Lennon’s Perfect Cousin was just too hard an act to follow
WHEN Neil Lennon was growing up in Northern Ireland, The Undertones offered a musical diversion from the Troubles.
Television news bulletins spent the 1970s painting the province as a violent land with violent men.
Derry’s resident punk rock combo preferred to tell a different story.
Feargal Sharkey didn’t sing of bombs and bullets. He belted out songs about teenage kicks and adolescent angst.
A top-ten single in 1980, the video for My Perfect Cousin featured the band playing a game of Subbuteo.
The lyrics are an evisceration of Kevin, the squeaky-clean cousin setting standards no-one else can live up to.
Oh my perfect cousin /What I like to do, he doesn’t / He’s his family’s private joy / His mother’s little golden boy.
Neil Lennon and Brendan Rodgers are not related. But they’re a similar age and grew up 50 miles apart when The Undertones were in their plookpopping pomp.
Both became Treble-winning managers of Celtic but that’s where the similarities pretty much end.
There’s no evidence that the bold Brendan made lots of noise by playing along with the art-school boys.
But, when it came to football, he was Carnlough’s answer to cousin Kevin.
In his first season at Celtic (2016-17), he won the fourth clean sweep in the club’s history without losing a domestic game.
Players perceived to be waning were rejuvenated and improved.
An Invincible season was sealed in stoppage time in the Scottish Cup final against Aberdeen to a flash of lightning over the Hampden skyline. Even God seemed to be a Rodgers man.
He set high standards, he rarely threw players under a bus, he charmed and buttered up everyone he met, he convinced supporters he was one of them.
Europe was one frontier he couldn’t quite conquer and Leicester City’s shock Europa League exit to Slavia Prague the other night suggests that hasn’t changed much.
But one-sided thrashings of Rangers convinced fans he would deliver ‘the ten’. Like a regular cousin Kevin, he was always spotless, clean and neat and, while he never turned up for work in the kind of fur-lined sheepskin jacket The Undertones couldn’t afford, the teeth and the tan were top drawer.
When he upped and left for Leicester City, he was a tough act to follow.
To fans, Neil Lennon’s return on an interim basis felt like swapping caviar for cod and chips wrapped in yesterday’s back page. When he landed the job on a permanent basis after winning the 2019 Scottish Cup final, they reacted as if someone had taken a leak in the champagne.
Where Peter Lawwell saw a safe pair of hands, the supporters regarded Lennon as an underwhelming appointment that the chief executive would use to cut costs.
So long as he kept winning trophies, they tolerated his presence. But they never felt he could manage a game or a team like cousin Brendan.
And, when he lost the ten and the Betfred Cup, they reacted with untrammelled fury.
The list of mishaps became lengthy and, after paying £600 for season tickets they never got the chance to use, punters had a right to be furious. They saw it coming.
Whoever took over from Rodgers risked supping from a poisoned chalice. Leicester are currently third in the English Premier League, above Liverpool, Chelsea and Everton.
Right now, Rodgers looks like the best British-born coach in the land.
By winning five trophies, Neil Lennon can argue he was never the Wilf McGuinness to Sir Matt Busby. Never the Davie Moyes to Sir Alex Ferguson.
But, like Ally McCoist at Rangers, the halo pinned to his head by once-adoring supporters lost its sheen.
As the only man to win a Treble as a player and a manager, Lennon will get over that. They always do.
It’s a simple fact of life that most football managers leave clubs under a cloud. Even Rodgers.
Two years have now passed since he walked out on Celtic for Leicester City. And some still find it hard to forgive and forget.
But that’s only because they never wanted him to leave in the first place.
The day the Parkhead board hired Brendan Rodgers as manager, they made a rod for their own back.
They raised standards and expectations to a level cousin Neil could neither match nor sustain.
He always beat me at Subbuteo / ’cause he flicked the kick/and I didn’t know.
If the Brodge ever played Subbuteo as a boy, you can bet your life he studied the opposition tactics, prepared an eight-page dossier, then employed a high press in a 4-2-3-1 formation.