Gibbo4
Player Valuation: £950k
I think that's a nice story, but he represented Scotland as a youth as well and likely would have continued to had the Celtic and SFA policies been changed.
He played for Scotland U'13 schoolboys because he went to school in Scotland. He joined up with the Irish U'15 at the first opportunity as this is the youngest age group for which they have a team. Now I know the thing about Celtic not letting you play for your school so the Scotland schoolboys wouldn't call up Celtic players. This later blew up in Scotland into a blame game looking for the reason for the fact that McGeady didn't play for Scotland. They tried to get him back at the first opportunity into their youth (not schoolboy) squad when he was 15 or 16. But by then he was with Ireland and continued representing them.
From the horse's mouths in the vid:
"Everybody always used to ask me, 'who would ya like to play for, Scotland or Ireland?' and I always used to seem to say, Ireland"
McGeady's dad:
"An awful lot of people in the Scottish media tried to say that Aiden's decision was a pragmatic decision based on getting to the world cup, as at the time Ireland had a better team than Scotland and they seized upon this thinking that this guy has seen his future as playing for Ireland and maybe getting to the world cup because Scotland were in the doldrums. It wasn't based on that at all, his decision was based on a very rich heritage and culture passed down from father to son and from aunts and uncles and Aiden spent every single summer in Ireland from a child, as I did. So he was very much ensconced in the Irish way of life, and he had a real deep and sort of unerring love for Ireland, and that's the reason he made his decision."
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