Lack of leadership just one of problems for sad Celtic

Let's begin the post-mortem by dismembering the captaincy of Scott Brown.

In the darkness of Utrecht on Thursday night it should have fallen to the leader of the team to speak on behalf of the dressing-room, to articulate their sorrow and their hurt at such an awful defeat, as well as their determination to try and put it right in the weeks and months ahead. That is what all good captains would have done.

Neil Lennon did it himself in the past. Davie Weir did it last season after his team got destroyed by Unirea in the Champions League in front of their own people at Ibrox. Even those pampered souls in the England national team did it when Germany heaped embarrassment on them at the World Cup. Think what you like of them, but Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, John Terry and Wayne Rooney were all man-enough to front-up when the English crashed in South Africa.

Unlike Mr Brown of Parkhead.

He breezed past everybody on his way out of the stadium, not even acknowledging the reporters' requests for a comment, and then sat sullenly in the airport lounge awaiting departure for Glasgow. The dressing room spokesmen on the night included Cha Du-Ri and Joe Ledley, two novices in the side, but with more backbone, seemingly, than the guy who was supposed to be leading them.

If Brown had cause to be embarrassed by the result, then he had equal cause to be shame-faced at leaving a couple of Celtic rookies to explain it to the public while he sat brooding in his seat.

Brown has strengths as a player, but self-control is not one of them. Above all things in Utrecht, Lennon needed his experienced men to come through for him, needed composure and mental strength from the players who've been around this scene the longest. Players like Brown.

Let's go back to the closing minutes of the first half in Utrecht, to the incident that saw him booked. Brown was squaring up to Dries Mertens, the Utrecht midfielder who had appeared to head-butt him a few seconds earlier. Of course, he was a victim. Mertens had put in a cheap shot and Brown was enraged that he was getting away with it. In that moment, he lost the plot. Couldn't see straight for all the red mist. As he walked away from the incident, Brown shouted over at Mertens: "I'm going to f****** kill you." It is entirely plausible that the referee heard what he had to say. It was a near-certainty that Lennon did, for shortly after, he removed him from the field for the sake of the team.

Celtic were 3-0 down in the early minutes of the second half. Their goalkeeper and both their centre-halves had been culpable in the concession of two penalties. Their right-back, Cha, was looking anxious. Their entire midfield was being pulverised. One of their centre-forwards, Georgios Samaras, looked disinterested. The other, Marc-Antoine Fortune, was running about like a man who knew he was heading for a new club, West Brom, first thing the following morning. In short, Celtic needed a commanding presence to pull this disjointed side together in a time of crisis. And they didn't have one.

Yesterday, at Lennoxtown, Lennon was asked how his captain was - and whether or not he is still the captain. "He's still the captain," said the manager, but it's inconceivable that Lennon doesn't now have serious misgivings about Brown's ability to do the job. "He almost cares too much [about winning]. He feels it as much as I do. He feels responsible for it because he's the captain."

Lennon continued the hangdog theme of Thursday night. "I can't defend the indefensible. It's as sore a one as I've ever felt. I'm fed up with coming back from Europe and my backside spanked. It's happened again and there's nothing I can do about it until next season, if I'm still here.

"I picked the personnel. There wasn't that much change in the team from the last match. It's a mentality thing. You can't lose that in a week. You don't lose your ability to run, your ability to pass the ball, your ability to eliminate people, your ability to head the ball and stop crosses and tackle and press. It's a mentality thing and it's something we've looked at and tried to change for away games, but it's manifested itself again in all departments.

"I wouldn't say it's a curse or a hoodoo or anything like that. It's a new management team and new players, but the same results and the same level of performance. I would have thought they've got a good mentality and I still think they do. It's probably too early to judge them as a unit. It was very important to the club that we had a European run but I am not going to make any knee-jerk reactions, even though the performance was poor. They have to get used to the culture of the British game and adapt to the environment but from what I've seen domestically so far, they've done okay.

"But it's a different quality of opposition in Europe and that's what we need to reach. We didn't look like a team last night. We looked like a team of individuals."

Of course, that is precisely what they are. Lennon has changed the team dramatically and is now into double figures in terms of new players since the end of last season. His purchasing has a touch of the indiscriminate about it at this stage. A Honduran fetched-up on Friday and something was made of the fact he had played for his country at the World Cup. Yes, well, so did a lot of people and plenty of them were rubbish. Edson Braafheid played in the World Cup final and yet couldn't hack it in the SPL.

Lennon has added masses of players, but has he added character? Where are the leaders? The go-to men when Brown's running around like his hair is on fire? Daniel Majstorovic looks a possibility, but who else? Beram Kayal? Efrain Juarez? Ledley? Cha?

Celtic are a liability away from home in Europe. That's not Lennon's doing. It's a problem that stretches back years and covers 29 games on the road, only one of which they have won. Twenty-four losses out of 29 and 58 goals conceded at an average of two a game on foreign soil. It was with a barely-concealed smile that an official from Utrecht said on Thursday: "We knew about Celtic's record away from home. It's not good."

It wasn't good when the team was settled and it wasn't likely to be good now that the team is up in the air, in the early stages of a major rebuild. That's the only crumb for Lennon. That the horrors of Thursday were down to the unfamiliarity in the side.

Lennon will cling to that thought and hope the ordinary challenges that await him and his players in the SPL will help redeem his reputation as a manager. After all, there is a precedent here. When Celtic lost 5-0 to Artmedia Bratislava in Gordon Strachan's first game in charge, the reaction went thermonuclear. Strachan was presented as a chump who didn't know what he was doing, yet he won the SPL that season and Artmedia didn't seem to matter so much after that.

Same story with Walter Smith. Two seasons ago, Rangers got dumped from Europe by Kaunas and yet Smith ended the season as a hero of Ibrox on account of the SPL title returning there after three seasons at Parkhead. Last year, there was calamity in the shape of Unirea and Sevilla, yet he was lionised after another SPL title came his way.

Lennon got a kicking on Thursday. As history has shown, he can make the memory go away by winning the SPL. Europe is beyond them, but domestic success may be within their grasp. But his captain? There are issues there. Many, many issues.