Neil Lennon

I think he's finished here too, mate, and I don't deny he's done a bad job this season. I have conceded that point since the first Prague game. But folk are acting as though his doing a bad job this season is proof that he was always pish. I don't think his record shows that. If people want to argue that, they have to make a separate argument for that. No one has provided anything like a watertight argument for that, but they act like it is as settled as the fact that he has * up this season.

 

I think all of that's true... for this season.

 

Gerrard managed one 1-0 win v Rodgers in a game where we had neither a striker nor a left back.

And even then we were always in it, McGregor (from left back) had a legitimate goal ruled out and Ntcham had a late goal bound shot blocked on the line.

Regardless, Rodgers would never have allowed us to be outplayed by them on several occasions thereafter.

Lennon said he didn't even watch the cup final back because the next fixture would be a "different game"... and what happened? We lost the next game with a performance identical to the cup final.

Horrendous management.

He hasn't a clue. We'll be destroyed at the Bigotdome in January BTW.

 

@Gyp Rosetti to be 100% honest, I suspect that the game and coaching itself have both moved on since MON's days and that Lenny still tries to coach as if it were 2003. I also think it is quite plausible that the gap between how Lenny coaches and what a club like Celtic expects has grown since 2013. I wanted him, but probably I was wrong. I thought he'd take on board all the analytical and high-tech stuff Rodgers brought and add that to his own skill set, sadly he doesn't seem to have done that.

But it is annoying me that folk are acting like he is shockingly incompetent. The majority of his seasons at Celtic were successful. Last season was extremely successful. They talk about Bolton and try to explain away Hibs.

He's done a lot of good things. He's not what Celtic need in the modern game, but folk arguing that he's always been incompetent haven't demonstrated this assertion. It's annoying me that they keep repeating that as if it were an obvious, uncontested fact.

That he's doing a bad job this season is obvious and uncontested and so is the fact that he is incoherent in his interviews this season.

That he's not kept up with how coaching is done at big clubs in the modern game is looking more plausible by the week and has a fair degree of evidence to back it, sadly.

But that he's always been an incompetent coach... tactically inept... doesn't develop players... and any number of other such opinions you can find being stated as if they were facts on this thread, those things are very far from having been demonstrated. I will continue to argue against them.

 

1) You can't actually know what would have happened with Rodgers.
2) Lenny had more key players missing for the game this season than Rodgers did.
3) Most importantly, no one is arguing that Lenny is as good as Rodgers. What's happening at Leicester shows that Rodgers is still one of the top 5 or 6 coaches in the UK.

The point is that Gerrard is quite good tactically (see their EL results over 2 seasons) and that being outfoxed by him on several occasions (not every occasion!) does not mean you are tactically inept.

It's absolutely not good enough for Celtic, but that's a different claim altogether.

 

I might be wrong but I haven’t seen anyone saying he was always incompetent. He’s majorly out of his depth and incompetent now in the current game.

Before that he was simply a bang average manager, even in his first spell.

 

Lennon's weakest point has always been his tactics. I don't need fancy stats or other than what I have seen with my own eyes since 2010 to back that up.

Lennon's biggest attibute is that he has been a motivator. This season has shown evidently that he is failing abysmally to even do that.

 

There are loads of posts stating exactly that in this very thread.

 

You're entitled to that opinion, but people who feel the same way as you need to stop stating that opinion as a fact.

You may not need facts or stats to be correct, in general your football judgement has always struck me as quite insightful; but members do need them if they want to claim that their opinions are facts.

 

People have said he’s always been poor tactically, which I think is fair enough. As Paddy said, Lennon’s biggest strength according to players was always his motivational skills and man management. It wasn’t him being a genius tactician or a fantastic coach.

Now the man management, or at least the motivational stuff, appears to have gone out the window and there’s very, very little left.

 

I think it's fairly clear that he's not "a genius tactician". That's a total straw man.

 

It’s not, because it was a facetious comment. I know nobody thinks he is one.

Jesus...

 

Thanks, I appreciate that. I've close to 30 years experience of watching football under my belt.

Tell me, what method would be used to stick it down to a "fact" then, for argument's sake?

 

That's debatable.

But in any case, if it were one game in isolation it might be an acceptable mitigating factor. However, Lennon's been outplayed and outthought by Gerrard on several occasions, including two of the games we fortunately managed to hang on and win - the 2-1 game at Parkhead in March 2019 and the cup final last season.

And it's not just Gerrard who has schooled him, you can go back to his first tenure and see two humiliations handed out by that managerial collousus Ally McCoist - one of which took place after the old Huns had been placed in administration.

He is very, very fortunate to be managing Celtic.

 

But there's too much of that.

To be clear: Rodgers was giving players detailed dossiers on their immediate opponent for routine league matches and Lennon was musing on whether he had given the players too much or too little information after a big European game.
No one can deny that we have clearly regressed tactically and that tactics are not a particular strength of Lenny's coaching. That is obvious.

It's not at all obvious that he is tactically incompetent, though. Rodgers is one of the best coaches in the UK.

 

@Random Review if Eddy scores a belter and everyone posts "That was a * great goal"

Will you ask for evidence and reasoning as to why in their opinion it was a great goal?

This is all a bit bizarre

 

Evidence, stats...

 

The one thing I will add is at all his other clubs and this spell with us is he has fell out with players, that’s part of the argument that he hasn’t moved with the times. You cannot constantly flip flop on players, he is throwing them under the bus one day the next he’s building them a lounge to harmonise the squad. So what’s happened from say after the break last season when we were absolutely ruthless? You can’t sack a full team even if the spineless * are as much to blame, so the buck stops with Lennon. Though we also know it goes way deeper than that aswell.

 

We can all see Eddy's goal directly. We can't see Lenny's coaching, we can only infer things from its indirect results. Results which have multiple causes, Lenny's coaching being one.

That's exactly the kind of domain where you need evidence to claim something as a fact.

 

It does seem remarkably similar to the end with Hibs. I really wish he had learned from that.
In hindsight, it probably wasn't good for him to get the Celtic job so soon after he fell out with the players at Hibs. It must have made it hard not to feel justified and to sit down and analyse what he did wrong. I guess he'll do that this time; but that's not much help for us.