In my article earlier, on how Neil should learn to calm down, I referenced the deplorable treatment he received from people all over Scotland and including in the media.
Neil needs to learn not to get so involved in the stupid things other people do; he was not to blame for last night’s shocking scenes at Morton, but he could have reacted to them better.
Cue the morons, though, suggesting that this “proves” Lennon brought his issues on himself.
I almost got into an argument with one of these halfwits on Twitter before deciding not to bother, but he wasn’t alone and his thinking is representative of a lot of people in Scotland.
Neil’s issues were a result of “the kind of person he is.”
I agree, but not in the way they think. Neil is, to put it mildly, an unrepentant Irish Catholic. He refused to bow down. He refused to kiss arse and scrape and fawn at those who hate him. He told them where to shove it, and for that he was about as generally despised as any individual here has ever been.
You know, I find it instructive to look over those incidents again, to knock this cobblers on the head once and for all. Neil Lennon was a victim of easily the most depraved hate campaign any public figure in this land has been subjected to in my living memory.
The problem these people have with him is that he never acted like one. He refused to change his life or his views or his behaviour to suit them. His conduct was like a spit in their faces; every act of his only increased their venom towards him. That wasn’t his problem. It was theirs.
Hatred of this guy, most of them don’t even understand it themselves, or where it comes from. Ask for the reasons and they give you pathetic excuses. It was nothing g to do with his religion, they claim, and everything to do with his personality.
But is Neil Lennon the first footballer to be combative on the field? Or the first manager who got emotional off of it? Of course he isn’t. Is he the first celebrity to tell the media where to go, or the first famous person who told his critics to piss off?
Absolutely not.
But he is one of a handful who was sent bullets in the post.
He was one of a very small number indeed who was attacked during his leisure time.
He was the only one, to my knowledge, who was ever attacked at his place of work, in full view of the television cameras.
And he was one of the only people anywhere in the UK ever targeted by letter bombs.
I could name you a dozen celebrities and journalists and politicians who I regard as thoroughly loathsome, repellent individuals. None of them has ever gone through what our former manager did, and nor should they ever have to.
Nobody “brings that on themselves”, no matter how divisive or even outright evil their opinions or behaviour might be.
Jose Mourinho may well be the most arrogant football manager in all of Europe.
His spiky personality and general demeanour on the touchline is far worse than that of Neil Lennon; the English press actually loves him for that, but there are times when he goes way over the line in his comments and reactions to things. Nobody ever drew a hanging man on a wall and scrawled his name beside it. Nobody ever ran down a flight of stairs, jumped over an advertising board and lunged at him whilst he was standing on the touchline.
I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had with otherwise intelligent people who cannot speak about Neil Lennon without a sneer or a curse and who, when you grill them on the reasons for their utterly irrational level of hatred towards him simply do not know the answer. They despise this guy, a fellow human being, a warm, decent, generous man from all accounts of those who know him well, and they literally cannot give you one single reason – no matter how ridiculous – why this is the case, and what makes him so special from other folk in the same profession and who have, on occasion, let themselves down with their behaviour.
People hate this guy just because.
Because what?
Ask them. Try and work it out because I stopped a long time ago.
That’s some of them,
Others hate him for very real reasons which all of us can grasp, those I stated above. Because he’s an Irish Catholic who played for Celtic and didn’t moderate or change his behaviour to suit what others wanted to see from him.
I cannot put it more bluntly than to say Neil was supposed to “know his place” in Scotland. Like other Irish Catholics he was supposed to take his seat at the back of the bus and not rock the boat. But that was never Neil Lennon’s style, and whilst I think his touchline demeanour could be better (and my hope for that rests on how it holds back his career and gives ammo to his critics) I hope to God that the outspoken, passionate Neil keeps doing what he does.
The reaction, in Scotland, to everything Neil turns his hand to reeks of bigotry.
When he was at Bolton he behaved exactly as he does now, and the English media never once turned on him the way the Scottish press (and a lot of the Scottish public) has time and time again. I watch him from afar and I marvel at how he deals with it and how he has always dealt with it and it amazes me that those who’ve met him report that he’s very open, straightforward, down to Earth and humble when a guy who puts up with what he does would be fully forgiven for being guarded, withdrawn, sheltered, distant from others, even wary and suspicious.
And he’s not. He’s just not like that at all.
No words that I could ever write can fully express my contempt for the people who hate this man, or what goes through their minds. They can cling to whatever “proof” they want that Neil Lennon is an unlikeable character; that ideas exists only inside their own demented minds and the reason I refuse to engage with them is that there’s no prospect of changing that. Hatred that runs so deep can’t be changed or reasoned with or rationalised.
I won’t try. It’s not worth the time or the effort.
But nor am I going to let them build their prejudice on top of my own genuine concern for the man by using what I wrote today as some kind of warped justification for it. I know exactly why those people hate Neil Lennon and why he received the abysmal treatment he did. One of his most prominent public defenders was the late Paul McBride QC and he also knew and he was very open in stating that reason in public, many times.
And for that, he too was sent bullets and eventually bombs in the post.
That’s a sickness that runs deep.
That’s a hatred no other footballer in this land has ever had to endure.
The people who would make excuses for that are as bad as those who did it, and those folk crawled out of a sewer.
Our society ought not to allow them to do it with impunity.
This particular community – who loves Neil Lennon as one of its own – certainly never will.