Lennon, Duffy and illusive perspective on last season

Last week, Neil Lennon wired into the debate on what went wrong at Celtic last season.  Neil is as much a Celtic man as you or I, so I suspect he’s still as raw as the rest of us on this topic, I’ll therefore cut him some slack.  For me, it is too soon for sound perspective, we need to let it settle for a while before insight kicks in.

To help gain some of this commodity for myself, I switched between the Scotland and Ireland games on Saturday.  Reports of how well Shane Duffy was performing in the English Premier League this season sounded remarkable and I wanted to see with my eyes what my ears did not believe.  All I know for sure on last season is that the Shane Duffy I watched for Ireland is not the same person we had at Celtic.  No DNA test could convince me otherwise.

Ireland’s Duffy did nothing spectacular, but he was where he should be throughout the game, no wandering off, no concentration lapses.  There will be books written on what went wrong last season, I doubt any of them will explain the performance of the player we loaned from Brighton.  That Ireland defender is solid, though, if only we signed him instead.