Neil Lennon still backs Martin O’Neill for top club
The Hibernian manager played for O’Neill at both Leicester and Celtic and speaks in glowing terms of the Ireland boss under whom he won nine league and cup titles.
Lennon dismissed any suggestion O’Neill, 65, is a managerial ‘dinosaur’, insisting his tactical knowhow is up to scratch — something that often lags behind his motivational skills when outsiders assess the Derry man’s abilities.
O’Neill frequently made Lennon, the player, feel ‘10ft tall’, but the former Celtic midfielder is not so sure today’s young professionals could handle the dressing down O’Neill was also more than capable of dishing out.
“Does he have a stern side? Frightening,” Lennon said, blowing out his cheeks. “I don’t want to talk ill of him, but it was just his way. He demanded very high standards. He demanded from you and he demanded from you, and if you weren’t delivering he would be quick in telling you. I’ve seen him lose it.
“The first time was my first game and he was being nice to me — ‘I’m delighted you’re here, great player...’ Then at half-time I saw this other side to him. I thought, ‘Bloody hell, what have I signed up for here?’ But he just got you bang at it all the time. When you did well he made you feel fantastic as well. I look at young players now coming through and I’m not sure some of them could handle that because socially they are different. They are a different generation.
“This generation coming through, they’re technophiles. They are on Twitter... they don’t communicate. I talk to young players now and every answer is monosyllabic. ‘How you doing?’ ‘Alright.’ ‘How’s your family?’ ‘Good.’
“But put a phone in front of them and they’ll write War and Peace on it. You need to communicate out there.“
Lennon learned this the hard way as Hibs hit a run of bad form last season on the way to promotion from the Scottish Championship.
“At one stage last year I said I was being too hard on them, I’m too demanding of them because I was losing them,” he said. “So I decided just to lay off them a little bit and it seemed to work. Then I realised that not every generation is like ours or the generation before us or the generation after. But there is still a time and a place to dig people out.
“Martin didn’t do it all the time. When it was required, when we needed it, he was quick in coming forward. What did they call him and Roy — bad cop and even badder cop? I would say there is a nice balance there. There’d be a fear and respect there, and that fear keeps the players on their toes, which is a good thing.”
O’Neill and Roy Keane will need to be at their best over the next five days with their 2018 World Cup hopes at stake.
Ireland don’t have the talent available to him that O’Neill had at Celtic, but Lennon is impressed with how competitive the country has been since qualifying for Euro 2016.
“Martin could still work in the Premier League,” he said. “Ireland are sitting joint top in a very difficult group with Wales, Austria, and Serbia.
“The result they got in Serbia, I thought, was fantastic against a very good side. They are unbeaten in the group and, to be fair, he has had a lot of injuries to contend with.
“And you have lost Robbie Keane. Robbie Keane guaranteed goals and that is a huge loss at any level. Brendan [Rodgers] took Liverpool to second, almost won the league. They sold Luis Suarez the next year and finished fourth or fifth. Brendan wasn’t a different manager, he didn’t become a worse manager overnight; he just lost a world-class player.
“Ireland have lost that in Robbie Keane and yet they are still in a very, very strong position in the group and that is down to good management rather than anything else.”
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