Celtic’s pattern of failure: Cluj, 2019.

Neil Lennon’s return to the Celtic dugout in 2019 was always going to come with baggage. He’d inherited Brendan Rodgers’ team midway through the treble-treble season and delivered the goods domestically.

But Europe is where Celtic managers – and boards – ought to be judged, and his first summer back in full control was a masterclass in how not to prepare.

The window was defined by two things: the sale of Kieran Tierney and the curious treatment of Christopher Jullien. Tierney was sold to Arsenal for £25 million on 8 August, days before the decisive second leg against Cluj.

Yes. In an incredible act of self-harm, we actually sold one of our best players between games. Have you heard anything quite like it? The club had had months to prepare, months to plan, and yet the deal was left to fester until after the crucial qualifiers had started. The board trousered the cash, but no replacement was in place and we couldn’t have registered one even if he had been.

Scandalous doesn’t even begin to describe that.

Meanwhile, Celtic’s record signing of the summer, Jullien, was left on the bench for the second leg, something people are crucifying Rodgers for but few unloaded fully on Lennon for at the time. He chose to reshuffle the deck by playing Callum McGregor, a midfielder, at left-back. This despite having Boli Bolingoli in the squad.

It was a baffling call that set the tone for one of the most ridiculous nights in Celtic Park’s European history.

The first leg in Romania had finished 1-1. Not ideal, but not disastrous either. Celtic had the away goal, the tie was in their hands, and with a big crowd at home the expectation was clear: get through, move on. What followed was 90 minutes of anarchy.

Celtic won a penalty, Odsonne Édouard converted. James Forrest scored. Ryan Christie scored. We scored three times at home in a Champions League qualifier. That should have been enough. Instead, the backline fell apart under pressure, McGregor’s unfamiliarity at left-back was exploited time and again, and the Romanians sensed blood.

Cluj equalised once, then again, then again. By the end it was 4-3 to Cluj on the night, 5-4 on aggregate. Celtic Park sat in stunned disbelief. How had a tie that was there to be won turned into a circus of mistakes?

The answer, as usual, was a mix of poor planning and poor decision-making. Lennon leaving a £7 million centre-back sitting on the bench while McGregor floundered at left-back was craziness and totally on him – and on the people who had hired him after his post-Celtic career had thrown up the twin disasters at Bolton and Hibs.

He had a left-back on the books, but didn’t trust him which made the board’s decision to let Tierney go look an act of unpardonable folly. Only Celtic could have contrived such a disastrous situation. It was chaos, the sort you only get when the board treat the qualifiers like pre-season friendlies instead of the financial and sporting be-all and end-all.

The post-mortem was ugly. Very ugly.

Supporters were furious with the team, furious with the manager, but above all furious with the people upstairs. The Tierney sale might have been inevitable, but the timing was catastrophic. Jullien’s benching baffled everyone. Lennon looked shell-shocked afterwards, insisting he’d made the right calls, but everyone in the stadium knew otherwise.

The Cluj tie was the Neil Lennon warning shot. He’d been hired in a shower, in an act of grotesque unprofessionalism with Lawwell actually boasting that he’d left CV’s of other candidates for the job unopened in a drawer somewhere. It probably wasn’t true, but every manager who didn’t get a call back or invited for an interview would have heard those words and crossed Celtic off their list of possible jobs forevermore.

We have idiots in charge of this club and the hiring of Lennon, the way it was done, the manner of it, everything surrounding it, was disgraceful and amateurish. But he deserved better treatment than to have seen Tierney sold at such a critical juncture, forcing his hand with such a barmy set of selection decisions.

It exposed tactical blind spots, yes, and gave us a taste of the chaos to come in the next campaign, but more than that it underlined Celtic’s warped priorities. For the board, the Tierney sale and the balance sheet mattered more than a Champions League campaign. For the fans, it was déjà vu: another summer, another disaster, another year in which Celtic didn’t need to come up against an open capable of doing us damage.

We, again, managed to knock ourselves out.