RANGERS are skint, Celtic have a Fortune.

So read the headlines on the day back in July when the Parkhead club fended off interest from the likes of West Brom, Hull City, Portsmouth and Fulham to stump up £3.8 million on Nancy striker Marc-Antoine Fortune. So drastically has the terrain shifted in the five months since then that re-living that signing conference now – a 
beaming Mowbray lavishing superlatives 
on the man seated next to him as a football 
player and a man, and backing him to score goals in the Champions League – is a bit like finding out that YouTube also provides a portal to a parallel universe. Even in these singular days of plunging 
share values in the world’s financial markets, it is rare for a Fortune to have depreciated quite so quickly.

The statistics themselves don’t tell the full story. Six starts and two goals is hardly the end of the world, particularly for a player who has never been prolific at any stage of his career. There is further significant mitigation in a medial knee ligament injury which deprived him of first team action for 10 weeks.

But such considerations mean little to those more inclined to knee-jerk reactions. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the situation, the player’s 
plight has come to symbolise the malaise seemingly afflicting the entire club at the moment, not least because the sum spent on him means that his fate is inextricably linked with that of his manager.

Perhaps then it is unsurprising that the 28-year-old should receive such a glowing testimonial from the man who has now signed him twice, along with a demand that anyone who wants to form a judgment on him should do so over the long term.

“He is a very conscientious boy,” said Mowbray. “He is not one of these lads who just comes in and shrugs his shoulders 
whether he is in the team or not in the team. He wants to play, he wants to do well and he wants to please. I am confident that given the right run of games, given the right time and 
circumstances that have got to be right for the team that he will be fine.

“He will get judged over the long term – that’s football,” Mowbray added. “With strikers at any club the 
expectation is that they have to contribute 
to being part of a winning team and I am sure he will over the longer term.”

To date, there has been no booing or jeering from the club’s support, just occasional murmurings of discontent. Such sound effects reached a crescendo at Dundee United on Sunday, when the player betrayed his lack of confidence in front of goal by twice finding presentable 
space in the penalty area, only to take one touch too many and find the chance gone. Mowbray admits that “in an ideal world” he would have broken him back into the first-team fold more gently.

“We have been trying to give him minutes on the pitch, but I think United was probably only his second game back,” Mowbray said. “I took the decision to leave Sammy [Georgios Samaras] out after seeing that mentally he seemed quite drained after qualifying for the World Cup and all the emotion of that. So I went with Marc, but in an ideal world he would have been filtered back into the team because he has been out for 10 weeks.

“With the opportunities that came his way [last] weekend he has 
probably not been instinctive, he has tried to make sure of things and with the extra touch the chance has gone,” he added. “I have got an understanding of where he is. Like all footballers who have been out for a long time, he wants to do well. Once he has had more time on the pitch I am sure the instinctive footballer will be in evidence.”

Considering Mowbray has been 
castigated in some quarters for being too truthful about the under performing parts of his team, it was instructive this week to hear the Celtic boss singling out Samaras – another who hasn’t entirely been spared the ire of the supporters on occasion – for some unadulterated praise. “Samaras has been exceptional for us over the last month or so, he has probably been our most important player,” Mowbray said. “Particularly against Hamburg I thought he was unplayable. He is 6ft 4in, has got great strength, great pace, and is fantastic in the air. He can run and he can shoot with both feet, basically everything you would want in a centre forward. I hope that he can keep the sort of form he has shown over the last three or four weeks going.”

Celtic still have a chance of making it from their Europa League group, even if – with Hamburg needing only one point to join Wednesday’s 
visitors Hapoel Tel-Aviv in the knockout stages – in all likelihood it is only a 
theoretical one. The way the Israeli side have stormed to the top of the table – scoring two in Germany and three in Vienna – has surprised many 
observers, but Mowbray isn’t one of them. He saw indications of the quality the side possessed in the 2-1 win over the Parkhead club back in September and it is unsurprising if that match sticks in his memory. In hindsight those two goals conceded in the last 15 minutes at the Bloomfield Stadium was when the Celtic boss’s honeymoon period came abruptly to an end.

“The evidence was there the first night we played them that they were capable of doing well,” the Celtic boss said. “We scored the early goal, and with the nature of the heat in Israel, it wasn’t a night for expending lots of energy, but by allowing them to have the ball, they showed that they are more than 
capable of playing. I see this match as an 
opportunity to try and win football matches and build off the back of that.”

With the match having the feel of a dead rubber, it seems a pretty safe bet that many will take Aiden McGeady up on his suggestion that Celtic aren’t worth watching at the moment. 
Mowbray, who has no intention of 
disciplining his winger for the comments, said: “He’s a young guy who has moments of frustration, on the pitch, off the pitch, but generally for the right reasons.”

Mowbray must now knuckle down with the long-term task of making his team better. Honduran centre half Osman Chavez is halfway through a two-week trial at the club, and planning continues for January, when Korean midfielder Ki-Sung Jung will arrive, and there is the possibility of Darren O’Dea returning from his loan spell at Reading. It would also help if some of his summer signings showed what they were capable of some time soon.