LIKE I DID

I was the record signing for plenty of top clubs and £9m may put a target on Edouard’s back, but he can rise above it

ODSONNE Edouard became Celtic’s most expensive signing since myself when his move got over the line last week and I do think there is an element of pressure that goes with that.

There is a difference in that he has been at the club and knows what it is all about so he won’t need time to come in and settle but what he will want is a proper good run of games.

He won’t want to be in for one or two and then out for a couple, he’ll want a dozen games under his belt so that he can be judged properly over the piece.

I do think when a club pays big money for you that the fans are patient and they are excited but the longer it goes without you getting a goal then you start to feel the pressure. It does build.

You are aware of people saying, ‘well we paid a fortune for him and he can’t do x, y or z.’ You put the ball in the net and that stops.

And it’s not just your own support the pressure can come from; you have opposition fans chanting ‘what a waste of money’ and essentially you can feel a reminder of the pricetag wherever you go.

My only advice to Odsonne would be to try to block as much as that out as possible because we all know that players have nothing to do with how much they cost. All he can focus on is hitting the ground running and showing the kind of form that he did in the latter half of last season.

It took me until my 11th game for Celtic before I scored my first goal for the club. To be fair, from there on in I never looked back but I remember the build-up of pressure leading up to that. Everyone talks

about it – pundits, punters, everywhere you go people are asking you when you’re going to score.

I had been coming on for 10 minutes here and there and I really needed a run of it. I’d played against Hearts and had had a few chances but I ended the game needing five stitches in my lip. So it wasn’t a great start for me in terms of my career at Celtic but, of course, I went on to score 110 goals for the club. I always think it could have been more, too.

But I know the kind of pressure that Odsonne will feel because it is something that is very hard to get away from – I had it for a large part of my career.

When I was 19 I was signed by George Graham at Arsenal for £2.5m which equalled the record they had paid for Ian Wright, who was a decade older than me at the time and England’s centreforward. I was young and didn’t really feel the pressure so much at that age.

I signed a five-year deal but then Arsene Wenger had come into the club and West Ham were interested in me. Arsene wanted me to stay and learn off Dennis Bergkamp and Wright but Harry Redknapp offered £3.2m for me and I wanted to play. I didn’t want to sit on the bench so I went – and that was West Ham’s then record fee.

We stayed up, I scored 24 goals in the Premier League

‘‘ You have opposition fans chanting ‘what a waste of money’

and I was just one goal away from winning the Golden Boot. Michael Owen won it that year.

Then Joe Kinnear came in for me and Wimbledon paid £7.5m for me. I was 23. I had had three big moves, all within London and I was still a kid. I had broken a lot of transfer records whenever I had moved and I did feel a bit of pressure then.

You do feel it. I went to Coventry after Wimbeldon, I failed medicals too at Spurs, at Rangers, at Charlton but when Martin O’Neill came in for me and said that the only way he wasn’t signing me was if I had a hole in my heart.

Martin had paid big money the season before for Chris [Sutton] and Neil [Lennon] so it wasn’t too out of character at that point from Celtic to be shelling out big money for players. But you certainly feel the expectation levels.

The good thing from Odsonne’s point of view is that he already knows that there is pressure at Celtic and he knows that he is capable of playing at this level. His goals against Rangers last season were crucial for him in terms of endearing him to the support but they also showed that he has the required temperament to go and play at this level.

He’ll simply be looking at it as a case of picking up where he left off.