The dust has settled on Neil Lennon’s time at Celtic, but he still isn’t ready for self-analysis.
In scrutinising the collapse that he oversaw last season, whilst Rangers romped unbeaten to the Premiership title, the Ulsterman found plenty of mitigating factors as his side stumbled from one calamity to another.
None of them were himself.
It was put to Lennon that Celtic were complacent in their chase for the fabled ten and that they underestimated Rangers but he insisted that wasn’t the case, as reported by the Glasgow Times:
“That’s just cliched. We brought in players, some of them didn’t do as well as possibly they could have done, but they were living in different times in the midst of a pandemic.”
“Some of them came from different countries and they weren’t seeing anyone else. They were going home after training and sitting by themselves.”
The former Parkhead boss also stated that, like many clubs, the covid pandemic created serious financial issues for the club.
He said: “We did try and sign players like Toney but we couldn’t get the deals done for whatever reason.”
“Why didn’t the deal go through? Just finances, I assume.”
“And we weren’t adverse to losing money during the pandemic, which affected a lot of clubs.”
Their signings, like Shane Duffy in particular, didn’t quite live up to expectations but the former Leicester man revealed that they couldn’t quite reach other targets:
“Let’s put it this way, we had other options that we couldn’t get so you look at the next best option available and try to work with that.”