Last night, Neil Lennon confirmed to Scotland’s most notorious purveyor of decorative bog-roll that he had, in fact, played a role in the signing of Liam Shaw.
He also suggested that he is already actively involved with the squad rebuild. In another aside – which I’ll talk about later – he suggested that there won’t be as many people leaving as we think.
Lennon’s assertion that he’s still fully involved in planning for next season is the equivalent not so much of alarm bells ringing as an air raid siren going off.
This guy believes he’s here for the long haul. Those inside Celtic Park are allowing him to participate as though this were the case. If there is any evidence to the contrary I’ve not seen it.
Lennon will be the manager of Celtic next season.
I believe that, and I believe it because he seems to be convinced of it, and nobody at Parkhead has dissuaded him from that belief. They are allowing him to start building the next team.
Would they be doing that if they had decided his future in the negative, or even if they were yet to make that call?
All that remains to be decided at Celtic is how they’re going to sell the decision.
He’s started already making more excuses and offering the cryptic suggestion that we don’t know all the circumstances that surrounded our form collapse.
People keep on telling me that it’s impossible for them to keep him in place.
I’d have said that in November. Others were waiting for the axe to fall even sooner. After January it had to, right? After St Mirren beat us I got up the next day waiting for the breaking news bar on Sky Sports to change.
When it didn’t I knew he’d take the next game.
Lawwell is going in June. If Lennon is going with him then we’ve got two failed individuals whose time at the club is almost up making major decisions on its future, and I don’t know about you but I think that would be pretty scandalous.
The other possibility is that one of them isn’t going anywhere.
I think a lot of fans need to start bracing themselves for what looks inevitable.