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Sor a lot to run Celtic as the soccer equivalent of living on Easy Street. Fifteen years ago, Martin O’Neill’s tenure ended with a painful concession of the title on his last day to the Rangers. After spending too long a season, even by his own admission, Gordon Strachan left in 2009 with the Rangers again as champions; Celtic support was tired of one-dimensional and one-line games.
Tony Mowbray worked hard before being fired. Having taken over for the first time, Neil Lennon resigned in 2014 stalling a single-horse career unable to stimulate him any longer. When Ronny Deila’s project ended two years later, it was recognized that this punt was worthy of a smaller club. Celtic raised the bar by signing Brendan Rodgers, but the current Leicester City manager would take it upon himself to be the only fish in a small pond for a time; Internal resentment at the start of the 2018-19 season preceded the inevitable.
Yet no one has come across anything quite like the level of vitriol Lennon has given him at this point, surely the dying embers of his second term in office. With police deployed against a howling mob and missiles flying towards Celtic players and staff as they emerged from their stadium after a first cup loss since Donald Trump was, for the first time, simply a hopeful presidential candidate, a tide growing abuse peaked.
There can be no defense of the disgusting scenes, even before the circumstances of the pandemic are contemplated, but they were not a complete surprise. Lennon, immersed in Celtic as a player and coach, has received amazing treatment from keyboard warriors and Football Manager obsessives. The next club newsletter that hails the ‘Celtic family’ should receive a laugh.
Celtic fans should, within reason, demand success. Current restrictions on people’s lives and the lack of alternative outlets may well fuel discord. However, what appears to exist now is an empowered group that cannot bear defeat.
They’ve created such a frenzy over the concept of 10 Scottish titles in a row, a trivial achievement, that even rational fanatics have lost all sense of reason. In March, Lennon was praised for reliving Celtic’s season to the point where he led the Rangers by 13 points. Now, he is ridiculed as incompetent. Defensively terrible Celtic has a suitable challenger in a revived Rangers; every error is amplified.
Several of its players believe that they are either about to move to a richer environment or that they should already be there. Lennon found out in August. “Have the right mindset, the right attitude,” he said. “If some of you don’t want to be here, go away.” The Northern Irishman spent the next few weeks praising too much, but the genie was out of the bottle. The body language of countless people has been damning.
Lennon has no interest in playing the victim. “I take it all” and “the past counts for nothing” were some of his comments after Sunday’s loss to Ross County. Lennon has the experience level to know that he will ultimately pay for the steep decline on the field. This level of toxicity and consistently buggy performance seem fatal, even for someone with a 72% win rate.
Lennon cannot be acquitted of guilt. Whichever team he put up against Ross County should have been strong enough. Successive 4-1 tanks from Sparta Prague cannot be acceptable to any Celtic coach. Even when they won earlier in the season, Celtic were slow.
Still, this is not a binary discussion. It should be okay to emphasize the qualities of the manager without being accused of cheerleading. Lennon has previously shown that he can handle Celtic perfectly well; Whether it’s seeing Barcelona with Efe Ambrose and Kelvin Wilson as center-back, developing Virgil van Dijk, stabilizing the club after Rodgers’s strong departure or presiding over that flawless streak from last season.
In deciding that it was time to end his playing career at Wycombe, Lennon believed that the “drab” atmosphere of lower-league football did not thrill him. The 49-year-old has emphasized the discomfort among his team when managing football during the coronavirus, but perhaps the coach himself, who thrives on the bustle of a great club, does not feel comfortable.
No one cared to hear when it was pointed out that Celtic were missing an opportunity to establish themselves as a strong European club during the Rangers’ years in the desert. No club had more chance to plan and build than Celtic, who instead celebrated beating teams with a 10th, twentyth or 30th of their budgets with immense joy.
Twenty titles in a row should have been easily achieved. Being eliminated from the Champions League by Malmö or AEK Athens, much more reasonable barometers, didn’t seem to count. Without any pressure, the board could at least give the impression of being accommodating.
For the summer, Celtic were trying to sign a goalkeeper, Vasilis Barkas. The Greek cost 5 million pounds sterling, but was subsequently abandoned. Shane Duffy, a costly loan from Brighton, is unable to make the starting lineup after a series of mistakes. None of Celtic’s arrivals during the last two transfer windows have been a success. The team desperately lacks wide players who are fast on the attack.
While that makes it easy to raise questions about Nick Hammond, the club’s head of recruiting, that his predecessor Lee Congerton also endured hardship implies a broader structural problem. Celtic’s obvious waste of resources should not be overlooked. They have been allowed to revel in the sales of Moussa Dembélé and Kieran Tierney without sufficient recognition of how much of that income has been consumed by Marian Shved, Marvin Compper, Jack Hendry, Ismaila Soro, Patrik Klimala, Boli Bolingoli, and many others. .
Decision-making, pressure and confidence have poured into Celtic’s career. The notion that has been allowed to persist, that Lennon is some kind of coach dinosaur, only interested in stirring up the mob with the players, is totally wrong. More analysis and more work has been done on form with this team than when Celtic were dominant, in an attempt to recover the situation.
After O’Neill, Celtic has been in the houses. Strachan, Mowbray, Lennon, Deila and Rodgers are of completely different races. The lack of an obvious plan B now, coupled with an unwillingness to bow to the shouting from the sidelines, have undoubtedly been prominent in the board’s thinking. The Celts, collectively, sleepwalked into a perfect storm.
