HAD THINGS worked out differently, Marian Shved could well have been lining up for Celtic in Warsaw tonight instead of playing against them for Shakhtar Donetsk.
While the winger has only good things to say about the club and his time there, there is no question of who he feels is to blame for his departure.
The reception Shved received from Brendan Rodgers when he was signed from Karpaty Lviv was infamously lukewarm - at best. The then Celtic manager made it clear that Shved was being signed by the club rather than at his own request, saying frostily: "We've got about a million wingers and don't need another one.”
However, it was Rodgers’ successor Neil Lennon that Shved feels didn’t give him a fair crack of the whip while he was in Glasgow after returning from a loan spell in Lviv, and despite receiving assurances that he would be given opportunities to impress in a sit-down with then chief executive Peter Lawwell and the Celtic manager, he feels that Lennon reneged on those promises.
“The president [Peter Lawwell] supported me,” Shved said. “That’s very true.
“I remember once I sat with the coach and the president to discuss the situation because I hadn’t played in maybe half a year.
“The coach said ‘yes, of course, I think, I will give you chances to play.’ After this we shook hands together but after this I didn’t play in the team.
“Celtic at this time had very good results. All the time they were winning. Maybe the president couldn’t say anything to the coach because they had good results. Maybe that is why there was no change. It was still frustrating.
“I am a football player. I was training very well and tried to show that I could play but it didn’t happen. The problem is that he promised me but nothing happened and nothing changed.
“It was only the decision of the coach. It wasn’t a decision of the club or the supporters. Of course there were the qualification rounds for the Champions League for Celtic [when I played]. But it’s difficult to say how this happened.”
Despite the regrets he has over how his Celtic career unravelled in the end, Shved holds no grudges towards the club, and his wish to get a result against them is fuelled by a desire to do well for Shakhtar Donetsk, rather than showing his former team what they have missed out on.
“When I was transferred to Celtic it was a step ahead for me,” he said.
“Maybe I didn’t play a lot but it was a good period for me. I think a lot about this club only in good positive things.
“It happened, so you can’t change anything. I think that Celtic is a really big club, and when the coach and the club wanted to make the transfer happen, it was OK.
“Maybe I made some mistakes, but if I had to go back to that time I would have made the same decision, because it was a great experience and it was good for my career.”
Of course, Shved and his teammates have an even greater motivation to succeed in the Champions League due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, the reason their game against Celtic is taking place in Warsaw.
The team made the five-hour bus journey to the Polish capital from Lviv - where they are playing their home matches in the domestic league – for the match, and Shved admits it has been difficult for the team to prepare as they would have liked as a result.
He believes though that their desire to represent their homeland on such a stage will more than make up for any disruption to their pre-match routine.
“It is very hard now of course,” he said. “It’s very difficult because we know we have a lot of transfers between the matches and the matches are very close. But we think about the matches, about the results, about winning, and we play for our country and for our people. We fight on the pitch the same as our defenders [the army] do.
“Shakhtar left Donetsk about eight years ago, and we have a lot of people from different parts of Ukraine who support us.
“They come from Donetsk, Kharkiv, Lviv, Kyiv and other cities, and we feel this support.
“We are not only a club from one city, we represent Ukraine in this match and we play for Ukraine.”
