The More Celtic Fans Agree With Lennon The More Wrong His Comments Were.

That some Celtic fan sites agree with Neil Lennon in his assessment of the squad is all the proof you need that he should have kept his damn mouth shut and never offered his opinion on it. How smart do you have to be to recognise that comments such as that can open up divisions between the current manager and the fan-base?

Honest to God, it was utterly moronic and arrogant of Lennon to put such a view in the public domain, especially at a time when there is already more than a murmuring of disquiet amongst the support.

If I didn’t know better, I would swear it was the act of someone who was deliberately trying to stoke disharmony at a time when many in the media think the current boss is vulnerable and are ever probing for signs of division.

This is precisely why former managers never speak about those in charge of their clubs.

They have more professionalism. They have more respect.

To be brutally honest, they have more common sense. They keep quiet about these things because they do not want to put the current man in the hotseat under undue pressure, as it’s blatantly obvious such comments can.

And especially at Celtic when the media practically glees over every such thing.

As I said in my initial piece on this subject, what happens if we come out of this window with mostly the same squad, and then Kyogo picks up an injury?

What does Brendan Rodgers say when some hack pins him down on it and points out that Lennon thought he should sign a striker and some sections of our fan-base happened to agree with him?

How does our current manager answer that? What’s his response to it supposed to be?

If I was in that press room, and I had The Mooch on the rack like that, if Van Bronckhorst had offered a critique of him and his signing policies and the chance came to turn the screw, I’d twist the handle until he screamed like a pig.

And there are people who would love to see Rodgers caught like that, people who would take the utmost pleasure from it. That door is wide open for them, and anyone who thinks they won’t walk through it hasn’t been paying attention all these years.

I happen to think we should sign a striker.

I happen to think we need one. I’ve said so.

But I’m just a guy with a blog, whose opinions are no more harmful to the club than a flea bite on the backside is to someone lying sunbathing on the beach. My articles aren’t going to have Brendan Rodgers caught in the media crossfire the way the words of a former manager will.

Lennon himself knows this.

He was quick enough to holler about it when former players passed judgement on this own management, from the pundit’s chair, which they were more than entitled to do. Had Martin O’Neill or Gordon Strachan did it, that’s a different ball-game entirely because those are the guys who can seriously undermine you.

Had one of those guys critiqued Lennon’s signings or his tactics or, at a time like this, told him who he should buy his anger would have been clear, and loud and fully justified.

His fury would have been off the charts and I would have written passionately in his defence.

And the more right you think Lennon is, the less leeway you should give him in expressing that view, because in this type of situation the danger isn’t that no-one will agree with you but that a lot of people might, and here and now a lot of people do.

This is why former Prime Ministers and Presidents don’t do this, it’s why former captains of industry don’t critique the CEOs of the companies they worked for … it is why football managers don’t offer advice to the managers of their former clubs.

For Christs sake, this one is obvious, this shouldn’t need pointing out, but apparently it still does.

This does nothing positive for Celtic whatsoever.

All it does is cause the guy doing the job real trouble, and with a Celtic manager who the media is already training the guns on, it is either head bangingly stupid or it’s selfish and egotistical beyond belief.

Either way, I don’t believe any of us should be defending him for it.