LENNON OF LEITH

‘There’s a culture here that the club plays good football, going back to the Famous Five. I want to buy into that.’

TO label someone a journeyman in football is normally to damn them with faint praise. As a player, Neil Lennon was always more than a few notches above the average jobbing pro. A master of his defensive-midfield craft, in fact.

But a CV that registers staging posts as diverse as Manchester City, Crewe, Leicester, Celtic, Wycombe, Nottingham and, as of yesterday, Edinburgh, unquestionably makes the Lurgan native a journeyman in the most literal sense.

Perhaps it’s in the less-celebrated destinations where he’s laid his hat over the past 25 years that the answer to a pertinent question was to be found yesterday. Namely, having played and managed in some of the best stadiums in Europe, isn’t the prospect of walking out into a one-stand wind tunnel at Dumbarton now beneath him?

‘Look I played in League Two, League One in England, non-league sometimes,’ said Lennon. ‘That won’t affect me at all. I’ve been there and done that as a player, so it won’t phase me as manager. I didn’t have any misgivings about coming back, none at all. I’m looking forward to it.’

Sitting inside a sun-kissed Easter Road yesterday, Lennon looked and sounded every bit as enthused at the prospect of managing Hibs in the Championship as he was when unveiled by Celtic in the top flight six years ago.

Perhaps it’s the somewhat jumbled order of his managerial journey that has forced delighted Hibs fans to pinch themselves over his arrival this week. Managers have previously tended to use the Leith club en route to the Old Firm or a big job in England. Rarely has the order been reversed.

‘If you got offered the Celtic job, would you take it?’ Lennon offered. ‘I was 38 when I got offered it. There was no way I was going to turn it down, maybe I wouldn’t get offered it again. So we made the most of what we had at Celtic.

‘Four years later, the club had championships, cups. We sold players for millions who we bought for next to nothing. We made a real success of that. There’s an expectation. There’s an expectation here at Hibs, too. It’s not easy.’

Lennon believes he and the club are ‘a good fit’ and you sense these are not merely the platitudes of a man who has been out of work since leaving Bolton in March.

‘There’s a culture here that the club plays good football, going back to the Famous Five,’ he said. ‘And I want to buy into that.’

When he left Celtic two years ago, the lack of competitive edge due to Rangers’ absence from the top flight figured in his thinking.

A man as much driven by a fear of losing as much as a love of winning, the prospect of doing battle with Dundee United and Falkirk next season far outweighs any considerations as to the fact he’s now competing in the second tier.

‘When you are manager of Celtic, you need to win the league. At Hibs we need to get promotion, either by winning the league or going through the play-offs,’ he replied.

‘We need to get there by hook or by crook. It will be a dogfight. I don’t think we are the favourites.

‘Last season, we finished third and you saw the gap between Kilmarnock and Falkirk. With Dundee United coming down, they will still have good players.’

The 32nd manager in Hibs’ history, Lennon became the first man since Dan McMichael abdicated in 1903 not to be asked about the side’s Scottish Cup prospects.

Last month’s triumph over Rangers and the scenes in and around Leith the following day served to underline the potential of the club when word of Alan Stubbs’ impending departure reached him.

Rest assured, however, that basking in the glory of that day will now be best done in private.

‘It’s great for the fans, more than anyone else,’ he added. ‘All the legpulling they’ve had, the gloating and goading. They’ve got that monkey off their backs and it was a great achievement by the players but I don’t want them dining out on that. When their careers are over, they can but it’s important we get out of this division.’

Of the class of 2016, Liam Henderson is now Celtic’s property again, while Anthony Stokes seems to Rotherhambound. There is no pressure to sell either John McGinn or Jason Cummings but it’s also hard to see big offers being thrown out.

But while the personnel changes over the summer are likely to be minimal, Lennon believes attitudes must alter radically if the survivors are to do what was required of them in the league last term.

‘To lose to Falkirk (in the play-off) and then pick themselves up five or six days later and beat Rangers in the Cup Final showed a hell of amount of character,’ he said. ‘They’re going to have to show that character, week in week out, next season if they want to play for me. The mentality has to change.’ So too, you suspect, will the style of play. Lennon is an advocate of attacking football but first and foremost he’s a pragmatist. It’s no slight on his ex-Celtic team-mate Stubbs to suggest there were times last term when Hibs could have done with some of that approach. ‘There’s nothing wrong with good football if you get penetration and you get goals, but at times you need to mix it up a little bit and you need to be physical,’ he added. ‘There is maybe a little bit of imbalance that we overplay. It’s maybe a criticism that’s been aimed at the team. I haven’t seen enough of them to make that assumption. It’s just what I hear.’ If Celtic was an overwhelmingly positive experience, Bolton was a struggle. Losing more often than winning took a bit of getting used to but the financial tidal wave that hit Lennon just a few months into the post was like nothing before.

‘It wasn’t a great experience, from a football point of view, but I learned about the environment and the quality of player,’ he recalled. ‘You also learn that you can’t do everything yourself. You need help at times. Am I a better manager now? I don’t know, time will tell.’

There were other options both close to home and in Asia, but none had the allure of Hibs.

‘Of course, there is the thought about going to England but this is a big club. Stubbsy has gone to Rotherham but Hibs are the bigger club,’ said Lennon.

‘Yes, it’s England and the Championship, where there is more money swilling around. But Hibs are the bigger club. I want to make this club big again.’

Lennon will brush all previous allegiances to one side as he seeks to make good on that promise.

‘I love Celtic and always will. But I’m now at Hibs and I’ll do all I can to win football games whether that’s against Celtic, Rangers, Hearts or Brechin City,’ he insisted.

‘This is my job now and my whole focus is now on Hibernian.’

At Parkhead, you have to win title. Here, we need to get promotion