The Big Interview Leigh Griffiths

New Bhoy Leigh Griffiths is happy to be making headlines for football reasons.

He’d have preferred to have been selected, of course. But Leigh Griffiths didn’t mind too much being the centre of attention for missing out on a Scotland call-up.

The 23-year-old’s January switch from Wolves to Celtic was warmly welcomed by National Coach Gordon Strachan, who spoke of the player stepping up a level.

But when it came to choosing the group to face Poland in Warsaw next month, he opted to look elsewhere. As Griffiths says, though, at least the coverage that followed was preferable to seeing his private life plastered all over the papers.

“It was where I want to be on the back pages, not the front,” says Griffiths, who opened his goals account in the Hoops against Hearts yesterday.

“Unfortunately it is usually the other way around, and that does make my life a bit hard. Every time it seems there are two lines of a story and the rest is about my past.

“It’s not going to go away, but I am trying to calm down what I do so I can always be in the sports pages rather than the news.

“If you ask any manager I’ve worked with, or any player who has been in a changing-room with me, they’ll say I am not a bad lad. I come in and sit quietly, get out and do my work, then go home and see my kids.

“There has been a spotlight put on me, but if you ask anybody they will say I am no trouble at all.”

Griffiths puts his omission down to a lack of recent match action.

“It has been good at Celtic, it has been intense,” he says. “But I hadn’t played a lot of games in the last month and a bit, so I need to get up to match fitness.

“I think I have done OK so far, and getting 90 minutes under my belt last Sunday against St Johnstone was good.

“Scott Brown, Charlie Mulgrew and James Forrest are all regulars in the Scotland team, and I want to be in that situation too.

“Gordon Strachan hasn’t been in touch with me, but he has had good words to say about me through the Press.

“That was encouraging, so I will just keep my head down, keep working hard, get my fitness levels up and score a few goals.

“It is exciting to play alongside good players like Kris Commons and Anthony Stokes. They will help me settle in, and if I can do that then hopefully I will get Scotland recognition in the future.”