Lennon hails ‘perfect’ Old Firm win from Celtic

A PROUD Neil Lennon described his Celtic team’s Old Firm performance as perfect and admitted the 2-0 win was one of the highlights of his career.

And the Northern Irishman took great delight in putting one over those who claimed Rangers were going into the game as the better side on form.

Despite losing players to injury before and after the match at Ibrox, it was the champions who thoroughly deserved to win. Rangers were second best for most of the day and much of that was down to how an aggressive Celtic took the game to their hosts.

Odsonne Edouard and Jonny Hayes scored the goals which kept Celtic top of the Ladbrokes Premiership and concluded a fantastic week which silenced the critics within the Celtic support as well as elsewhere.

Lennon said: “It was a perfect performance from start to finish. We were outstanding. We were an afterthought coming into this fixture. I was an afterthought. My board were an afterthought. It was all about the opposition and what they were going to do to us.

“We didn’t listen to any of it, we stayed strong and played brilliantly. We came here to win, we came here to be strong.

“In the first half we bossed it. Scott Brown was outstanding – he’s another one who’s been written off, by the way. There were outstanding performances from [Boli] Bolingoli and [Christopher] Jullien. And I’ve got a front four who are a handful for any team. I thought we deserved to win the game by more.

“The second goal was the icing on the cake. We defended strongly when we needed to. It was a great performance from Hatem Elhamed, coming in from the cold.

“The personality, character and strength of the team was evident today when everyone, including some of our own supporters, had written us off. So, we are proud, we take the three points and, psychologically, it’s a nice win for us. We move on.”

Asked if this was a satisfying win over Rangers as he’d experienced, Lennon without hesitation said: “Yes. Everyone had written us off in the build-up. The bookies had Rangers as favourites and I asked ‘Why?’ on Friday.

“We came out and proved we are going to have a big say in the title race, that’s for sure.”

Rangers were strangely subdued for most of the game. Celtic kicked off by sending the ball out of play deep into the Ranger side of the pitch, not dissimilar to a rugby player kicking for territory, and looked to get at their hosts from the off.

Lennon insisted he wasn’t surprised by how the events unfolded. He said: “No, because we took the game to Rangers. We dominated the start of the game. I think the kick-off, everyone might have been laughing at it – but we wanted to play in their half.

“Which is something we didn’t do in the corresponding fixture. We had two minutes of passing it around at the back, conceded a free-kick and