Sometimes it is about the right fit and Cristian Gamboa has good reason to be confident of that being much better as he looks forward to life under a very different regime from what he was used to at West Bromwich Albion.
The 26-year-old Costa Rican was overlooked in pretty much every sense at The Hawthorns, his size reckoned to be an issue for Tony Pulis given the Welshman’s emphasis on physicality of approach to his football.
A pacey full-back with attacking instincts who has already accrued 47 caps for a team that was good enough to top a group from which England and Italy were knocked out at the World Cup in Brazil, he seems much more likely to slot into the type of gameplan Brendan Rodgers likes to implement.
While, then, West Brom would not initially seem the ideal place for the Celtic manager to seek out players it could hardly have made more sense.
He knows the English game is awash with talent it cannot accommodate so the likelihood was that a manager with an approach to the game that could hardly have less in common with the style he encourages his teams to adopt would have suitable candidates who are both frustrated enough to want a new challenge and are considered an unnecessary burden on the wage bill.
In short, so to speak, Gamboa may not, at 5’8”, be Pulis’s type of footballer, then, but his capacity to race up and down the right touchline should add usefully to Celtic’s options.
“This is the opportunity I was looking for,” he said, smilingly refusing to be drawn on what he had to deal with under Pulis beyond acknowledging that: “It was a difficult situation.”
His involvement with the Costa Rican national side having allowed him to maintain his self-belief even when out of the picture over the past year, Gamboa knows he has every reason to believe it will be very different under Rodgers.
“The manager here plays a style that does suit me. That was also one of the reasons I wanted to come here,” he said.
“I knew Brendan as the coach of Liverpool and how he liked to play. I’ve also see some of his games at Celtic and he likes the team to have the ball and play attacking football.
“He likes to go forward and score goals. I hope it’s a style of play that I can do well in.”
Whereas West Brom is at best a mid-table club, he knows, too, that the expectations at Celtic will be of a very different nature since they are expected to dominate every domestic match play, but again reckons that should play to his strengths.
“When you are at a big club like Celtic you have to be attacking all of the time,” Gamboa noted, claiming that the club’s reputation is such that even when growing up he was aware of it.
“You need to create and if you start something you need to finish it. The supporters always want to go forward.
“I enjoy playing that way but I have to prove it on the pitch.”
While he arrived at Lennoxtown on a glorious summer’s day to complete the formalities before heading home to Central America for World Cup qualifying matches against Haiti and Panama, he is under no illusions about what to expect when he returns to Scotland as autumn arrives.
However he will have less difficulty in adjusting than most of his compatriots might, courtesy of a previous spell with Norwegian club Rosenborg. You are used to 30 degree heat and all of a sudden it is minus 10,” he said of his stint in Trondheim playing for Rosenborg.
“The first year was difficult, very tough, but my dream was always to play football in Europe,” he said.
“The area where I grew up is close to the beach and that was what I was used to. Ten minutes and I could be on the beach. I came to Norway in the summer. Then came the winter. It was crazy… and then you have to play football in it.
“It was a good experience, though. You learn and adapt and pick things up. Later, you can enjoy it and laugh about it.”
He speaks warmly of the Norwegian people and how he was treated, however and believes this latest move is his reward for having been prepared to endure the hardship, describing his move to Celtic as a step forward from West Brom, for all the Midlands club’s status as an established Premier League side.
“I took it like a challenge and now I am here at Celtic, one of the biggest clubs in Europe,” Gamboa observed.
“I know Scotland is a little bit colder than home but it’s not minus 20 so that’s fine.”
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