COMMENT Same old nonsense... Lennon must pay price for repeated failure
NEIL LENNON cannot possibly be given another crack at getting Celtic into the Champions League. That’s not being harsh or controversial. It is certainly nothing personal. It’s just the price that has to be paid for repeated failure in a highstakes, multi-million pound industry in which those at the Parkhead manager’s level of the food chain are paid handsomely to, at the very least, prevent also-rans – you can’t call them rivals – with a fraction of their club’s financial or emotional investment stealing away their expected market share over and over again.
Whatever happens, the clock is surely ticking on his second spell in charge. It’s now just a matter of finding out whether the fire he lit following their ignominious exit from European football’s prestige tournament will consume him before he has managed to make it to the end of the season.
We all know what unfolded when Ferencvaros came to town on Wednesday. Much the same, really, as the tragi-comedy cum basketball match played out when the mighty Cluj turned up in Glasgow 12 months earlier.
There’s no point in replaying the post-mortem.
No worth in questioning where exactly Lennon was for the first half-hour if he thought it was a good performance. No need to work out which roles are played by the head coach and his assistant John Kennedy as pieces of paper bearing the players’ names are pulled out of one tombola drum in the dressing-room and the positions they’ll be playing pulled out of another.
At this rate, Callum McGregor and Ryan Christie will be having a go in goal when the Europa League preliminaries come round.
If all that is hard to get your head around, just consider who can possibly be the mastermind behind the now-annual strategy of spending millions on overseas imports and then benching them for the most financially important games of the season. Hoopy The Huddle Hound?
Taxing as these matters are, though, they remain but a diversion.
Just like that ill-conceived postmatch press conference in which Lennon, four days on from lauding his team’s ‘brilliant’ attitude, started accusing certain players of spending six months lining up transfers and vowing to boot them out the door.
He won’t name them, though. In fact, it seems he didn’t really mean what he said at all.
No one is being sold. It was all a big misunderstanding.
Look, there are only two issues that matter at Celtic right now. They are: Has keeping Lennon in position become too big a risk after all this? and Isn’t it time up for chief executive Peter Lawwell, too?
To pretend otherwise is to look the other way and hope that an uncomfortable situation goes away by itself.
Like Hatem Abd Elhamed dealing with a punt up the park.
If evidence and results mean anything, you can’t make a case for giving Lennon another shot at salvation in the Champions League.
It’s how football works.
No matter the other flaws in the matrix, it is the manager who cops it first when basic requirements aren’t met.
Celtic run a £50million-plus wage bill. Yet, that’s three years now in which they have gone out early in the qualifying stages of a competition set up, thanks to the Champions Path, to match them against lesser opposition.
It’s starting to make Ronny Deila losing to Maribor in the play-offs feel like the good old days.
And that’s not on at a club that has to restore Europe – and the money it raises – to priority status when 10 In A Row has been and gone.
Lennon, in truth, was always chosen to replace Brendan Rodgers because of ‘the ten’.
He knows the challenges of Old Firm life inside-out. Up against a Rangers side still behind schedule, he felt like a safe pair of hands in a domestic environment.
Until now.
Until he followed another horror show in Europe — a disaster that has sent £30m up in smoke against the backdrop of a recession — by letting off stinkbombs and blaming other people for the smell. Attempts to backtrack on Friday mean little.
As an absinthe-riddled Van Gogh said after necking some paint, slicing his ear off and pouring another large glass of the good stuff: ‘You can’t put The Green Fairy back in the bottle’.
Hitting out at players for wanting to move doesn’t add up. Isn’t that part of the sales pitch at Parkhead? Sign up, give it two or three years, get a bigger club, make us a few quid, and we’ll find someone else to do it all over again with.
It’s the Celtic way. As it will be at Rangers, too, now that they are finally close to bringing in more than ten bob and a packet of gobstoppers for their players.
What ought to be as natural a part of the business as paying UEFA fines for crowd disorder, however, now looks like it could derail history altogether.
Agents are sabre-rattling. Odsonne Edouard looks like becoming 2020’s answer to Moussa Dembele circa 2018. That’s where chief executive Lawwell’s role in all this comes in.
Given Rangers’ troubles since 2012, Celtic should be on cruise control to a different solar system. They’ve had free access to the Champions League and its riches. As it is, they have qualified twice in seven attempts.
It is an atrocious record that has led to punters now being in the ridiculous position of fearing that the Holy Grail of ‘the ten’ may actually be in peril.
Even though they should still see off a Rangers team that can’t beat Livingston away, Celtic somehow find themselves looking at a second crisis in two years after that chaotic summer of Rodgers going rogue and Dedryck Boyata going on strike.
That points to real faults in the way the entire place works. Certainly, recruitment has been a major failing for quite some time.
Deila was no Celtic manager. Lennon’s return always had the air of a relatively short-term fix.
As for the players brought in? For every Dembele and Virgil van Dijk, there have been umpteen Marian Shveds, Eboue Kouassis and Boli Bolingolis. Patryk Klimala and Ismaila Soro look like being the next two on the list.
They are never properly ready for these campaign-defining European qualifiers coming round.
Celtic have spent big on salaries, no doubt. Including Lawwell’s. But they aren’t getting enough bang for their buck on the park.
Lawwell will be almost 62 and 17 years in the job when this season ends. The end of the quest for ‘the ten’ should see him hand on the torch, but is that realistically going to happen when there is no appetite from the plc board for change?
He calls the shots.
He pulls the strings in Scottish football, if the likes of ex-St Mirren and Aberdeen chairmen Stewart Gilmour and Stewart Milne are to be believed.
He has grafted hard to get onto the European Club Association board.
To watch Lawwell work the room at these ECA summits is to relive Nureyev gracing the Mariinsky.
Unfortunately, that is not going to make the blindest bit of difference long-term when his club keeps being dunted off the dancefloor in the diddy stage of the qualifiers by the footballing equivalent of Russell Grant and Ann Widdecombe on the BBC’s annual Strictly tour.
He needs to prove the club still has real ambition.
He needs to be sourcing potential new managers. And he needs to be ready to press the button on them if the stink of the past few days turns toxic.
It really isn’t all that long ago that the top tier of Parkhead was being closed because of a lack of interest. Those days will soon come again if Celtic’s fans sense they are being taken for mugs.
When all the cash shelled out for season books, internet TV subscriptions and the latest line in adidas gear ends up with another night of the same old nonsense served up against Ferencvaros, there must be plenty feeling that way already.