Our manager’s been in the news lately
So I’m sure you’re all aware of the recently surfaced activities of he whom I once called ‘good guy’ Neil Lennon off the pitch. It was a story first broken by the Sunday Mirror and yesterday, the club responded thusly:
‘The club has dealt with the matter internally and acted accordingly, details of which will remain private.
‘Neil Lennon will remain in charge of the first team squad.
‘The club will be making no further comment on the matter.’
I don’t think anyone without insider knowledge can comment much other than to just express their disappointment in our first team manager. We can question whether what happened and what he got up to could have been distracting off the pitch- that could very possibly have been the case.
However, as the statement reads, Neil Lennon is still our manager. The investigation probably resonated with what the article uncovered as if what they found differed greatly, I’d probably expect the club to deny some of it.
If the board wanted Neil Lennon gone, they could have taken this opportunity to terminate his contract for free for gross misconduct. However, timing’s a bit awkward with our ‘impeding takeover talks’ and lack of full time chairman at the moment. Who would be put in charge anyway? Call bygones on this season and put Jimmy Phillips or Steve Walton in charge on a caretaker basis until the end of the season? Surely we wouldn’t be happy with that.
There are arguments that what we’re doing (i.e. not sacking Lennon) sets a dangerous precedent etc… and once again all I’d have to say is that unless you were involved in the incident/s then you don’t know for sure as to what happened and therefore you’re not really in a position to comment.
That said though, I’m not going to look at Neil Lennon in the same way again. I’d grown extremely fond of him as a person since he’s been our manager and while I really don’t want to compare the two matters because they’re unrelated, if Malky Mackay received the amount of abuse and career damage that he did, Neil Lennon certainly won’t/shouldn’t be having it easy.
Let’s move on though. He’s still our Neil Lennon; he’s still our manager. Let’s back him and hope that he can take us up the table.