Diminished Rangers elicit no sympathy from Neil Lennon

CELTIC manager Neil Lennon says he can have no sympathy over the predicament in which Ally McCoist finds himself as he views that as the reckoning for years of financial “mismanagement” in which his Rangers counterpart was a beneficiary.

Lennon says he feels for McCoist in a personal sense after he was forced to “significantly weaken” his squad by selling top scorer Nikica Jelavic on the final day of the transfer window, as owner Craig Whyte sought to plug a funding gap. But the Irishman is mindful that the Croatian was recruited to a then bank-debt hampered Rangers only 18 months ago, when McCoist was assistant to Walter Smith, for a £4 million fee. That makes the striker the most expensive import to Scottish football in more than a decade – and the sort of marquee signing out of Lennon’s reach under budgetary constraints placed on him in almost two years as Celtic manager, and which have existed at the club in previous years.

Indeed, Lennon points out that the moment considered by many to have set Rangers on their way to the past three titles was Celtic’s failure to tempt Hibernian to part with Steven Fletcher in the 2009 January transfer window through not meeting the Leith club’s £3 million valuation. “Tell me this: why was he [McCoist] forced to sell Jelavic? Because of the [financial situation of the club] that has been going on for how many years?” said Lennon. “I’m not saying it’s Ally’s fault. But it’s been a build-up of mismanagement, if you want to call it that, for the financial side for a long, long time. I have a certain sympathy with Ally in the respect it’s his first year in the job and I’m sure he didn’t envisage the problems he has had. But somebody must have seen it coming. Do I have sympathy in that respect for them? No. If you have mismanaged, if you’ve spent beyond your means, for a long, long time then eventually it comes home to roost. It has happened at a lot of clubs. The people who suffer are the supporters.

“We have cut our cloth accordingly for years and had to bite the bullet a few times. People keep going back to the Steven Fletcher thing. We didn’t have the money that Hibs were looking for so we had to let that one go. People say it cost us the title, but there is no guarantee that we’d have won the title if we got Steven Fletcher. It might have made us stronger, but it’s all theories and hypotheses, the Steven Fletcher myth. All these figures keep getting bandied about [in terms of the money I’ve spent] but the most I ever have was on [Effrain] Juarez, [Gary] Hooper and [Mohamed] Bangura – £1.6 million with add-ons.”

Lennon baulked at the suggestion that the contrasting sizes of squads he and McCoist have at their disposal means the championship should now be a shoo-in for his club. “I was going through it in October and November,” he said of McCoist’s current travails. “There was no talk of us having an upper hand or a massive squad then. Rangers were nine, 12 or 15 points clear and looked like they were running away with it. There was no talk of it being us who should win the title. The change has come because the players have turned it around on the pitch. That’s where you get it done.”

And the Celtic manager, thwarted in a late bid to bring in Leon Best on loan after the Newcastle United striker told him the move would be “disruptive” with a ten-week-old son, rounded on former Celtic midfielder Craig Burley after he was quoted this week as saying it would be an “utter embarrassment” if Lennon’s side failed to win the title, an outcome that, if it came to pass, Burley said should see the current Celtic squad being given “a one-way ticket out of the club”.

“I won’t fall into that trap,” Lennon said. “People are trying to crank the pressure up now on us. I saw this week a pundit who works for a TV company broadcasting Scottish games basically be totally disrespectful to the rest of the SPL by saying if we don’t win the league the majority should go out the door. That doesn’t help. And for me it’s just pub talk. Being an ex-professional he should know how difficult it is to win titles. It’s never given to you.”

Yet, Jelavic’s loss to Everton should mean a huge gain for Celtic. “Significantly it weakens Rangers,” Lennon accepted. “If I was to sell Gary Hooper that would significantly weaken us. Does that make us stronger? Well, our squad hasn’t changed. We’re as we were, apart from [Pawel] Brozek coming in. But in a lot of people’s eyes losing their leading goalscorer significantly weakens Rangers. Maybe it will galvanise them, I don’t know. Maybe they’ll just dig in now. They won 4-0 last week but having said that, Nikica played in all the games when there was a 19-point swing. I think he’s superb and Everton have themselves a really good player. He lit up the game here for a couple of seasons.”

In Hooper, Lennon has an asset he intends to ensure lights up Celtic’s play for seasons to come. The club repelled a bid in the region of £5 million from Southampton for the 23-year-old striker. He was also linked with a move to Russia, as was Anthony Stokes, but Lennon says no contact from that country has been received for either. And none would be welcomed, with Hooper someone he believes could reach the highest level in the English game if he continues developing at Celtic for “the next two or three years”.

“He’s not for sale; he wouldn’t have been for sale at any price,” insisted Lennon. “The past few games he has played as well as he ever has for us and I don’t really want to sell Gary while I am manager here because he is such an important player for me.

“We’ve got a big squad because we’ve built this squad. We’ve worked away at it, it’s not cost us a huge amount of money and we’ve got prized assets in the squad now as well.

“If and when we need to sell we will be pretty comfortable with the return on the players. But we also have to think of them. They have given so much to the club, we won’t just sell to the first bidder, if a club comes in they feel does not suit them.”