Lennon interview with The Guardian.

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Patience

Patience

Spastic Arab
Jul 19, 2011
15,984
19,101
113
Neil Lennon has never been one to seek endorsements of his professional ability. If he ever did, however, the Celtic manager could take confidence from the admiration afforded to him by the most respected manager in British football.

Celtic's season, which has already seen a victory over arguably the best team ever, Barcelona, as well as progression to the last 16 of the Champions League, could not have started better. On one Sunday afternoon in August, Sir Alex Ferguson paid a visit to Celtic's training ground, and in doing so, played a part in Lennon's coaching development.

"He gave us two hours of his time, which he didn't have to do, and I thought it was a brilliant gesture," says Lennon. "It was in the privacy of a room at the training ground, just myself and my backroom staff, some tea and pancakes.

"He was in great form. He has given us little tit bits along the way for the Champions League games. I'm not saying that has got us over the line, but every little bit helps. He was one of the only managers to write me a letter when we won the championship in May and I'll be eternally grateful to him for that, as well."

Celtic's training ground is an enthusiastic, confident environment at the moment. The success in the Champions League, where Juventus await in February, and the virtually certain defence of the Scottish Premier League are crucial to that. Looking back to how they got there, Lennon refers both to his maiden title win as Celtic manager and progression through the Champions League's qualifying stage as "pivotal".

"You never get fully comfortable in any managerial role but you get more confident with success like that in the background," he says. "I got fed up with people saying 'he's a young manager and he'll make mistakes'.

"Old managers make mistakes; Wenger makes mistakes, Ferguson makes mistakes, Mourinho makes mistakes. So what do people call them? Before winning the league, I felt like I was on probation. It has been a massive year for me, personally."

Perhaps there was prescience from Ferguson, in noting that Lennon's managerial stock would soon be on the rise. Just as a clutch of Celtic players – Victor Wanyama and Gary Hooper among them – have received admiring glances from England, it is logical to suggest Lennon, too, could be coaxed to a more lucrative environment.

Yet in a nod towards the continued allure of Celtic, Lennon stresses it is wrong to infer he would be tempted south by finance alone. "People speak about that but I haven't had one phonecall," says Lennon. "I have an agent who would have told me if there was any interest or even a whiff of it.

"And even then, it would take a lot for me to be tempted. It would have to be a club where there is the same substance to the job as I have here. That might not be in England, it might be abroad, but it would have to be a hell of an offer and a hell of a club to take me away from here at the minute.

"I really want to put the club at the forefront of European football again. Now that is a huge challenge because we are up against it financially, but it is one I enjoy.

"Other places wouldn't give you the same buzz. You would really have to go to a Champions League club to match what you have here. The opportunity to win trophies and the exposure you get at Celtic is something only maybe five or six clubs in England could match. The intensity of life here is something I'm used to, I'm institutionalised in it. In Glasgow, there is always a challenge.

"Something else coming up isn't something I think about. It's nice to have people patting you on the back but it lasts a month until your next bad result, and people go away and talk about somebody else."

Lennon speaks through uncomfortable experience. He left Glasgow once before, for a brief playing spell at Nottingham Forest. "I just couldn't get my head around it at all, which was my own fault," he recalled. "There was a lack of intensity, a humdrum lifestyle of a footballer down there."

Scotland's own football landscape has been altered significantly by the removal of Rangers from the top flight and, therefore, the routine Glasgow derbies.

"I don't particularly miss the to-ing and fro-ing," Lennon admits. "I think everybody misses the build up to the game itself and the raw energy that those matches bring but as a manager I don't miss them because they are not a nice experience at times. When you win, you just feel a pressure release and when you lose you are in a dark place for two or three days. People on the outside, the supporters, love all that theatre. Me? I'm happy without it."

And in the inevitable circumstance that the Glasgow duo meet again, will things be different? "I think it will be. I don't think Rangers are as strong on the pitch and I don't think they are as strong an institution as they once were.

"And we are, we have got stronger. We have got better on the pitch and the revenue we have brought in this year will leave us financially stable for a long, long time. I don't know the ins and outs of Rangers, I just look at their team and it has been significantly weakened because of all the big players who have gone."

Lennon is more content, too, with a relative serenity around his private life after the string of threats which earlier endangered his safety. Eight months ago, two men were jailed for five years each after being found guilty of sending suspect packages to Lennon and two other high-profile Celtic supporters. "I think those guys getting put away in April has become a deterrent for anybody else. Things haven't been as bad for me, which has made life a lot easier," Lennon said.

"I think without the Rangers/Celtic thing there has become more banter than anything sinister. At times when the two teams are competing for things there seems to be more of an edge to the sectarian element.

"This is my job and I love my job. There were days when I thought about rapping it but you see the players progressing, you come here close the door and get on with your work. You realise there aren't many better jobs in the world. Do you really need to give it up? I was well looked after security wise, had to put up with a bit of crap here and there but as long as the security people tell you that you aren't in imminent danger, you just get on with things."

Lennon remains more eloquent, erudite and engaging than many have routinely given him credit for. Should his detractors be in the Northern Irishman's company for 10 minutes, they would acknowledge that. Still, the image of Lennon as a hot-head is one which irks the man himself.

"Kenny Shiels and Steve Lomas [in charge of Kilmarnock and St Johnstone, respectively] at the minute are in trouble with the SFA. They are seen as a breath of fresh air or calling things as they see it, whereas I'm perceived as l'enfant terrible or the thug on the touchline. It's the perception people have," Lennon said. "It has bothered me because I was just, like Kenny, trying to be as honest as I could.

"If you look at my results over my three years in charge, we have been pretty successful here. I know how to get a winning team on the pitch more times than not and I think that's the most important thing.

"That doesn't give me the right to behave in a certain manner but I think I have toned that down as well. There are still times when you will lose your temper, when you don't think referees are having a good game. Now people don't perceive me as making as big a fuss about it. Other managers do worse than me without getting the negative publicity that I would get. "This isn't me bleating about it, it's just a fact of life. I keep going back to the Celtic Manager's Manual; people keep telling me I can't do this, can't do that. Where is this green book that I need to read? You stamp your own personality on the job and take it from there."

Lennon has done that. And some. Just as intriguing as Celtic's upcoming games with Juventus is the question of how far their manager's talents and ambitions can take him.

Celtic charity

To celebrate the club's 125th anniversary Celtic aim to raise £1.25m for their charitable fund, the main beneficiary being the Teenage Cancer Trust. Celtic fans around the world are showing their continual commitment to the founding principles of the club by presenting their story "Football for Good" and raising money in many different ways. Visit www.celticfc.net/charity for full details and to contribute
Click to expand...

Onwards and upwards Neil. Time to skelp The Old Lady next!

A few opinions there that will have the EPL lovers on GC frothing - "What, Celtic bigger than Norwich!? PAH!"
 
Scotland's own football landscape has been altered significantly by the removal of Rangers from the top flight and, therefore, the routine Glasgow derbies.

"I don't particularly miss the to-ing and fro-ing," Lennon admits. "I think everybody misses the build up to the game itself and the raw energy that those matches bring but as a manager I don't miss them because they are not a nice experience at times. When you win, you just feel a pressure release and when you lose you are in a dark place for two or three days. People on the outside, the supporters, love all that theatre. Me? I'm happy without it."
Click to expand...

<applause>

I knew Fergie had been in contact with Lennon but I didn't know about him going to Lennoxtown and stuff.

Fair play <ok>
 
IF YOU pay only peripheral attention to Scottish soccer then you may not need a defibrillator to help your pulse rate on learning that Rangers are top of the league and played to a full house the other weekend, while Celtic struggled to defeat a side from a community of 22,000 on a freezing midweek night.
But like everything in the often bipolar world of the Old Firm, not everything is as it seems.
Rangers top division three, excommunicated from the Scottish Premier League because of insolvency and forced to abandon 140 years of history in order to re-form as a new company (Newco).
Celtic's travails were in the Scottish Cup, where it scraped past lowly Arbroath 2-1 on aggregate in the first tie and its replay - by coincidence it was the same score which caused Celtic fan Rod Stewart to dissolve in tears at Parkhead when Neil Lennon's team beat Barcelona last month.

That was was one of the victories that earned Celtic 10 points and catapulted it into the last 16 of the Champions League.
Thus it was that on Thursday, Celtic's executives were in Nyon, Switzerland, waiting to discover whether the club would be drawn to play Bayern Munich, Juventus, Borussia Dortmund, Schalke, Paris St Germain or Malaga. Heady stuff.
In the end there were roars of delight and general punching of the air, which is what we prefer Old Firm fans to hit rather than each other or the opposition players, when Italian champion Juventus came out of the glass bowl. But more of that later.
Simultaneously, Rangers' staff and players were preparing for their match in Elgin (population 20,000, stadium capacity 4520 - mostly standing), a club so charmingly excited about the visit that, ahead of the originally scheduled date for the match, it sold over 1000 tickets too many and the game was postponed on safety grounds. It's a top-of-the-table clash so, given there's no Old Firm league battles for at least three seasons, it's one to savour for the few hundred travelling Rangers fans.

It's hard to know exactly how to calibrate the distance between Celtic, now in a holding pattern with Europe's elite (and deeper into the Champions League than trophy holder Chelsea) and Rangers, currently 31st on the Scottish ladder.
Accepting that Celtic is one of Europe's top-16 clubs, if you tried to merge all British and European soccer to create some sort of ''pound for pound'' hierarchy, then the gap between the Glasgow rivals would be cataclysmic. Obviously, the biggest in their history. Cumulatively, it meant December 20 was a hideous day to be a Rangers supporter. While Steve McManaman and company paired the wheat with the chaff in Nyon - Real Madrid plays Manchester United, Barca faces Milan - Rangers fans must have been aching. Desperate for their club to be there, still more desperate for Celtic not to be.
They must have been torn - drawing Juventus will spark nearly two months of glamour stories for Lennon and his team. Last time the Vecchia Signora came calling, there was the stunning 4-3 win at Parkhead (the two group games ended with a 6-6 aggregate). There was also the desperately tight result the last time the pair played a knockout tie - in 1981. Celtic won 1-0 at home, but lost 2-0 in Turin.
But some in light blue will be happy in the belief that the Italians will be too strong. We'll see.

The late Tommy Burns played in that European Cup contest over 30 years ago and once phoned me up to ask me to take him over for a three-day study visit to Marcello Lippi's Juve. Tommy was Celtic manager at the time. I did so and, because of his Celtic status, we were treated like royalty. He told me that the 2-0 defeat in the old Stadio Communale was one of the most noisy, passionate but disappointing of his career. He felt Celtic could have followed up its 1-0 win at Parkhead with a draw and eliminate the Serie A holder.
This tie will unleash all the ''days gone by'' stories from former players, fans and writers.

You'd have to be dyed-in-the-wool Celtic not to sympathise pretty strongly with the Rangers' public. Especially in light of the fans' defiance of the club's current situation.
The club's lawyers recently won a complicated, damaging and contentious court battle with the UK taxman - one which many had predicted would be a ruinous and guaranteed defeat that resulted in a penalty of anything up to £60 million ($A93 million).
There was an overwhelming presumption that the club would be found guilty; not so, but much damage has been done.
There remains an investigation by the Scottish authorities as to whether Rangers utilised so-called ''double contracts'' in order to attract star players and, thus, tilt the trophy balance in their favour during the reign of former owner Sir David Murray.
Since Murray sold to Craig Whyte, Rangers went out of business, a clutch of their former players refused to transfer their registration to Newco and there is an ongoing legal action against the new Rangers, now headed by chief executive Charles Green, over how the process was handled.
The fans? Well, not guilty. Not involved, not culpable, not in the Scottish Premier League, not in Europe. Not going to Dundee United in the next round of the Scottish Cup either - in protest at the stance United took about whether Rangers should be demoted and to which division.
Parts of the story tell you something eternal about Scotland. The national team patented the idea of glorious failure and how to celebrate it in Braveheart-gladiatorial-woad-and-sword-rattling, with a litre or two of home-made wine down the fans' throats. Believe me, I've been there.
Therefore, although their loyalty and defiance is admirable, no one should be taken aback that the Rangers' faithful are turning up in such numbers that when Ally McCoist's team beat Stirling Albion (heard of it?) last Saturday, the crowd was 49,000 - 2000 more than attended the Manchester City-Manchester United derby the following day.

Meanwhile, Celtic attempts to achieve something extremely difficult. Motivate itself for the domestic chores, which now don't include Old Firm derbies, while changing its mentality and playing style in order to progress in Europe.
In a way it's a fascinating laboratory experiment - is working in relative peace and quiet conducive to advances or is the white heat of racing to beat the other pharmaceutical company vital to creative juices?
Lennon concedes: ''It is a two-way thing, though. There is definitely less of an edge and you can feel that with the punters as well at times, with Rangers not being there. It is just a natural feeling because the competition has been so intense. It is surreal at times. Rangers' result would be the first thing you look for, particularly if they've played the early match.
''Then you have that wee bit extra pressure on you if they have won or it galvanises you if they draw or get beat. You do definitely miss that. The reality is they are not here and you have to get on with it.''

He's doing pretty well so far. Bring on Rangers against Elgin, Annan Athletic and company. Bring on Celtic v Juventus.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/sport/soccer/old-firm-on-different-paths-20121221-2brks.html#ixzz2FhM6VfL3



A long read but worth it.
 
StereoTypist said:
IF YOU pay only peripheral attention to Scottish soccer then you may not need a defibrillator to help your pulse rate on learning that Rangers are top of the league and played to a full house the other weekend, while Celtic struggled to defeat a side from a community of 22,000 on a freezing midweek night.
But like everything in the often bipolar world of the Old Firm, not everything is as it seems.
Rangers top division three, excommunicated from the Scottish Premier League because of insolvency and forced to abandon 140 years of history in order to re-form as a new company (Newco).
Celtic's travails were in the Scottish Cup, where it scraped past lowly Arbroath 2-1 on aggregate in the first tie and its replay - by coincidence it was the same score which caused Celtic fan Rod Stewart to dissolve in tears at Parkhead when Neil Lennon's team beat Barcelona last month.

That was was one of the victories that earned Celtic 10 points and catapulted it into the last 16 of the Champions League.
Thus it was that on Thursday, Celtic's executives were in Nyon, Switzerland, waiting to discover whether the club would be drawn to play Bayern Munich, Juventus, Borussia Dortmund, Schalke, Paris St Germain or Malaga. Heady stuff.
In the end there were roars of delight and general punching of the air, which is what we prefer Old Firm fans to hit rather than each other or the opposition players, when Italian champion Juventus came out of the glass bowl. But more of that later.
Simultaneously, Rangers' staff and players were preparing for their match in Elgin (population 20,000, stadium capacity 4520 - mostly standing), a club so charmingly excited about the visit that, ahead of the originally scheduled date for the match, it sold over 1000 tickets too many and the game was postponed on safety grounds. It's a top-of-the-table clash so, given there's no Old Firm league battles for at least three seasons, it's one to savour for the few hundred travelling Rangers fans.

It's hard to know exactly how to calibrate the distance between Celtic, now in a holding pattern with Europe's elite (and deeper into the Champions League than trophy holder Chelsea) and Rangers, currently 31st on the Scottish ladder.
Accepting that Celtic is one of Europe's top-16 clubs, if you tried to merge all British and European soccer to create some sort of ''pound for pound'' hierarchy, then the gap between the Glasgow rivals would be cataclysmic. Obviously, the biggest in their history. Cumulatively, it meant December 20 was a hideous day to be a Rangers supporter. While Steve McManaman and company paired the wheat with the chaff in Nyon - Real Madrid plays Manchester United, Barca faces Milan - Rangers fans must have been aching. Desperate for their club to be there, still more desperate for Celtic not to be.
They must have been torn - drawing Juventus will spark nearly two months of glamour stories for Lennon and his team. Last time the Vecchia Signora came calling, there was the stunning 4-3 win at Parkhead (the two group games ended with a 6-6 aggregate). There was also the desperately tight result the last time the pair played a knockout tie - in 1981. Celtic won 1-0 at home, but lost 2-0 in Turin.
But some in light blue will be happy in the belief that the Italians will be too strong. We'll see.

The late Tommy Burns played in that European Cup contest over 30 years ago and once phoned me up to ask me to take him over for a three-day study visit to Marcello Lippi's Juve. Tommy was Celtic manager at the time. I did so and, because of his Celtic status, we were treated like royalty. He told me that the 2-0 defeat in the old Stadio Communale was one of the most noisy, passionate but disappointing of his career. He felt Celtic could have followed up its 1-0 win at Parkhead with a draw and eliminate the Serie A holder.
This tie will unleash all the ''days gone by'' stories from former players, fans and writers.

You'd have to be dyed-in-the-wool Celtic not to sympathise pretty strongly with the Rangers' public. Especially in light of the fans' defiance of the club's current situation.
The club's lawyers recently won a complicated, damaging and contentious court battle with the UK taxman - one which many had predicted would be a ruinous and guaranteed defeat that resulted in a penalty of anything up to £60 million ($A93 million).
There was an overwhelming presumption that the club would be found guilty; not so, but much damage has been done.
There remains an investigation by the Scottish authorities as to whether Rangers utilised so-called ''double contracts'' in order to attract star players and, thus, tilt the trophy balance in their favour during the reign of former owner Sir David Murray.
Since Murray sold to Craig Whyte, Rangers went out of business, a clutch of their former players refused to transfer their registration to Newco and there is an ongoing legal action against the new Rangers, now headed by chief executive Charles Green, over how the process was handled.
The fans? Well, not guilty. Not involved, not culpable, not in the Scottish Premier League, not in Europe. Not going to Dundee United in the next round of the Scottish Cup either - in protest at the stance United took about whether Rangers should be demoted and to which division.
Parts of the story tell you something eternal about Scotland. The national team patented the idea of glorious failure and how to celebrate it in Braveheart-gladiatorial-woad-and-sword-rattling, with a litre or two of home-made wine down the fans' throats. Believe me, I've been there.
Therefore, although their loyalty and defiance is admirable, no one should be taken aback that the Rangers' faithful are turning up in such numbers that when Ally McCoist's team beat Stirling Albion (heard of it?) last Saturday, the crowd was 49,000 - 2000 more than attended the Manchester City-Manchester United derby the following day.

Meanwhile, Celtic attempts to achieve something extremely difficult. Motivate itself for the domestic chores, which now don't include Old Firm derbies, while changing its mentality and playing style in order to progress in Europe.
In a way it's a fascinating laboratory experiment - is working in relative peace and quiet conducive to advances or is the white heat of racing to beat the other pharmaceutical company vital to creative juices?
Lennon concedes: ''It is a two-way thing, though. There is definitely less of an edge and you can feel that with the punters as well at times, with Rangers not being there. It is just a natural feeling because the competition has been so intense. It is surreal at times. Rangers' result would be the first thing you look for, particularly if they've played the early match.
''Then you have that wee bit extra pressure on you if they have won or it galvanises you if they draw or get beat. You do definitely miss that. The reality is they are not here and you have to get on with it.''

He's doing pretty well so far. Bring on Rangers against Elgin, Annan Athletic and company. Bring on Celtic v Juventus.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/sport/soccer/old-firm-on-different-paths-20121221-2brks.html#ixzz2FhM6VfL3



A long read but worth it.
Click to expand...

bears you can write to the age in melbourne to complain about their anti rangers agenda
 
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