LOGAN BAILLY has warned the Celtic number one Craig Gordon that he is just reaching his own peak as a goalkeeper.
The Belgian tied up a three-year contract with the Ladbrokes Premiership champions today and described his £250,000 transfer from homeland club OH Leuven as "a dream".
Bailly is a huge admirer of Gordon and is diplomatic when asked about challenging him for a first-team place, but it is clear that he aims to enjoy the best years of his career in Glasgow.
"I have a lot of respect for him because he is a great goalkeeper with a lot of experience in a long career, so it will be nice to be training with him," said Bailly.
"I'm 29, but I can still learn a lot from him. I think I'm in my prime just now as 29 or 30 is a great age for a goalkeeper.
"I hope that my career is starting now and I still have a few years left to play football."
Bailly has represented his country at every level from Under-16 to the senior side, earning eight full caps, and has experience of a number of well-known clubs such as KRC Genk, Germans Borussia Moenchengladbach and Neuchatel Xamax of Switzerland.
"It's a great feeling," said the 29-year-old after putting pen to paper. "It's a big team with a big history and I'm very happy I'm here.
"When you see Celtic from the outside, you know it is a big team. When you are here, you realise that it is a lot bigger.
"My manager told me about the interest, but, when you hear that a club like Celtic is interested in you, at first you don't believe it. It's like a dream to pay for Celtic. When you play football, you dream of playing on the big stage."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article