Johnny Kenny admits a lack of contact from Celtic despite scoring goals for Shamrock Rovers is “hard to take.”
The striker penned a five-year deal with the Premiership champions after they plucked him from Sligo Rovers as an 18-year-old back in January 2022, before being loaned to Queen’s Park the following summer. A return to Ireland in January 2023 turned into a two-season loan and Kenny is now approaching the end of the 2024 League of Ireland campaign with Rovers.
Kenny is in the running for the division’s golden boot and has the Tallaght team in the mix for a fifth successive league title, as well as a Europa Conference League clash with Chelsea on the horizon. All of which has left him struggling to understand a relative lack of contact from his parent club. They brought in fellow countryman Adam Idah for £9.5million in the summer so Kenny is understandably down the pecking order, but there’s been less communication than he would have expected.
“It’s difficult. They are my current club, but you just have to try prove them wrong on the pitch and see what comes of it,” he told the Irish Independent. “It’s a message here and there from Darren O’Dea [Celtic’s professional player pathway manager], that’s it, that’s all it is. I’m into the last few months of my deal now at Celtic, so we’ll just see what happens.
“It’s hard to take. Last year, [the lack of contact was] fair enough because I wasn’t really performing. But this year, I think I have performed well and I have gotten minimal contact from them. But look, I’ll just keep going game by game and see where it takes me. I’m always hopeful of getting an opportunity [at Celtic], but it might be limited. It would be a dream to play over there, but we’ll wait and see.”
Kenny doesn’t have to look for for inspiration for how things can change, however. He and fellow LOI alumni Liam Scales were regularly left to do the hard yards on match days as their teammates prepared for games. But now Scales has forced himself into Brendan Rodgers’ first team after going on loan to Aberdeen, and Kenny just hopes he’s afforded a similar opportunity to stake his claim.
“The two of used to be in the ‘Bomb Squad’, that’s what we used to call it!” He said. “When we didn’t make the [Celtic] squad and we used to do running on the day of the games. It was tough, no one wanted to be there. To be fair, Liam’s attitude never dropped. He went on loan to Aberdeen, did brilliantly and then Brendan [Rodgers] gave him his opportunity.
“Now he’s the first name on the team-sheet, starting for Ireland and scored his international first goal against Finland. Liam was around 24 when he got his chance at Celtic and he has taken it. Playing every week, playing in the Champions League, what more could you want? We would still speak about that time. He’d be an inspiration.
“Now he’d say, ‘Look what happened to me’ and that there’ll be an opportunity for me at Celtic. When that comes, I’ll just have to take it.”