About a minute before Edouard scored the equaliser, Lennon was in the process of making one of his desperate mass substitutions. We were a goal down and looking lost to the world.
The team would have spent the next few minutes trying to adapt to it as players figured out where they were supposed to be, and not because the manager or the coaches had some blinding tactical plan.
They’d have adjusted themselves into whatever formation seemed to make the most sense.
Forget any underlying logic to it, there wouldn’t have been any.
We started the game with three attacking midfielders and one of them playing a striker.
Think Rogic, Turnbull and Christie can’t play in the same team?
Think Christie and Edouard don’t work up front?
Well today Neil Lennon was determined to prove you wrong.
Until the moment, just before the equaliser, when he was going to ditch that lunacy for another form of it.
Plan A and Plan B are bound by one principle; put attacking players on and hope that one of them can conjure something up for you.
That’s the extent of it.
Like watching a Football Manager first time player trying 2-3-5 formations in a last-ditch effort to win his opening game.
Would Eddie himself have come off in that series of changes?
Well Lennon was warming up his other strikers so we have to assume that it was more than possible. Who knows what goes through this guy’s mind? We do know that whatever changes he’d “planned” he stopped the moment the ball went in.
When we scored a second about a minute later he ditched whatever he had been cooking up. A more modest set of changes were made instead. Lennon did not change the game. He had planned to try.
But he personally played no role in crafting that equaliser; instead, our best footballer took advantage of a momentary loss of concentration from the home team and scored.
The second was Eddie at his best; individualistic, fantastic close control and a killer finish.
Odsonne Edouard deserves the plaudits, and because of him we’re three points better off. We’re also closer to having this joker in the dugout confirmed for another year.
I am glad we won. We have to keep winning.
Two scenarios loom large in front of us during this most dreadful campaign; the club from across town coming to Parkhead as champions or them the winning the title on that day.
Neither of those things can be allowed to happen so winning the remainder of games is imperative.
At any other club Lennon would already be too late; the history books will record the epic failure of this campaign and he ought not to be allowed to blight the next one.
There was nothing today to suggest that he has the first clue how to fix the enormous problems that assail us; for too long he has gotten by on certain players finding something special.
Well, Edouard will be gone next season. Christie is a shadow of the player he was, and will be gone. Don’t be surprised if McGregor goes. Ajer will depart leaving another gaping hole at the back.
A lot of the footballers who have saved the manager time and again won’t be at the club and if we have any sense neither will he, because they’ve been propping him up too long.
Today I saw no signs of hope.
We’ve won the match, but that’s all the good that comes out of it.
Because the starting line-up was just plain wrong, the tactics baffled even our own players and the substitutions were all set to confirm Lennon as a third rate choice before Edouard produced the goods for him.
The Frenchman has now scored six games on the bounce … he looks back on form, albiet late in the day.
But under this manager we are nowhere.