OPINION
With just 22 appearances for Celtic in two years at Parkhead the Hoops faithful would be forgiven if they admitted to forgetting that Eboue Kouassi was still in Glasgow.
A highly rated signing from Krasnodar back in the winter window of 2017, the 21-year-old has not lived up to expectations this season with just five appearances under Brendan Rodgers this season, injury curtailing the amount of game time that he has been able to pick up.
However, his fitness problems have not been the only problem, with his form hardly impressing the Parkhead faithful or his manager and with the amount of problems he has suffered his confidence must be shattered into a thousand pieces.
It is so important for players to feel happy and settled somewhere and it cannot have been easy for Kouassi to move to Glasgow as such a young talent to find himself struggling to forge a career at the club.
So what can be done to solve the issue? Well, Brendan Rodgers may have inadvertently brought the answer to Celtic already in the shape of Vakoun Issouf Bayo.
The striker is a new arrival at the club and while he will be keen on stamping his own mark on the first team, he is also very close friends with Kouassi and has revealed his plans to help his fellow countryman revive his career in Scotland.
He told the Daily Record: “If we can help each other we will. We have a community feeling together.
“I have known him since we were in the Ivory Coast Under-21 squad. We used to spend quite a lot of time together before games and became good friends.
“He encouraged me to come here. Although he’s not playing right now and doing a lot of rehab on his knee we have had quite a lot of exchanges on the phone.”
Having a friendly face will help both Bayo and Kouassi immeasurably and after being forgotten by those at Celtic the latter’s confidence will surely soar when he is back playing alongside his mate.
He might not have meant it but Rodgers could well have sealed a deal which gives him not one but two talents ready for the first team.