Celtic: Neil Lennon at the crossroads

Champions League nights like this seasons clash with Barcelona have provided Neil Lennon with some welcome challenges but the domestic game has been less satisfactory. Photograph: Craig Williamson/SNS

NEIL Lennon is the second-longest serving manager in situ at a Scottish senior side. If, in 13-and-a-half months’ time, he passes the five-year mark in charge of Celtic, his unbroken spell at the helm will surpass that of any occupant in the post since Jock Stein almost four decades ago.

Lennon’s longevity has exposed him to some undeniable and uncomfortable truths about time-frames.

“It’s a huge job and it’s like everything else, you have good days and bad days,” he says. “The good days are good and the bad days are horrific. That’s part of the excitement as well. You have to be a bit of a masochist to do this job.”

One of the horrific days arrived with the Scottish Cup fifth-round home defeat by Aberdeen last weekend. In the aftermath, the Celtic manager has been prepared to put on his hairshirt – “there has been a bit of soul searching but it is not a national disaster, I have got to put some sort of perspective on it”, he says – but some among the club’s followers seem to want him to wear the garment on a permanent basis.

Care must always be taken when making assessments on the mood of any team’s fans from the fulminators and frothers who forever populate cyberspace. Yet the fact that this faction has gone into overdrive in the wake of the Aberdeen elimination, which made this season the first in 32 years where Celtic did not reach either domestic cup quarter-final, cannot entirely be ignored.

Celtic are the solitary superpower of the Scottish game. Merely winning the league and negotiating Champions League qualifiers against sides with only a fraction of their resources must then leave the club only in the break-even position. Lennon accepts that this means there has been slippage in his fourth season in charge. Not that progress is ever linear for a football team. It wasn’t even under Stein.

In the past, Lennon has acknowledged that every manager has a shelf life. With typically-admirable candour, the 42-year-old does not simply dismiss the questions now being posed by some Celtic supporters over his very own shelf life. “I think you know instinctively when there is a cut-off point. Whether mine is here yet or not I do not know,” he says.

Gordon Strachan stepped down after four years at Celtic, but a staleness had long-since enveloped his era.

Lennon, while enjoying a similar silverware record, has overseen an upgrade in the standard of footballers and football witnessed in the east end of Glasgow – as well as banking record profits on player sales. In large part, the problem for the Irishman is that, with no credible title challenge, his record is being judged on domestic cup successes, with only two won in nine attempts. In previous times such honours were perceived only as add-ons where the title was concerned. A point not lost on him.

“We are going to win another championship by the looks of it and people will go, ‘so what?’,” Lennon says. “That’s a difficult thing to deal with. Years ago, there was a spell where people would have chopped your right arm off for the opportunity to be challenging for a title rather than going on to win one. I have to look past that. I have to look at the players, some of the new boys that have come in, getting them bedded in for next year. I can think about the Champions League but not too much, I have to work in the present.”