The Tragedy Of Lennon’s Managerial Career Was That Celtic Made Him Believe He’d Have One.

In years to come, when people look back on the career of Neil Lennon, they will remember an outstanding player who took on a difficult role in an unglamorous position, yet served as the anchor of a fabulous and scarily efficient Celtic team.

Lennon the player will also be remembered for enduring some of the most abhorrent treatment ever handed out to a single football player in this country. Many bear responsibility for that, and some still don’t acknowledge it, including the so-called gentlemen of the press who painted a target on his back, only to feign horror when others took aim.

I have complicated feelings about Neil Lennon.

Lennon the man, the human being, I would have taken the proverbial bullet for. What that man had to tolerate in this country is an unforgivable stain on Scotland’s history, and the disgrace of it still clings to certain people even now.

Neil Lennon the manager is a different matter.

He is not so highly regarded, even among Celtic fans, despite delivering titles, trophies, and making history by winning a treble as both a player and a boss at the club.

Yet, I firmly believe his tenure as Celtic manager may be one of the great tragedies of Neil Lennon’s life. I don’t believe Lennon should have ever been a manager. I don’t believe he has the chops to be one. I don’t think he’s a good manager or possesses the skills to be.

I know there are people who don’t like to hear that. I know there are those who consider Lennon a hero, and they can hold onto that belief until the day they die. I have no issue with how others view him, except in one regard: Neil Lennon’s biggest fans are on the Celtic board, and they’re the ones who gave him the job at this club not once, but twice. Nothing Lennon has done outside Celtic Park remotely justifies either hiring.

Lennon had two spells as manager here, and I found both of them, when viewed in context, staggeringly underwhelming. His cup record in his first tenure was dreadful. I don’t believe his performance in his first full season merited a second. He was very nearly sacked when 3-0 down against Kilmarnock, only to come back to draw 3-3. I believe he was in a good position to win the title in his second full season, but I’ve always wondered how that campaign would have ended had Rangers not collapsed in the middle of it.

We all know how his second tenure as manager ended. Although the Covid season was certainly unique, and Lennon has always believed the judgement was harsh due to its unique circumstances, there were warning signs before then, particularly in Europe against teams Celtic should have beaten. Some of our performances in that second tenure were truly awful, and the season was doomed by the decision to leave Lennon in place far longer than was sensible because it had clearly already begun to fall apart.

Listen, these are my own feelings on this, and there are some people I’ll never convince, so I’ve stopped trying. People are entitled to their views, and they can believe that Lennon was a committed and dedicated servant to this club, as I do myself.

Here’s why I believe it was a personal tragedy for Neil Lennon to ever have gotten the Celtic job. It’s because Lennon believes he merited that job, that he did it well, and that he can build a managerial career on the back of having it on his CV.

But the simple fact is that the only people running major clubs anywhere in Europe who genuinely believe Lennon is a good manager are the people who run ours. This is not a view shared anywhere else in the game. Lennon is not rated anywhere else in the game. His coaching career outside Celtic Park has been disastrous—not just uninspiring, not just low-level, not just disappointing or underwhelming—it has been disastrous.

The calibre of clubs that think Neil Lennon is an appropriate appointment is staggeringly poor; teams in Cyprus, Romania, and the lower leagues of England. He had one spell at a club he rescued from the Scottish Championship, which he won with Hibs. He finished 4th in the SPFL upon their return. His dismissal from that job, and the circumstances of it, could have ended his career in an instant. A month later, he was back at Celtic Park.

Tonight, Neil Lennon stands on the brink of being sacked from his latest job in Romania after only a handful of games. This will be one of the shortest managerial tenures on record.

Following his dismissal from Omonia Nicosia and the long absence between being sacked by the Cypriots and finding his current role, it is almost inconceivable that Lennon will ever again sit in the dugout with managerial responsibilities.

There is no question that Lennon is a highly intelligent guy with a deep knowledge of football, and he has achieved things in the game that will stand him in great credit for the rest of his life.

He has won major honours as Celtic boss. He has a Scottish Championship with Hibs, a Cypriot Cup with Omonia Nicosia, and along the way, each of the teams he’s been in charge of—save for this one—have had spectacular individual results and outstanding individual performances. But Lennon’s managerial career as a whole is mediocre at best, and always it seems to be stalked by controversy, and it’s this as much as anything which might have brought it to an end.

Lennon’s real niche is in the commentary box, as a pundit.

I think he has exceptional skills and a way to analyse games that should be the envy of all the second-rate pundits out there who don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.

You look at the average BBC Scotland commentary team, almost all with some Ibrox connection and you listen to some of the low-intellect stuff that comes out of their mouths, and then you listen to Lennon, and the difference is so stark as to be almost unbelievable.

He is good at that. He is very good at that indeed. If Ally McCoist, with a fraction of Lennon’s intelligence, can make a major career for himself as a commentator, there is no reason whatsoever why our former player and former boss cannot do the same.

Because I am a great admirer of Neil Lennon the man and because I was a huge admirer of Neil Lennon the player, who was the unsung hero of the Martin O’Neill team, I’ve wanted Lennon to prove me wrong by forging a career in the dugout that measures up to his self-belief.

It’s one of those matters where I’ve always wanted to be wrong.

Because if Lennon really is as bad a manager as his record outside of Celtic suggests, then we have pure fools running our club.

I don’t say that lightly, because in many ways, our board of directors has gotten an awful lot right, and some of its managerial picks—even the one made in great haste, the one that brought Ange Postecoglou here—have been tremendous success stories.

The hiring of Rodgers the first time was inspired, and bringing him back to the club has proved all the doubters wrong. On the surface of it, even the hiring of guys like Tony Mowbray and Ronny Deila—which many fans had issues with—weren’t as crazy as they sound now.

At the time, Mowbray was an experienced and accomplished boss, and most Celtic fans were confident he would be a success here. Ronny Deila, although initially pegged to come in as Lennon’s number two, revolutionized this club and dragged our training methods and sports science department into the 21st century. Even the one that got away—the failed attempt to hire Eddie Howe—was intelligent and thought out. Howe was the best guy available, and we tried our damnedest to get him.

But Lennon was appointed the first time with no managerial experience whatsoever. He was appointed the second time after a high-profile, self-destructive sacking from Hibs during a very public unravelling of his relationships with his players and bosses.

I’ve never been able to work out then, or now, why certain people at Celtic Park thought that was an appropriate response to the positions we found ourselves in.

On an interim basis, he was a reasonable stand-in while we worked for a manager in the aftermath of sacking Mowbray. As a steady hand on the tiller for half a season, you could understand his hiring in the aftermath of Brendan Rodgers’ departure.

But under no circumstances should Lennon ever have gotten the job for real.

I’ve always believed that the tragedy of Lennon’s managerial story is that he believes his own PR. He believes that the incomprehensible faith that Peter Lawwell and others placed in him meant he was a manager of substance who could go on to achieve big things in the game. And because Lennon believed that, because they gave him reason to believe that, Lennon missed what would have been a genuine legacy opportunity, especially that second time around.

Because what Lennon did that second time around, in coming in as the interim boss to replace Brendan Rodgers on a short-term basis, could have made him a legend for life.

Had he possessed enough self-awareness to walk away from the job, had Lennon come in, done his interim role, and then walked away—difficult as that would have been—he would be among the great towering figures in our club’s history for all the right reasons, and nothing negative about him could be written or said.

In ancient Rome, they had a tradition where, in times of the gravest emergency, they would hand supreme authority to a single individual, usually for a set period. That individual was called a dictator, and they would serve until the emergency was resolved.

The greatest among the men who assumed that responsibility was Cincinnatus.

He served as dictator twice, and on both occasions, he willingly handed back his authority to the Senate the moment the emergency was over, without any attempt to keep power, without any ego, without the slightest demand.

He handed back supreme power because that’s what he had sworn to do, and that is why Cincinnatus is regarded as one of the great figures in the history of the Roman Republic—not because he took power and triumphed, but because he took power and then gave it back. Others later on would attempt to use dictatorial power to stay in office and rule as kings.

Had Lennon walked away at the end of that interim spell, had he secured 3Treble and passed the torch to another, we would be singing his name for all time. Lennon’s legacy would have been secured, and he would never have gone down in history as the guy who blew 10 in a row.

More importantly, that may have presented Lennon as someone who had learned something—something about himself and the limits of his talent. Instead, he stayed and is now fated to learn those lessons in a much harder way.

If reports from Romania are true, it may well be for the final time.