So Walker will be in the Sky Sports Scotland studio tonight.
Not a great surprise. Nobody at Sky would have even entertained the idea of having him somewhere else.
Andy Walker and his bosses have called Lennon’s bluff.
But was Lennon actually bluffing?
That’s the question that our manager has assured will hang over tonight’s game before it even kicks off.
I would be astonished if Walker apologised, especially when the manager decided to insult him so publicly and gratuitously.
So this has become a showdown.
It’s also a side-show we could have done without.
But here we are, and having gone on the warpath Lennon now has to decide if he stays on it.
Worse, the club has to decide whether or not it allows him to. If he appears for an interview tonight you know they’ve told him that his red lines are not on, and that he was making a statement off his own back, and that he doesn’t have the juice to turn it into policy.
In truth, he was never going to win this and if the club has decided to end it fast before it gets out of hand I can’t blame them. We’ve got contractual obligations to Sky. He had a hundred targets he could have shot at and some of them have been much worse than Walker; he picked the one with the iron clad backing of a company who have our game the balls.
It seems impossible to imagine either Walker or Lennon backing down. So I don’t know how our manager can credibly do an interview with Sky or let any of his players do so.
But at the same time, I don’t see how our club can allow the manager’s break with reality to put us on a collision course with the broadcaster and, through them, the league itself.
I see two possibilities; the first is that Lennon will do an interview and tell the audience that he and Walker have talked in private and that the matter is closed. Or he’ll claim that it was a heat of the moment thing and that he’s still angry but understands that he went a little further than he should have. That’s possibility one.
Either would be bad for him, because Walker could tell the audience he has nothing to apologise for, and either option will look like Lennon backed down. We’ll never know if the club twisted Lennon’s arm and sent him out there against his will, unless he is so obviously irked that he flat out confirms that or at least hints at it in his comments.
Possibility two is that the club allows him a little wiggle room.
That they let Lennon have his moment tonight, that they allow him to boycott and command his players to do the same, either as a one-off never to be repeated or as a last stand from the manager, after which he’s already gone and the next guy is allowed to do things his way.