RIDDY OR NOT
Door Who’ll have la st laugh as next bid to neighbours Halliday & Lenny recover from Hampden humiliation?
Two neighbours from one street in Glasgow w will contest the Scottish Cup Final today.
One of them will tonight have a Covid- compliant celebrationn at home. The other address willl fall silent.
But Celtic boss Neil Lennonn and Hearts’ Andy Halliday are well versed in the way Hampdenn dramas are written.
Lennon was Celtic’s captain inn the 2007 final that was his lastt ever game for Celtic andd supposed to be a tumultuous farewell to his time by deliveringg a league and cup Double.
With 66 minutes gone, and the match scoreless, Gordonn Strachan threw out the big hookk and the captain was substitutedd for Gary Caldwell.
Lennon walked straight up the tunnel and intended to go AWOL before thinkingg better of the idea and returningg for the presentation of the trophyy after Jean-Joel Perrier-Doumbe scored the winner for Celtic against Dunfermline.
That day taught Lennon that t sentimentality has no place in football.
Now life has turned full cycle and Neil’s the manager who has to decide if Celtic’s captain Scott t Brown should skipper the side who can claim a quadruple Treble if Hearts are defeated d this afternoon.
Brown’s time at the club could d be drawing to a close and he has been the most inspirational, and trophy-laden, captain since Billy McNeill.
The dilemma facing Lennon is that a large percentage of the fans think Celtic’s prospects would be enhanced today if Brown watched the match from the bench instead of starting it.
Survival, not sentimentality, will rule Lennon’s judgment because his own job could be partly secured, or threatened, by the outcome.
His fate is in his own hands and fate, as his neighbour Halliday knows, can be a funny business. Andy was once memorably subbed by Graeme Murty during a Scottish Cup semi-final ingloriously lost by Rangers to Celtic in 2018.
Half-time had yet to be reached and the Celtic fans compounded Andy’s misery by sarcastically chanting his name from the safe distance of a two-goal lead. Not that he noticed while directing verbals towards a person, or persons, unknown from his vantage point in the technical area.
I have recently enjoyed working with Andy in the broadcasting game and in spite of the welter of stories he’s told, on and off air, I have yet to hear him utter a single word about that episode.
Maybe the memory still burns a hole in his chest.
Or maybe Andy has expunged the incident from his mind forever. He hasn’t said.
What I do know f rom obser v ing him from close
quarters is there is a ferociously competitive streak within the man that makes him a dangerous underdog today.
I ronical ly for someone humiliated by a managerial misfit, Halliday has made it back to Hampden ahead of all the Rangers players who lasted the distance that day as Celtic continued building towards the prospect of a quadruple Treble.
You’d have got long odds on that being the case when all hell was breaking loose two years ago. Halliday will have kept a diplomatic distance from his n e i g hbou r in the day s leading up to the final.
But they will go head to head today and there can’t be room afterwards for two celebrations where they live. This is, of course, last season’s final and a c y nic would say it would be much better for Lennon if last season’s Celtic turned up at Hampden.
That is an argument for the manager to contradict and he could make history by having Celt ic become the first team ever to win the Scottish Cup four times in a row if he gets it right. One argument for Brown playing is the
valuable rest time he has accumulated by missing the last two matches.
But the reason why he had a free midweek was the Celtic side he captained were not being good enough to beat Ross County in the Betfred Cup.
It is Lennon’s toss of the coin which argument is the more powerful.
Halliday and Lennon have known painful rejection at Hampden. One watching the other go up the steps to lift the Cup will hurt even more.
not Surv ival, ity, al ment senti rule will on’s Lenn ment judg