LENNON, LENNON - BEST OF LUCK! (or something which rhymes with that, anyway)

It’s been a day for the departures of combative, ginger midfielders who so many have loved to hate.

Alan Ball, England World Cup-winner and “Jimmy Clitheroe” to Slim Jim Baxter when we humiliated the World Champions at Wembley, almost 40 years ago to the week, has truly departed.

He was the youngest member of the most famous team to wear the three lions on their chest and it’s sad to see anyone leaving this world as young as 61. Part of the greatest Everton midfield of all time, the Toffee’s 1970 Championship-winning side, a mainstay at Arsenal and the engine room of England’s greatest ever team - a real legend and a real loss.

Neil Lennon, of course, is far from dead, no matter what some cowardly gits in Northern Ireland might have wished on the man. The Celtic captain is calling it quits at Parkhead and moving to pastures newer but less green.

Why mention “Lenny” on a Rangers blog? Well, apart from anything else, I think the guy’s been the most influential player in the short history of the SPL and his leaving our main rivals will have a major impact on ourselves as a footballing entity - even if I can’t quite decide what that impact will be:

I was always more afeared of Hartson and Sutton than Larsson but the sneaky Swede is probably the greatest player in the near-decade of Scotland’s re-vamped top flight. However, Lennon came in half-way through O’Neill’s first championship and has been at the heart of what many Celtic fans apparently now think should have been 7-in-a-row so far (aye, well, yese would still be six short of beating the TWELVE-in-a-row we “should” have made it but for the stupid loss at home to Killie at the end of 1997/1998!! Naw? No havin that? OF COURSE, yer noh - because there is no “should” or “could” in league titles. Ye win it or ye don’t - a goal short of the title is as relevant as 40 points short).

Lennon has bridged the gap between O’Neill’s side and Strachan’s side. He was clarly one of the defectors trying to get sent off when we did Strachan’s shambling squad 3-1 in his first Old Firm game. But unlike Hartson and Sutton and Thompson, Lennon came round to his fellow squat ginger and, again, provided Celtic with the nouse and nastiness required by any title-winning team.

Had he stayed, as was his due for helping them to five titles, three Scottish and two CIS Cups and a European final, the myopics in the Parkhead stands he tried to bottle after we did them last time out may well have lost the plot with him, especially when we go ahead in the title race next season. This would have led to him imploding and, hopefully to Celtic imploding altogether.

I’ve yet to discover if Strachan’s petulance with reporters and the like is a cunning mask - a tactic designed to take the attention off his players. I’ve yet to dscover it because, frankly, the little prick’s been so far ahead of us in the SPL the last two seasons we’ve never seen him under real presure.

But if Strachan is the huff-meister he appears and Lennon had stayed on with his legs getting wearier and his head getting hotter, it could have suited The Teds Big Time.

On the other hand, if Lennon’s the tactical and inspirational genius I think he is, maybe he’d have scraped another great season out his old legs and booted Strachan’s side onto three-in-a-row. Gravesen certainly seemed a far better prospect than Lennon, as did Roy Keane. But both of them went by the wayside while Lennon stayed at the helm.

Of course, the other reason we have to consider Lennon’s departure - and I hope his Scottish Cup Final swansong is another Hampden sending off as his team get leathered by The Pars - is the catalyst he provided for all that is small-minded and evil … about CELTIC FANS!

O’Neill used him to deflect criticism of his football failure during one Ragers Old Firm victory and Lennon often used his own reputation as a “man with psychological demons” to act like a spoiled wean irresponsible wean. Sptting on a Rangers scarf at the Copland Road Stand - can you imagine if Bob Malcolm had spat on a green-and-white shite rag at the Jock Stein End of The Piggerry??!! We simply laughed that day and that was what most annoyed O’Neill, Lennon and the subject-changers in the Brommloan Road Stand. It got to the point where plater and manager, having just been played off the pitch, were back on that Ibrox pitch at the end, milking some sort of imagined moral high-ground applause for invented wrongs.

And the Celtic fans singularly failed to see they were being had that day, having their age-old hang-ups exploited by two non-Scots worried that the result night become the main story of the day. Rangers players trying to take a corner at Parkhead are bombarded but still it’s Rangers - calmly allowing Celtic players and management to waltz all over our pitch at the wind-up after the game - who’re the nasty conspiratorial overlords. Lennon was the subject of a truly horrendous campaign against him leading his country - but it seemed to make him more determned to incite crowds which could very well contain the very nutters he and his family were threatned by. Yet, all the time, the complete passivity of the Gers crowd with relation to such dearnged harranguing of our players, the match officials and our good selves, was never appreciated.

Did Ragers fans dislike Lennon particularly because he was a Catholic Ulsterman? No doubt, for some of us, that sadly helped. But, in an example of a phenomenon which has slowly increased in frequency over the last twenty years (or is it just since we signed Maurice Johnston?!!), hysterical, near-lustful desireous claims of Sectarianism seemed to be coming from the Celtic fans while we, and most other fans of Non-Old Firm clubs, celebrated that age-old football habit of slating a dirty, narky, TALENTED midfielder.

Lennon likes putting his head above the parapets and ye have to admire that. The reason I think he’s underrated as a player is because so much of what he did was appreciated only by team-mates and his managers. I remember him getting almost no touches of the ball in one Old Firm game at Ibrox - because he was marking Ronald De Boer. So many Rangers fans tought we’d been “unlucky” (what the fuck does that even MEAN??!!) because our Dutch genius seemed to have so much time on the ball yet we lost the game. But Lennon simply stayed goal-side of Ronnie all game - never diving in to be suckered but just keeping our most gifted player out of harm’s way. Celtic won 2-0.

But Lennon also knows when to kop a booking and turn, for example, a footballing exhibition by a young Hibs team this season, into a quagmire of petulance and gamesmanship which HE knew how to deal with but the opposing youths did not. By the end of this Easter Road game, Celtic were playing the football and securing a draw with a 2-goal comeback. In such pivotal ways, Lennon has dictated the pace of a season, never mind one game.

But the dirty, grafting side of his play - which I totally admire - would overspill into his personality when things were getting beyond him. He behaved like a ned at times but we’ve had plenty such players at Ibrox - if they do the job, all well and good. the problem with Lennon was it all soon became part of the imagined Masonic conspiracy and, with the Celtic support, he was playing to the right audience.

In the end, even that audience has turned against him (What chance have ye got at an Old Firm club if a player with Lennon’s achievements is the kind of guy getting abuse from his own??!!) but, at a push, I’ll venture to say it’s a good day for Rangers both on and off the field when he leaves Parkhead. If we do them at brox in May it’ll be the first time he’s gone a whole season without winning in Govan - that, to me, makes it self-evident why we have to be happy.

More than that, though, we’ll now be allowed to go back to despising Celtic players in the way we all despised Willie Miller when he and Aberdeen (not “Catholic-Deen” - ABERdeen!) were shafting us for Championships every other season and, say, Alan Ball was despised by Scotland fans in the sixties and seventies: It’s just part of the theatre and something every football fan does. Personally, I never wanted to give Lennon the attention from the stands and, personally, I actually don’t really think we’ll ever again be allowed to hate a Celtic player without it being labelled “bigotry”. After all, if it isn’t Celtic might have realise they’re just another Football Club.

So goodbye and fuck off to the man who started so much shite!

That so many Rangers fans despised you is a compliment to your footbaling skills, young Neilly. I mean, Anton Rogan was a Northern Irish international player and a Catholic - and, I’m tellin ye, we Bears fucking LOVED him!!

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Published:
04.25.07 / 8pm
Category:
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