Just to be clear, this isn’t designed to support or criticise Neil Lennon as a manager, but he’s just made it so much easier for the board to get rid of him if they were looking for an excuse.
Celtic went out of the Champions League to Ferencvaros for a number of reasons last week, but deciding to play at home without a recognised striker against a team who are going to get behind the ball was proven to be an awful decision.
Lenny talked about players not being fit and multiple other excuses, but he had strikers on the bench so that doesn’t really wash – clearly he thought he was being tactically clever and was massively found out.
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The best managers are always willing to learn and adapt their system to help the team win – insecure and incompetent managers will be stubborn to try and prove they were right, so selecting the exact same team against Motherwell is very worrying.
Due to the postponed fixtures Celtic are already a long way behind albeit with the games in hand, but it means they need to win convincingly to close the gap and get the season back on track.
Today’s bench does feature Ajeti and Klimala again so this is absolutely Lenny’s decision to persevere with the same system that lost to the Hungarian side last week.
If Celtic win today then he might feel some vindication for his methods, but anything other than a win is going to heap an almighty amount of pressure on the boss.
Most fans will understand that they can’t win every game and bad performances will happen, but if it happens after someone has put their ego ahead of the team then it becomes a serious problem.
