Neil Lennon Is Still Trying To Tell Our Current Manager What He Is Doing Wrong.

There is a convention in politics which many people follow in football at it is this; you never comment on the performance of your successors. Ideally you should wait at least a decade before you offer any sort of commentary on what’s going on in your previous role.

Only in very exceptional circumstances do you see former managers, or former leaders, talking about the people currently in those jobs. It is not the done thing, because it is grossly unfair.

All it does is generates cheap and easy headlines and gives our enemies something to work with.

“Ex Celtic boss tells the manager what he’s doing wrong” is basically what it amounts to, and that’s ridiculous, and that’s why it is most unwelcome to see Neil Lennon commenting tonight on what our transfer strategy out to be. That is especially rich coming from someone whose last job in the game was working in Cyprus, where he managed to get himself sacked.

The scars of the Neil Lennon era are pretty nearly healed.

But I’ll tell you, he should not be in the media commenting on what he would be doing in Brendan Rodgers’ place any more than he should ever have opened his mouth about what Ange was doing. Ange was cleaning up after him.

Rodgers has inherited a winning squad and has his own ideas.

Neither of those men needed Neil Lennon’s advice. I am sure that neither of them wanted it, and he has no business offering it. So, he thinks we need another striker. We might not if he had done better due diligence on Albian Ajeti. Or if he’d allowed Odsonne Edouard to be sold prior to the ten in a row campaign so that he could move for a couple of fresh faces.

He also thinks we need a ball winning midfielder. Funny, but I thought that when he was in the job as well.

It’s a problem that predates Ange. Lennon allowed Brown to carry on in the role as our sole player in that position, and his own efforts to fix it include signing – and not playing – Ismaili Soro. We have signed Iwata and Kwon; lets see what they have got to offer this manager before we write them off. It’s a typical piece of Lennon attention seeking at Rodgers’ expense.

It so happens that I agree with him on the striker; that’s not the damned point.

The press doesn’t care what I think and “fan blogger tells the manager to sign a forward” would not generate heat the way attaching a former bosses name to the story does. Lennon knows that’s news, and why.

He knows exactly what he’s doing, and what the connotations are if his “advice” isn’t heeded and Kyogo gets injured or our midfield can’t handle the Champions League elite.

It gives the media an obvious opening and creates, for Rodgers, an obvious problem; say Kyogo does get injured, and Rodgers gets the question; “Neil Lennon said prior to the window shutting that he would have signed an additional striker, why didn’t you?”

How is Rodgers supposed to answer that? By dissing Lennon, which creates its own headlines and its own problems, or by trying to be diplomatic in the face of an obvious piece of shit-stirring? Which would make him look weak. This is precisely the reason previous managers try never to do this stuff.

Lennon clearly doesn’t care which is why he’s offering up these unsolicited observations.

The thing is, he would have been extremely pissed off if a former Celtic boss had done this whilst he was in the Parkhead hot-seat.

I am appalled that he thinks it’s appropriate.