Craig Swan of the Daily Record has hit out at the media hysteria over Celtic’s recent results.
After a run of two home defeats and a draw Neil Lennon faced a media conference on Tuesday to promote Sunday’s Scottish Cup semi-final against Aberdeen.
There was little mention of the game against Derek McInnes’ side as the Celtic boss took the media to task on a number of issues.
Two newspapers had run polls on whether Neil Lennon should be sacked while the Celtic boss called out Kris Sutton for describing Shane Duffy as a bombscare.
Lennon’s string defence became the biggest talking point of the day with Swan having his say on the Record’s Celtic Podcast:
I think that some of the criticism of the team has been way over the top. I don’t think anyone would say that Celtic are performing brilliantly, no one is suggesting that. Neil Lennon himself said it that Celtic haven’t hit the heights this season
The way some of the stuff has been showcased over the past 10 or 11 days. If you take each game in isolation Celtic lost an awful lot of players due to injury and the virus situation going into the Rangers game. Everybody accepts that the performance against Rangers was way below the levels that Celtic would expect but the heart had been ripped out of the team.
It’s been discussed many times before, there’s no need to go over it again. Then AC Milan followed that- it was AC Milan- people seem to just pour that performance on top of the Rangers performance but they were playing a team that hadn’t been beaten since returning from Lockdown, who are top of Serie A with guys like Ibrahimovic.
Celtic were OK in the game second half, they didn’t play great in the first half. In the second half they showed signs that they were coming to life but they lost a late goal. If you take that in isolation that’s not a disastrous result by any means.
Aberdeen on Sunday. A lot better attacking wise, a lot more intent to the team. A couple of cracking goals scored, they made mistakes defensively, no one is attempting to dress that up, I don’t think that anyone inside the Celtic camp has dressed it up.
But as Neil Lennon pointed out in his press conference Celtic are two points worse off than they were this time last year. Celtic have dropped four points outside of the Old Firm game. Rangers have dropped four points in games outside the Old Firm game.
The gap between the two teams at the moment if you take away the game in hand is the fact that Rangers won the Derby match when Celtic had half a team missing.
That’s the difference at the moment yet the perception is that Rangers are playing wonderful stuff and absolutely flying and Celtic are utter garbage which is just not right.
Celtic will have Nir Bitton and Odsonne Edouard available to face Lille tonight but neither player is likely to be in the starting XI.
After tonight’s match the hoops have another demanding run of fixtures across three competitions- Aberdeen (Scottish Cup), Sparta Prague (Europa League) and Motherwell SPFL.
