Lennon insists League Cup is high on his priority list

WITH Celtic having only managed to get their hands on three of the last 12 trophies on offer in Scotland over the past four years, manager Neil Lennon is well aware that he can’t take the Scottish Communities League Cup lightly.

Lennon’s men got back to winning ways in the SPL with victory over Aberdeen on Sunday but they have endured a difficult time of it in recent weeks and have still to post a major victory in a troubled campaign.

Tonight’s League Cup quarter-final against Hibernian at Easter Road gives Celtic the opportunity to reach the last-four of the tournament and it’s one Lennon is eager to grasp. “It is a big game in the context of what we want to do domestically,” he said. “Every competition is worth winning. It is important and could be a morale booster if we have a semi-final to look forward to.”

But Lennon will once more have to reshape his defence for the trip to Leith. In part, fitness-created selection dilemmas have hampered Celtic this season and these will not ease for a tie that the manager expects to go into without centre-back Charlie Mulgrew, stand-in captain for long-term injury absentee Scott Brown. “I’d say he’s pretty doubtful,” Lennon said about Mulgrew, who scored the winner in Sunday’s 2-1 success over Aberdeen. “He took a heavy challenge at the weekend, his ankle is quite swollen and he’s popped a blood vessel. But we’ll give him every chance.”

Mulgrew is likely to join weekend defensive partner Glenn Loovens – expected to be out for a week to ten days after he was forced off earlier against the Dons – Georgios Samaras and Mohamed Bangura on the recent casualty list.

The club are awaiting results of a scan to see if Bangura, a £2.2 million summer signing, will require surgery on possible knee ligament tear. If he does, the Seirre Leone forward will be added to Emilio Izaguirre, Kelvin Wilson and Brown as the players lost to Lennon for most of the opening half of the season.

Loovens’ definite absence this evening will mean that, in their 18th game of the season, it will remain the case that only once – back in August – will Celtic have fielded the same back four for two consecutive games. Yet, the Celtic manager refuses to use lack of continuity as an explanation for his team’s fragility in the defensive department.

“It has just been really frustrating that we haven’t been able to get a settled back four or our ideal back four,” he said, with Thomas Rogne coming back into contention for this evening’s game following a period sidelined. “If you look at the injuries we’ve had up to now with [Kelvin] Wilson, Izaguirre out, and Cha Du-ri out for six weeks, and Loovens and Rogne out, we’ve been pretty stretched. We also have to be careful with Mark Wilson, who gets pretty sore between training and after games with his knee. But we’ve still a good core of players to call upon. They’re experienced and a lot of them have been here for a while. They know each other so I wouldn’t like it to be the be all and end all of why we’ve been conceding goals. I feel we’ve still quality players who can handle what’s thrown at us, at domestic level anyway.”

Daniel Majstorovic could partner Victor Wanyama in another central defensive pairing, with Lennon confirming he will field “as strong a team as possible” against an ailing Hibernian team managed by his former Nottingham Forest manager Colin Calderwood, before the teams meet again in Glasgow on Saturday.

“He’ll turn it around,” Lennon said when asked about Calderwood’s early-season troubles at Easter Road. “For some reason he got a hard time at Forest, even though he got them promoted. He’s very dogged, as a person and a character, and he’ll see the bad patch through. I just don’t want it happening against us because we have enough to worry about ourselves.”

The semi-finals of the Scottish Communities League Cup will be played at the end of January. By the tenor of his conversation yesterday, Lennon wouldn’t be surprised if Brown’s contract situation hadn’t been resolved by then.

“I haven’t had a chance to speak to him,” said the Celtic manager. “Scott has been in London [for surgery on an ankle problem] and he’s just come off the crutches, so I don’t see him much. The only position I’m in is I think things were agreed in principle and there was a discrepancy with the agents over commission. I would have liked it resolved but the agents know the club’s position on it. Till they adapt a different approach it is stalemate at the minute. I don’t have any input in negotiations at all. Sometimes I might speak to Peter [Lawwell, Celtic chief executive] but he has the final say on budgets and contracts.”

Lennon confirmed that he has taken 20-year-old Londoner Andre Blackman on a two-week trial after he liked “the cut” of the former Chelsea, Arsenal, Portsmouth and Bristol City left-back out of the game for a year with “issues”, but knew little of Swedish centre-back Alexander Milosevic’s interest in moving from AIK Stockholm.

Meanwhile, Celtic were told yesterday that the Court of Arbitration for Sport has set 24 November as the date for its hearing into the dispute between FC Sion and Uefa.

The Swiss club were thrown out of the Europa League on 2 September after being found guilty of fielding ineligible players in their play-off match against Celtic, who were installed in the group stage in their place.

Uefa has since rejected numerous attempts by the club to regain their place via the Swiss civil court in the Canton of Vaud, insisting that the CAS is the only authority with jurisdiction over the matter.