Livid Lennon brands Celtic side ‘immature’

After yesterday’s shock 1-0 defeat at home to St Johnstone, Celtic manager Neil Lennon did not miss when taking aim at his players and hit the wall, to quote an old phrase about a boss letting rip about the inadequacies of his underlings.

Clearly still fuming many minutes after leaving the dressing room, Lennon ripped into his players, calling them “immature” and a host of other less than complimentary adjectives.

“I am angry, really angry,” said Lennon. “We threw it away, missed clear cut chances, were complacent in front of goal, wasteful and the longer the game goes on and it’s 0-0, you give the opposition encouragement.

“We keep missing simple chances and I’m fed up with it and I’m fed up with missing penalties that would have given us a real good start.

“Our play in general wasn’t too bad, but in the final third again we were awful.

“We were missing players but we still had a squad good enough to beat St Johnstone at home.

“Maybe I need to look at myself, too, I’m not immune to criticism, but we’re only four games in and I’m not panicking, I’m not going to make any rash decisions.”

Lennon pinned the blame for the loss on the front six rather than the back four: “I am more angry with them than anybody else.

“Concentration or quality or whatever it is – we have hit the post a couple of times but we have missed simple chances and we are snatching at things.

“Maybe we didn’t deserve the result but we got it, and if you don’t take your chances then that’s what happens in football.”

What mystified Lennon was the fact that with players such as Emilio Izaguirre, Beram Kayal and Gary Hooper injured, those who came into the team did not take the chance to cement themselves into his future plans.

“My point is that with players out, the players who come in have got an opportunity to make a stake for the team,” said Lennon. “They didn’t do it, they failed.”

Asked if he had taken anything positive from the match, the Celtic manager said brusquely: “No.”

Penalty misser Kris Commons came in for some analysis of his lame effort: “I don’t know why he shaped to take it the way he did. He practises them in training and takes a totally different run-up. Today he’s taken two steps to the right, and he’s slipped and I don’t know why. It was a pretty poor penalty.

“There shouldn’t be a mental block when it comes to penalties, but that’s two we’ve missed already this season, and I think it might be six out of nine, and that’s nowhere near good enough. We get a penalty and I expect us to be one nil up.”

Anthony Stokes missed several chances, including one where he tried to dribble round St Johnstone goalkeeper Peter Enckelman only for the big Finn to pounce on the ball.

Lennon has already condemned this trait in his players of trying to ‘walk the ball’ into the net, and he was vocal again: “Yes, it’s just not clinical enough.

“Paddy (McCourt) got in and had the whole goal to aim at and hits the post, and the ball bounces out to Jamesy (Forrest) and he panics and hits the defender, so there’s a wee bit of that in our play at the moment.”

More worrying for Celtic, perhaps, was a trait that was obvious to all neutral observers – the players in the hooped jerseys got flustered, to say the least, when their own fans’ frustration became ear-splittingly obvious.

Lennon said: “We didn’t handle the crowd after they scored, and that’s a concern for me. A bit of panic set in. I understand the crowd’s frustration, but the players have to handle that situation a lot better. We were immature, that’s one word to describe that performance, and we need to toughen up a bit mentally, in terms of the quality of play, in terms of seeing games out, all the mature things you would expect of a team that’s going for the title.”

The only silver lining for Lennon is that McCourt has not asked for a transfer – “just people making trouble” – while Hooper and Kayal may be fit enough to return against Sion in the crucial away leg of the Europa League qualifier in Switzerland on Thursday.