Eastern promise unfulfilled

UNLESS he's sticking around to support his former teammates at Fir Park this afternoon - which we doubt very much - Du Wei will be back in Shanghai by now, chastened by his experience but surely relieved that his time in Scotland was not extended beyond the five fruitless months he has already spent here.

Celtic wanted to continue Du Wei's loan period at Parkhead but his employers at Shenhua, the Chinese Super League team from where he came, ruled that out last week. The 23-year-old has returned to the Hongkou Stadium in Shanghai, where nobody much cares about what happened on that ill-fated Sunday at Broadwood.

I have sympathy for Du Wei, not because I think he's much good as a player - palpably he is not - but because I'm sceptical about Celtic's real reasons for bringing him here in the first place. I'm particularly dubious about Celtic wanting to stretch out his loan spell. Why would they want to do that? Du Wie has been at Parkhead since some time in August. If they can't make their mind up about him in five months then you have to wonder about their vetting process.

Remember it took Strachan about five minutes to decide Jeremie Aliadiere was not for him and even less time to conclude that Didier Agathe is not the answer at full-back. So why the huge delay in assessing the Chinese international's true worth?

Did Celtic see a player or a commercial opportunity? Wasn't it the case that the smell of money from the Far East was the most appealing aspect of the Du Wei connection? Celtic, after all, have already started to tap the Japanese market on the back of Shunsuke Nakamura. They're planning a visit in the summer and there was talk of taking in China on that trip too. You may recall that when Sun Jihai's Manchester City played Li Tie's Everton in 2002, the television audience in China was 120 million. What club would not want a piece of that action?

It would have been easy to miss them, but quite a few Chinese players have come to the UK in recent times. Most have failed, their blatant shortcomings on the field sooner or later overriding their economic appeal off it. Sun Jihai is an exception. He has been a fine player for Manchester City and Li Tie has been a moderate success at Goodison Park. But what about the others? What about the Chinese players that were signed amid preposterous hype and the ching-ching sound of cash-registers?

There were shades of Du Wei in Everton's signing of Li Weifing in 2002. Weifing was a centre-half and a former China captain who ended up playing two games for Everton before being sent home again. Fan Zhiyi, one of the many imports who arrived with the mantle of "China's Beckham" couldn't hack it at Dundee or Cardiff; Hai Haidong, "China's Alan Shearer", has made one appearance off the bench for Sheffield United; Dong Fangzhuo, "China's Michael Owen" and "China's right-footed Ryan Giggs", hasn't made a single Premiership appearance for Manchester United since joining two years ago. He did, of course, feature in their tour of Asia last summer. United bigged him up on tour and then dropped him like a stone on his return to Manchester.

Fangzhuo is still young and you can't rule out the possibility that he will become a player one day. In the meantime he is serving a purpose by giving his club a foothold in China which is probably the one good reason why Celtic were interested in Du Wei. Asked repeatedly over the months about the progress his former defender was making, Gordon Strachan used to routinely reply that he was getting there slowly. "There's something there," he'd say of the Chinaman. "There's definitely something there."

After five months of work on the training ground, Strachan finally discovered the only thing there was an over-hyped and overwhelmed defender. So, Du Wei has departed and with him has gone Celtic's association with the most rapidly expanding market in football. How long will it be, though, before they hear of some new supposed superstar rising in the East and start seeing pound signs once more?

Family shed more light on sad demise of cup hero

TWO weeks back we mentioned the bitter-sweet story of Hughie Ferguson, the Scot who got the winning goal for Cardiff against Arsenal in the FA Cup final of 1927 - the first, and only, time the old silver pot has been taken out of England. Hughie, who remains something of a folk hero in Cardiff today, came home to Scotland two years after the cup final and signed for Dundee, but after losing form and getting pilloried by the supporters, he tragically took his own life in January 1930.

We said in our piece that Hughie, 32, left a wife and two children. His grandson, Hugh, has been in touch to give us more details. "His wife - my grandmother - was actually pregnant at the time he died," said Hugh, from his home in Edinburgh, "so he had three kids. It just makes it all the sadder. Apparently my grandfather was suffering from an imbalance of his inner-ear by the time he came up to play for Dundee. The family reckon it was a tumour that was never diagnosed.

"Anyway, the result was that he kept falling over on the park, which didn't go down well with the fans. He was also an insomniac, so you can imagine how difficult things must have been for him."

Hugh cherishes his grandfather's medal and his cup-final jersey. He has the match programme and some photographs of him with King George V, who was there that day with Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. Hughie's story, his glory and his sudden demise, will be told as part of a BBC television documentary due to be aired in springtime.

Press stops raving at Murray's rants

WHAT was most remarkable about Andy Murray's volleys in Melbourne last week - the ones directed at the media as opposed to the rather lame efforts put across the net to his first round opponent Juan Ignacio Chela - was not the fact that he let off some steam at certain sections of the British tennis press but that they took such childish umbrage at it. Maybe his words were ill-chosen but, frankly, who the hell cares?

I wasn't in Melbourne so I wasn't party to the much-talked-about press conference where Murray unloaded on the scribblers. Maybe I'm missing something but I think there's an irony here. Murray's angst-ridden, teenage strops were seen as something of a plus-point not so long ago, an illustration of how his competitive fires rage. All the screaming, shouting racket-throwing and gut-wrenching was all packaged together and hailed as the antidote to Tim Henman, the supposedly impassive and compliant loser.

One hissy fit after a demoralising defeat in a Grand Slam event and those edgy qualities everybody raved about at Wimbledon, and beyond, are suddenly a problem. Why? Just because he had a pop at some quarters of the media? Let's get things back in perspective here.