Lennon has sympathy for Gerrard in Jack row

NEIL LENNON agrees with Rangers manager Steven Gerrard that players shouldn’t have been subjected to gruelling double-training sessions with Scotland immediately after an Old Firm match, but has confirmed that his Celtic players reported back for club duty with a clean bill of health.

Lennon said that like Gerrard, he had never exper ienced such a schedule in his time as a player, but he also had sympathy with Scotland manager Steve Clarke in that he only has a short window to work with his players.

So, while he would prefer his own players to have gotten more of a break to recover physically and mentally from the win over Rangers, he stopped short of criticising Clarke or the Scottish FA.

“I wouldn’t have liked to have done it as a player, put it that way,” Lennon said. “As a player, a double session two days later? No. [But] you don’t know the intensity of what was put out there.

“[Running 11km] is a lot. I have a certain sympathy. I don’t know how much my players ran, I’ll have to ask them.

“It’s unfortunate in that aspect, I suppose, but Steve has a job to do as well.

“Our boys came back fine. Steve has got two weeks to try and get his methods across.

“At times [the players] maybe don’t get enough down-time to digest it, freshen up and go again, but there’s been no complaints from our boys in terms of the training times or the intensity of the training.”

Lennon has no fears about lifting his trio of players who were in the latest Scotland squad for the game at Hamilton this afternoon.

“You commiserate with some of them and you congratulate some of them,” he said.

“We’ve all gone through that as players, at times with Northern Ireland it could be difficult.

“You’d come off a good result with your club and then have a couple of difficult games internationally. You get back to your club and you look forward to it at times.

“Our boys are OK, they are fit, and they are looking forward to getting back playing.

“They’re obviously disappointed with the results as you can imagine, they care passionately about it.”