If it isn’t the enemies of Celtic, constantly chipping away at us, and it isn’t ex-Celts trying to boost their media careers at our expense, now we have the constant drone of Neil Lennon trying hard to burnish his own reputation by raking over the coals of last season over and over and over again, without ever once taking a shred of responsibility for it.
This is beyond tiresome. I feel like I only wrote about this a week ago, when I said that Lennon is actually harming his own chances of landing a new job at the same time as he risks whatever is left of his relationship with our fans.
Today it is clear that he’s now testing it to the absolute limit. Most folk have about as much of this guy as they can stomach now. Frankly we’re all sick of him, sick of his self-pity and his justifications, sick of his delusional belief that everything was someone else’s fault. He even appears to believe that there was a way he could have stayed at the club.
I understand that Lennon has lost things here. I said it in the last article I wrote on him. His grief is real. We should acknowledge that.
He has to live with being the guy who lost ten in a row, the guy who blew it. He will never have another job remotely as big as Celtic so he’s lost the better part of his career at the same time. Lennon knows nothing will ever be the same again and he is entitled to mourn that, all of it.
As long as he understands we’ve lost things too.
This is what grates most about Lennon. He thinks we should be grateful to him. He keeps on banging on about his record. If his record was as impressive as he appears to believe then he wouldn’t be sitting eight months on without a job in management. There is a larger context to that record and owners and chairmen understand that well.
He’s blaming the players again, slagging the mood some of them were in after they came back from lockdown. Does he even understand what he’s saying? Lockdown was hard on a lot of people, he should know. He came back looking like someone who fell out of a kebab shop. He has no idea what personal struggles others were undergoing.
Blaming the players is easy. He’s been doing it since the night of the Ferencvaros game, and if there was legitimacy in that criticism he had a solution open to him which was to sell those guys in what was left of that window or to stop playing them. He did neither, so if things were so bad behind the scenes he and his coaches made no effort to change that; instead they made matters worse.
None of this excuses, either, the damning list of tactical and organisational mistakes he made and which haunted us all through that campaign. The mind-bending bad decisions. The instructions he gave individual players that stifled the creativity. The reliance on the same approach to games even when it obviously wasn’t working.
There is no excuse for any of it and the more he attempts to deflect from his share of the blame the stupider he sounds, the more arrogant and out of touch he comes across and the closer he gets to a point of no return where even his dwindling band of followers stop believing that he’s anything other than a charlatan.
Lennon would do well to shut it for a while. He would be better off if he took a long break from taking about Celtic. Nobody wants to hear his justifications or rationalisations or his endless stream of excuses. The man sounds delusional.
Neil needs to take a step back. Is there no-one advising him? The press up here are not his friends. I remember through the bullets and bombs in the post era they were saying “he brings it on himself”. Time to screw the nut Neil. HH
Bollocks. What is wrong with telling it like it was. There was obvious dissension in the ranks, everyone could see it from the performances that were lack lustre to say the least, and anyway, it shouldn’t have come down to a few disgruntled players. The Board failed miserably by not going out and spending accordingly to assure that 10IAR and beyond was a guarantee. But they didn’t, and that is really where the finger should be pointed, directly at them.
Lennon’s behaviour is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.
I don’t find it in the least ridiculous. It’s still hurting and he’s still young enough to continue his career in football. So it’s understandable and I’ve yet to read a comment he’s made that sounded way off the mark or a lie. It may not be the full story but the full story is complex and is more suitable for a book rather than a newspaper or a blog unless the blogger wants to spend a year writing something based on interviews with players, Neil Lennon, Peter Lawell and others. Personally, I’d say if you don’t like what he is doing just don’t read and comment on it.
James said: “Lockdown was hard on a lot of people, he should know. He came back looking like someone who fell out of a kebab shop. He has no idea what personal struggles others were undergoing.
Blaming the players is easy. He’s been doing it since the night of the Ferencvaros game, and if there was legitimacy in that criticism he had a solution open to him which was to sell those guys in what was left of that window or to stop playing them. He did neither, so if things were so bad behind the scenes he and his coaches made no effort to change that; instead they made matters worse.”
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I think there is a fair chance he understood the personal struggles others were going through and tried to help. The goal of 10IAR complicated things and these were highly paid professionals not just mates. So he had to combine helping them and trying to win 10IAR. How would the rest of us cope with this? He did bring in a sports psychologist remember.
And I don’t think he could have simply let them go at that time or stop playing them. The board had left him in a weak position and Griffith and Ajeti weren’t exactly ready to replace Eddie. Ajer was doing okay and Ryan Christie might still have been able to scramble something together given better conditions.
It’s easy to accuse Neil Lennon of all sorts of things but no one really knows what he was up against and how much of it was the board’s doing – couldn’t bring in his own coaching staff, players foisted on him. For anyone to say he shouldn’t have taken the job just shows how much they fail to see Neil Lennon’s passion for the club or for winning in general.