Peter Lawwell told Sky Sports he’ll not be rushed into making an appointment. Football goes on holiday for the next few weeks as players, managers and (under normal circumstances) CEOs kick back before minds turn to preseason and transfers. Even if Celtic appoint a manager tomorrow, his plans for next season will progress little in the immediate future, but the task is being addressed with some urgency.
The best insight I can offer is that the bookies and media know Sweet Fanny Ally about what is going on. Know that when Celtic start to talk to a candidate, the first thing they will insist on is radio silence, so if the aspiring manager is talking to a jouno, chances are he’s not talking to Celtic. The club will attempt to do as much work below radar as possible, but between now and the day of an appointment, newspapers will splash their latest ‘favourite’ to get the job over their covers in an attempt to get you buy. You’d be better picking your own candidates and writing your own headlines.
I’m going to wallow a bit in European glory tonight. All those photos of the Lions back in Lisbon has been inspiring. What great man, what a great history they’ve given us.
Order your dedicated copy of Tommy Gemmell’s All the Best at the fancy new CQN Bookstore.
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ekbhoy
Speaking with a Geordie friend, he says they think FF is set to return to Newcastle to replace Tim Krul who apparently wants a move.
I think there are a number of reasons for Lennon leaving but his kid needing security to go to school might just be in there.
GCT
Where did I say it was funny.
I am pointing out how rediculous the idea is.
But hey you take it to suit your own narrative.
Not my issue!
MWD says Aye
Ernie Lynch
Ok. I need to be clearer.
On my oath, I have never voted SNP. I was for many years a card carrying fully paid up member of the Labour Party. I knocked on doors, leafleted and taxied people to the polling stations.
However, disappointingly, you do not seem to want to address my question. We didn’t used to avoid difficult questions. I’ll leave you alone now.
Hail Hail
Ach well, I thought it was a stat worth shouting about….
Lubo
10:31 on 25 May, 2014
And would your interpretation be consistent with McKenna’s other writings on all things Scottish?
I suspect not.
MWD –
Apologies.
Went right over my head.
I’m tired.
That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it :)
jobo, my friend in Celtic.
It is certainly a stat worth shouting about. And thank you once again for bringing positivity and joy to this place.
Hail Hail
GCT , CRC , MWD
All noted .
MWD when do you have the wee man next , and I’ll work it round that?
TT
TT
I have him this weekend buddy. Cheers.
MWD
Gary67
I wonder where Mr Krul thinks his talents will take him?
Would make sense in some levels for Fraser, but from Pardew’s perspective he is not going to shell out big time for a goalkeeper he pushed out the door …..
HH
Theglasgowcelticway stop being sensible, offering up a perfectly reasonable viewpoint that there are many reasons and unsurprisingly that Neil would put his family first before anything else would be top of the list is crazy…………
Hope you are well
Ernie,
Got it. Your argument is not anything to do with the article just the author. Let’s attack the man brave enlightened to stand up for Neil Lennon. How enlightened and progressive.
Thanks for answering your question to me, but I have not read much of his work. Apologies for my lack of depth.
Lubo.
I can’t see FF wanting to go back to Newcastle.
Oh, and just for clarification ah’m no flouncin’ but the ironing will not do itself ;-)
ps – Rory to make a stunning recovery in today’s BMW Chamionship. Bjorn will blow up (not literally). Rory 12/1.
Funny that my predictive text substituted “enough” for “enlightened”..
mmmm….
My friends in Celtic,
Interesting point about FF going back to Newcastle.
There are some who advocate buying back David Marshall if indeed FF goes.
HH.
lionsroar67
Good to hear from you.Hope to have another “free thinking”(boozy) day out soon.
Lubo
10:40 on 25 May, 2014
Brave?
It’s a mildly controversial, not particularly original piece in an English based broadsheet.
Would Fraser see going back to Newcastle as an opportunity to prove they were wrong to let him go? Or would he rather than another season or two playing in the Champions League before looking for an even bigger more?
I wonder if Imran Ahmad is going to have a chat with George Lethan?
Certainly, if Lethan is having to actively pursue his dues, you can be damned sure there ain’t no money leftover.
I also can’t help but think that had this been any other club, they would have been forced to prove they have the funds. Persistent liars should not be taken at their word.
Gordon_J backing Neil Lennon
10:46 on 25 May, 2014
‘Would Fraser see going back to Newcastle as an opportunity to prove they were wrong to let him go? ‘
####
No.
He would see it as a lack of ambition.
FACT.
jobo
Just finished the ironing myself! Getting the shirts done for the week ahead, chicken marinade made as well. Beats the bitching on here.
Big Fraser is a sharp focused guy, can’t see him returning to a diddy team like Newcastle, upwards and onwards for the Big Man if he leaves Celtic his services may well be in big demand, he’ll be a hard act to follow!
Looking for a CQN or Lisbon anniversary link to today’s winners at the nags?
Howzabout;
Molly Milan 2.05 Kelso 12/1
Fight away boys 4 20 Kelso 14/1
Golden Milan 1 55 uttoxeter 7/2
Midnight Minx 3 00 uttoxeter 4/1
Alwaystheoptimist 4 10 uttoxeter 4/1 ( also runs in green and white hoops)
A 20p Canadian on that lot with a £1 ew accumulator added will bring home just under 30 grand:-)………………………….. Or….lose you £7.20p
Neganon, Awe Naw, Ernie…..best you leave the last selection oot!!
Doctor Whatfor
You might try looking here.
http://www.wealthynation.org/
I think if FF has any ambitions to play for Newcastle he’d see it as happening just before he retires.
Burnley78:
Please tell Kevin his ex bottom flat neighbour said hello por cierto.
GCT
NO worries. Hope you are well after all your scares recently.
MWD says Aye
FF speaking last year
‘I’d like to go back to Newcastle at some point, if the opportunity arises,’ said Forster, who was speaking to BBC’s Late Kick-Off. ‘I’m a Newcastle fan and I’ve got unfinished business there.
‘It was a wrench to leave, it’s my hometown club. But it wasn’t meant to be. I enjoyed my time out on loan and after enjoying playing week in week out it was important I carried on playing. I wanted to be No 1 and it was clear that wasn’t going to happen at Newcastle.
‘Everyone wants to be playing in the Premier League. It’s the place to be.
If MWD was drawn against GCT in TT’s pool competition would that be the start of an OF pool rivalry.
Scotland
September 22, 2005
Imagine there’s no fairness: for Neil Lennon, it’s easy if you try
By Phil Gordon
CONTEMPT: the feeling that a person, or thing, is worthless or beneath consideration
(Oxford English Dictionary)
LOOK UP next year’s edition and you may well see a mugshot of Neil Lennon next to “Contempt”. Or perhaps Lennon will simply be underneath “Kangaroo court”. That is what the Celtic captain has been exposed to over the past few weeks, following his controversial confrontation with Stuart Dougal, the referee, after the the Old Firm match at Ibrox on August 20.
On Tuesday, both men had their day in court — or Scottish football’s version of it. The SFA disciplinary committee at Hampden Park reviewed the incident in which Lennon was shown a straight red card as he left the pitch after the 3-1 defeat by Rangers. It handed out a three-match suspension. That has not been enough for a media lynch mob that had been talking, wildly, in terms of an 11-game ban, or perhaps a cell on Devil’s Island next to Dustin Hoffman.
For anyone who studies these things, it fitted perfectly. It was a punishment to fit the crime. “Misconduct of a significantly serious nature” was the SFA’s verdict. That is swearing at the referee, to you and me. The only problem has been that many newspapers have either never looked again at the incident on television, or simply chosen to ignore the nagging feeling that it was not as bad as it had been hyped up to be, because it got in the way of a good — or in this case, bad — story and steamy headlines.
The most alarming thing to emerge from the Lennon- Dougal affair was the nature of the coverage. If this had been in any other area of the newspapers, other than the sports pages, a lot of it would have been thrown out by the lawyers in case it got the paper into deep trouble.
Perhaps I am just being old-fashioned, or it is the product of too many days spent watching real-life court cases, but the one thing drummed into me by the law professor on the journalism course at City University was beware of contempt of court. In news, business and especially court reporting, you have to get the facts 100 per cent accurate — 98 per cent is not good enough — or else you and your newspaper could find yourself in front of a judge.
Football reporting? Oh, just use your artistic licence. The most commonly used descriptive mistake about Lennon’s confrontation was that he “manhandled” the referee and linesman. Now, according to the Oxford dictionary, “manhandle” is to “move a (heavy) object with great effort or to handle roughly by dragging or pushing”. Anyone who looked at the incident again could see that such a description did not fit what happened at Ibrox. Lennon, in football parlance, may have “lost the plot” but in strict legal terms he and Dougal came shoulder-to-shoulder and there is slight contact with the linesman, James Bee.
The offence was entirely verbal. Dougal’s match report confirms this. The red card was issued because the Celtic captain called him “a f****** disgrace” and “a f****** joke”.
It is misconduct, pure and simple. It was not as serious as the barging of linesman, Andy Davis, last season by Saulius Mikoliunas at Tynecastle. The Heart of Midlothian player did not, as has been commonly reported since Lennon’s incident, suffer an eight-game ban: he received three matches as an instant punishment for his two red cards and his five-match penalty for misconduct was brought down to three on appeal. Not by “the SFA cowards”, as some newspapers have branded the Lennon jury, but by Lord MacLean, an esteemed Law Lord.
Lennon’s three match suspension is a reflection of his disciplinary record since coming to the Premierleague five years ago. Have a guess how many red cards this menace to society has to his name? One. That’s right, his Ibrox crime was his first. Set against men in his line of work, ball-winning midfield players, Lennon would not even get first use of the soap in Alcatraz: Patrick Vieira registered eight at Arsenal, Roy Keane seven at Manchester United.
Anyway, that’s the facts out of the way. Enough of that boring stuff. How come the lynch mob managed to screw it up and watch Lennon get off almost Scot-free? Beats me. They certainly tried hard enough.
In the intervening time since Lennon lost his temper that day at Ibrox and Tuesday’s hearing, this was a man who, if he read the papers — which he does not — would have noted a string of articles that bordered on the litigious. A “backstreet thug” was one gem. It moved out of the realms of reporting and comment on a match, and its aftermath, into open warfare on one man.
Neil Lennon has been demonised by the press. They don’t like him. That is fair enough if it is an individual point of view, but when it is carried into print simply to pursue a campaign, it has unedifying overtones. This opinion, by the way, will be in a minority of one, or almost.
Don’t take my word for it. Ask the former Rangers player who defended Lennon on Tuesday at the SFA. Fraser Wishart, the secretary of the Scottish Professional Footballers’ Union, was not pleading for Lennon because it is his job, he did so because he believes it is right.
Now Wishart finds himself being portrayed in the media as some sort of Uncle Tom or, worse, a Lennon-lover. Not even OJ Simpson’s lawyer had the sort of questionmarks placed against his name that Wishart has.
“One of the things we argued was that you had to take Neil Lennon out of the equation because he is some kind of demonised figure,” Wishart told reporters outside Hampden as he explained his defence strategy. “They (the SFA) also had to forget it was a Rangers-Celtic game and look upon it as an isolated incident.
“One of the interesting facts is that Neil Lennon has never been sent off in the Premierleague and never been suspended. He has never been over the points threshold and that is a remarkable fact for someone who plays his position and the number of games he has played for Celtic. I think that record was taken into consideration and I think three games (ban) is reasonable.”
Hold on, there. We can’t have reasonable creeping into this, can we? Wishart underlined the whole unseemly thirst for blood when he added the name of Ian Wright, who was was banned for two games for pushing Willie Young, the referee, at Kilmarnock. “There have been similar cases over the last five years,” Wishart said, “but the players were not punished to the level that there seemed to be such a clamour for in the case of Neil Lennon.”
Bizarrely, Stuart Dougal turned up at Hampden Park with his own lawyer, for what was an in-house SFA disciplinary meeting. The irony of Dougal and Wishart being on opposite sides is that the players’ union man actually jumped to the defence of the referee in 2004, when the SFA fined Dougal £200 for using the same industrial language as Lennon — television viewers reported the referee for telling Christian Nerlinger of Rangers to “f*** off”. You would have thought this might be one man who would have cut Lennon some slack on a day in which his team had been well and truly beaten by Rangers.
Still, Dougal applied the letter of the law and Lennon was correctly punished for it. The newspapers that have ganged together to pursue Lennon could not claim to be following the letter of the law. They have treated Lennon with contempt in its most literal and legal sense. There is an agenda at work. Selling more newspapers might be one justification, but there appears to be darker motivation.
Newspapers may say that they merely reflect public opinion, but they also try to manipulate it. Unlike someone who has had a bad game, the newspapers’ mistakes are not usually as visibly and publicly denounced, though one former editor now has reason to rue his choice of headline, “Thugs and Thieves”, after unsubstantiated reports about a Celtic team night out in Newcastle turned out be nothing more than allegations.
Dougal and his referee colleagues were yesterday called the most vilified characters in Scottish football, but the truth, however unpalatable, is that that status is reserved for Lennon. There were no banners at Ibrox that day proclaiming Dougal to be a bigot; there was for Lennon. The referee has not been attacked in the street, or in his car; Lennon has. Death threats scrawled on the pavement outside the house? That will be Lennon again.
Helping to create such a public enemy No 1 is irresponsible when merely kept to the confines of a football ground, but when being demonised changes the way you walk down the street, it is time to think again.
Corkcelt
More like infirm. :-)
MWD
For what it’s worth, my take on Neil Lennon leaving is that timing is everything. This time next year we could be debating the Zombies promotion to the Scottish Premier League – how do you think that would appeal to Neil Lennon?
He has had a relatively enjoyable two years free from the bigoted crap that was a part of daily life. In leaving now, he can walk away with his head held high and avoid any nonsense that might be heading his way 12 months down the line.
I wish he had stayed – but can well understand why NOW is the time to leave.
Scotlands Shame won in the end – but at least he has denied them any triumphal moment.
Gary67.
I know this is just a blog, but Forster would be beyond crazy to go to Newcastle, or any other club for that matter, bar one.
He lacks confidence and has only developed since he became comfortable and more confident at Celtic Park.
Now if Lenny, in whatever job he takes, came calling his panacea would be there for him too.
TnT
Best of luck with your Canadian – I have followed you in (e/w four folds & five fold)
Fingers crossed ;-)
Cheers,
BJM
cowiebhoy
09:02 on 25 May, 2014
Hoopy Birthday to your Auld Da…
Keep the Faith!
Hail Hail!
Bjm
Haha…ya mad! Mind you, if these win, no more studying, no more info, good ole fashioned names:-)