Interview: Shaun Maloney - I'm kicking on

Published on Saturday 14 May 2011 14:44

Maloney adamant he is ready for the battle to hang on to his place in Celtic's plans

THE 10th anniversary of Shaun Maloney's first start in senior football arrives next week. It has been a decade the Celtic striker seems to have travelled across in two different time zones simultaneously. "It doesn't feel like 10 years; it's flown in," the 28 year-old says, before checking himself. "Well, the last few years have felt like a lot more..."

On this deciding afternoon of the league season, Maloney might be about to experience fortune that needn't be prefixed by "ill". The red card shown to Kris Commons in midweek means Maloney is in line to make only his third start in the second half of a season since he returned from Aston Villa in the summer of 2008. A fact that pains him as much as the operations, the hamstring pulls and the break-downs in rehab that have dashed the promise Maloney has shown in each of these campaigns. He is sick of being sick, but no health kick can allow him to kick footballing ill-health.

Thoughtful, perhaps to a fault, and honest, perhaps also to a fault, he knows how it might be playing among supporters and inside the club that he is so often not playing. "I love my job, think it is the best in the world and I'm sure so many people envy me," he says. "I love playing and may have a chance to play in a really big day for the club this weekend. I just haven't been able to contribute as I want in the past three years, and so know that people in the club and people that follow it, could be in danger of losing confidence in me. Yet, no amount of effort, no amount of trying, has allowed me to do anything about that. I'm not the first player to be consistently unlucky with injuries for a period. I know some supporters will be seeing me as a player who is around but not contributing, and I understand that. And most frustrating of all is the fact that I have never felt better, or felt better about how I was playing, than the first three months of this season and last season."

Maloney knows a section of the support will never truly forgive him for his 18-month sojourn at Villa. His ailments and his absence have caused his contribution to be judged in a harsh light. His manager Neil Lennon and assistant Johan Mjallby both described him as "arguably" the club's best player over the eight-game winning run with which they opened the season. Tony Mowbray's tenure started to tip downwards only after he lost "key" man Maloney last November. And the first half of Gordon Strachan's ultimately grim final season witnessed a, tenure-best, 11-game league winning run in which Maloney was a central figure.

The player says the last three years, for him and his club "haven't brought much to shout about". Yet the one-season-wonder dismissal of Maloney - the forward claiming both SPFA player and young player award in season 2005-06 - is well off the mark. "I have had loads of highlights in my Celtic career," he says, a Scottish Cup winners' badge all he needs to complete his medal set achieved across 210 appearances, around half of which have come from the bench."I grew up in the team coming off the bench, and at that time there were six senior players in it who were guys you would expect to step up and make a difference if things weren't going well," he says. "I was envious of their status and I wanted to be one of those. I was that in 2005-06 and I want be that again. If people say that at 28 my peak years are ahead of me, then that is what I want to be. I know I've got it all to do this season and, I hope, next to convince I can be a major player in a winning Celtic team."

Three of those players from the Martin O'Neill era are now the club's management team. He will line up against them in the benefit game for his friend John Kennedy next Sunday and muse on the fact all the people he used to play with in his early years that will fill that Seville side "have been retired for numerous years". The mention of the venue for Celtic's UEFA Cup final defeat by Porto in 2003 causes him to muse on that evening too. "I'm not saying I think about my free-kick late in the final every day, but every two or three days it might get to me." Certain past games simply refuses to budge from his consciousness.

"The day at Ibrox in 2009, when I was brought back for my first league start in five months as we chased four in a row and it just didn't happen for me and the team, that haunts me, absolutely haunts me."

That he appreciates his lot in life but just simply can't let it wash over him is just how Maloney is. "However bad the past three years have been, I feel so fortunate to have been able to come back and have never regretted it. And I get a thrill just even being on a training pitch. I have loved playing for my country and worked under great managers, great people."

Lennon, whom he has known for practically the Irishman's whole 11 years in Scotland, Maloney describes as a "fascinating hybrid" of O'Neill and Strachan; in that he really comes alive on matchdays like the former, but is hands-on in the Monday to Friday sessions as was the latter. And, despite all the appalling events he has been forced to live through, the player believes the Celtic manager's character is unchanged by it all. Even the attack on him at Tynecastle the other evening, which Maloney was witness to from the technical area behind his manager, that initially seemed to leave him shaken.

"I haven't noticed any difference in him, day to day," Maloney says. "No person should have to bear what he has this season. He could not have imagined that when he got his dream job he would have to deal with this sort of baggage. What happened at Tynecastle the other night goes beyond our comprehension of a sporting event."Maloney, as a Catholic Celtic supporter brought up in Aberdeen, has a sense of detachment from the intensity of religious tribalism in the west of Scotland. It has never impacted in his life. He is too cerebral to be dragged down to such a petty level and, some would contend, too cerebral for the schoolboy world of the football dressing room. "I am just me," he says. "Old players always talk about missing the banter when they retire, I can't see me thinking that way. Whatever comes next, I'll be focused on that."

For now, the concentration is on altering some curious misconceptions about him that have started to take hold, the most prevalent of which are that he causes an imbalance in the Celtic team when sent wide in a 4-2-4 and that he's lost a half-yard through injuries. "I've never played in a 4-2-4 at Celtic. They played a 4-2-2-2 under John Barnes, but I was a 16-year-old boot boy then - including the night that Mark Viduka refused to put them on again for the second half against Inverness.

"And at my age, I still have the half yard, am still materially the same player I've always been. There will come a time the years catch up, but that's in the future for me. I can have no complaints about not coming straight back in. In the five months I was out, the players in wide areas have performed so well. As well as Kris (Commons] and James (Forrest] in there, you have had Joe Ledley, Scott Brown, Charlie Mulgrew, Paddy McCourt and Niall McGinn so the competition is fierce. I knew Kris was a good player from the Scotland team, but I just didn't realise quite how good. He has been absolutely outstanding since he signed here in January."

At this time in his career, Maloney has come full circle in largely being deployed from the bench, just as he was in his teenage years.

And when it comes to teenage years, he sees in 19-year-old team-mate Forrest spectacular promise. "James has the potential to be our best player. He has so much ability. There need be no limit to his progress. However good he turns out to be will depend on how much he wants it. Injuries permitting, that is." It is time that injuries permitted Maloney to be the thrilling player football's cognescenti know he can be.