FORMER Celtic manager Neil Lennon has accepted responsibility for the club’s lacklustre performance during the 2020/2021 season, a year marred by the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s the first time the manager has said something of the sort, always looking to put the blame on the situation or his wantaway players.
This was a season in which the Hoops found themselves alarmingly off the pace, ending the season without a trophy and a gaping 25-point chasm behind their arch-rivals, The Rangers.
COVID-19’s impact on the sporting world was significant, with matches played in empty stadiums in order to abide by social distancing measures. For the players who thrive off the energy of a live crowd, this was a dispiriting new reality.
While Lennon acknowledges the challenging circumstances, he has stepped up to shoulder the blame for the season’s downturn.
However, he’s not taking all of the blame. He argues that everyone was attempting to maintain the facade of normality during the matches, a facade that was transparently far from reality.
Neil Lennon said: [The Herald]
“When we eventually came back we were flat and we never got our mojo back after that.
“As professionals, you want to play in front of full houses and, without crowds, the novelty soon wore off.
“I take responsibility for what happened that season, but everyone was pretending that everything was normal at games — and it quite clearly wasn’t.”
Neil Lennon has absolutely nothing to apologize for over the 2020-21 season. Try as you might, you just cannot win the league every season. He started off the most recent nine-in-a-row years in the 2011-12 season, and that could easily have been derailed when the individual who the Celtic board have seen fit to re-appoint as manager, decided to abandon Celtic on the verge of a historic 50th title, with 3 months of the 2018-19 season left. Neil Lennon then had the difficult job of taking over with only a few weeks left of the season, and finished off that season’s domestic treble, as well as adding another domestic treble the following season. As manager, he’s delivered 5 league titles to Celtic, in his two spells in charge, making him just about the third most successful manager in the club’s history behind (1)Willie Maley and (2)Jock Stein. He’s also the last manager to get Celtic into the last 16 of the European champions league, when they played against Juventus. He also managed to find the time to get Celtic to top their Europa league group, ahead of the Romanian side Cluj, the Italian club Lazio, and the French team Rennes. THE BHOY DONE GOOD.