Lennon quashes conspiracy theory

Celtic captain Neil Lennon moved to quash any conspiracy theories ahead of their crucial Bank of Scotland Premier League match against Hearts on Wednesday.

The Hoops, 17 points clear at the top of the table, just need a victory over the second-placed Jambos at Celtic Park to win back the championship from rivals Rangers.

However, the Tynecastle club will grab a Champions League spot over the chasing Ibrox men if they stay in second place.

Rangers closed the gap behind Hearts to just three points on Sunday with an impressive 4-1 win over Dundee United at Tannadice.

Some Hoops fans, confident the title will eventually arrive at Celtic Park at some point in the last seven matches of the season, have indicated in radio and newspaper phone-ins they would not mind their favourites being beaten by the Gorgie side in order to help deprive the Ibrox men of a Champions League spot for next season.

But the Irishman had a firm message to those Parkhead supporters, saying: “Put that to the back of your heads, it’s just nonsense.

“If we get beat then the conspiracy theories will start but we want to get the league done and dusted as quickly as we can whether we do Rangers a favour [or not].

“We still have to play Rangers after the league splits into two so we might do Hearts a favour then. But we are only focusing on our performances. Nobody has done us favours over the years so we are not looking at it like that at all.”

The former Leicester midfielder, who arrived in Glasgow in 2000, claims the Parkhead men have not received due credit for their achievements since the day he joined the Hoops.

In 2003 Rangers won the title on the last day of the season with a goal difference of one and last year the loss of two late goals at Motherwell on the last day deprived the Parkhead men of another title.

But as he looked forward to picking up his fourth championship medal a clearly irritated Lennon said: “Let me tell you something, I don’t think we’ve had the credit we deserve in the last five or six years since I’ve been here.

“But for one goal (in 2003) and four minutes at the end of last season we could have been looking at six championships in a row.

“So the consistency the players have shown since I’ve been here has been nothing short of top class.

“There has been a lot of transitional changes over the course of the season and I think we’ve coped brilliantly because it’s not easy being a success here.

“That [lack of credit] makes us more determined to succeed, of course, it’s an added incentive but the players here are driven and it’s been like that since day one.

“Martin O’Neill bedded that in and Gordon Strachan has just carried it on. Any time you win the title it is an achievement and despite what people have said about it being a poor league this season, that doesn’t wash with me whatsoever.

“It’s basically down to great performances by individual players and collectively as a team. And what the manager has achieved over the last eight or nine months has been not so short of brilliant.”

Lennon admits, however, he is puzzled as to why Strachan, unlike his Irish predecessor, has found it so hard to win over the Celtic fans.

He said: “Maybe because they say that he’s not a ’Celtic man’, I don’t know. But you are never going to please all the people all the time.

“We’ve had a couple of blips but that happens over the course of the season. We are on the edge of something special. As I say, we are three points away from the championship and hopefully nothing will stop us – and it will have been won in the true Celtic way.”