Neil Lennon was put through another painful media conference today, scheduled to preview tomorrow’s match with Lille but the visit of the French side barely rated a mention.
The first person to question the Celtic manager brought up the ‘dangerous rhetoric’ in banners outside the Celtic Park barricades, a phrase that Lennon used in his reply.
A number of predictable issues were discussed, much as they have been over the last six or seven weeks as Lennon has tried to explain the depressing run of results that Celtic are enduring.
Apparently the players are all really happy and enjoying training but seem to leave their confidence in the dressing room when they go out for matches.
During a run of 12 matches with just two wins Celtic have kept just one clean sheet with an incredible 17 lost in five Europa League matches. Formations and faces have changed during that sequence but the end result is defensively worse than any other club in the competition.
Towards the end of the conference a question from The Cynic Podcast had Lennon struggling for an answer, with the conference ending at that point in the video released by the club onto You Tube this afternoon.
17 minutes
QUESTION? On 27th of October you said if things start to deteriorat rapidly you would hold your hands up and say that this isn’t working. Can you hand on heart say that things haven’t deteriorated with two wins in 12 games and what can you do that you haven’t already done in this run of results to make sure that it doesn’t become 13 tomorrow night?
Neil Lennon: Em, good question. Look as of tomorrow night we are going to use the squad. I look at aspects of our play, Milan for example, for a long period in the game we were very, very good, we just let ourselves down with individual lapses. I think that it is confidence more than anything else with the players. They went into the game again at the weekend and there is a bit of anxiety there in their play in the final third.
Once they get a feel for the game and start flowing I think that we will be absolutely fine and start reigning things back in. It’s not been a quick fix, I just think that they have to work themselves and we have to work them through it. And come up with solutions, particularly in the final third where we have so much of the ball.
I didn’t think that we crossed the ball quickly enough or early enough or enough in the first half against St Johnstone at the weekend so that’s something that we need to improve on. And obviously take our chances when they come, we had good chances- Odsonne, Rogic with the header. And just when you are going through a run like that it may take a set-play, it may take a deflection, it may take an own goal even just to get our noses in front and it will settle everyone down.
We had @DavFlan at today’s presser. He asked Neil Lennon about the deterioration at the club and what he can do to fix it that he hasn’t already done.
The full unedited press conference audio ia available in the form of the Press Gang podcast.
Subscribe??https://t.co/1GcXoqZU5t pic.twitter.com/0Nv3prdsmi
— The Cynic (@90MinuteCynic) December 9, 2020