Alan Thompson has relived the incident in May 2012 that was the beginning of the end of his Celtic career.
In the summer of 2010 the former hoops midfielder gave up his job coaching the Newcastle reserve side to return to Celtic alongside Neil Lennon, Johan Mjallby and Gary Parker.
Thompson was on the front line with Lennon every step of the way. Through turbulent Glasgow derbies in their first season in management, at Tynecastle when the Irishman was attacked by a Hearts fan and at Hampden when Motherwell were beaten to win the Scottish Cup.
In October 2011 Lennon was on the brink of resigning as Celtic trailed 3-0 away to Kilmarnock but by the turn of the year they had turned around a 15 point deficit. The next time Celtic were at Rugby Park they were watching a 6-0 title party.
Lennon and Thompson seemed the ideal partnership, two former players in coaching that were as driven as they were as players under Martin O’Neill.
Neither of the duo were saints off the pitch, Thompson was serving a drink driving ban when the title was clinched but nothing prepared him for the showdown that was coming with his long term friend.
Serialising his book A Geordie Bhoy, The Sun reports:
We’d just won the league in May 2012 and everything was going swimmingly well — or so I thought! I had no idea that just weeks later I would be out the door at Celtic after only two years on the management staff.
There’d been a few issues with myself away from the club which were well publicised in the media but nothing that I thought was worth me being fired. Looking back at it now, there were signs that I should have seen something like that coming.
One day I remember particularly was Lenny coming into the coaching office to see me at Lennoxtown Training Centre. ‘Tommo, can I have a word please?’, Lenny asks out of the blue. It sounded all rather serious considering we were best mates but, of course, I told him he could.
Lenny then comes out with, ‘Tommo, I’ve been asked from certain people above me to ask you this, although I already know the answer. I have to ask you if you are taking drugs?’.
Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather as he went on to say certain members of the Celtic board had heard I was taking cocaine. Anyone who knows me will tell you the answer to that.
I told Lenny straight that I was offended he’d even asked me that. Then I told him to ring downstairs to the doctors and I’d take every single drug test in the world. I told him that even though I was petrified of injections, the club could take whatever they wanted from my body to test.
If I never see my three kids again, I have never touched any drugs in my life! Regarding Lenny asking me that, I considered it as him putting a chink in our friendship. I also didn’t like the way he did it in the manager’s office, it was all too official. As a friend, he could have asked me away from Celtic.
It seems a very strange move for Celtic to get Lennon to ask that question of his long term friend and first team coach. A formal HR procedure should have been in place, whatever the outcome of the conversation the relationship between the two men was clearly never going to be the same again.
CLICK HERE for Thompson dismissed by Celtic on 4 June 2012.