Neil Lennon remembers the moment in 1990 like it was yesterday.
He had an end-of-season meeting planned with boss Howard Kendall to discuss his future at Manchester City.
The 19-year-old, who’d been at the club for three years and impressed, thought it was going to go one way. Kendall had other ideas.
“Howard had come in and replaced Mel Machin as manager. Mel had got us promoted out of the Second Division and then Howard had arrived the following season to steady the ship in the First Division,” Lennon recalls.
“At that point, I felt I was flying and doing well.
“And then Howard said, ‘This is the time of the year when we give you good news or we give you bad news,’ and he said, ‘Unfortunately, it’s bad news for you’.
“I thought ‘wow’. I certainly didn’t see that one coming. Obviously then I left. I was devastated at the time, but I got a good deal with Crewe and that changed everything for me career-wise.
“Then five years later I was on holiday in Mallorca with a couple of the Leicester lads and Howard was sitting at a bar and shouted across, ‘Oi young Lennon, come over here and have a drink with me’.
“He put an arm around me and said, ‘I made a big mistake with you’. That was a nice touch. He didn’t have to do that.
“It ended up in disappointment at having to leave City, obviously, but I look back now and understand it was just a football decision.”
Lennon was taken by surprise and no wonder given what he would himself call a ‘meteoric rise’ from the youth set-up to the first team fringes.
He'd arrived in Manchester in 1987 from Lurgan in County Armagh after starring in the final of the Milk Cup for Glenavon Select.
City scout Peter Neill was impressed with what he saw and invited Lennon over for a trial alongside fellow Irish hopefuls Gerry Taggart, Steve Lomas and Michael Hughes.
Lennon settled well into life at City and felt positive about the future as he began to take his formative steps in the game.
“I joined City in November 1987 after trials at Platt Lane. I did my YTS, a youth scheme which was a two-year apprenticeship, and my coaches were Glyn Pardoe and Tony Book,” Lennon added.
“I couldn’t have had a better football education than the one I had with those two. They were unreal. What a partnership they were!
“The stuff I learned under them would be the stuff I’m still coaching now.
“We had a really good team, too. We had the likes of Paul Warhurst, Jason Beckford, Ashley Ward, Mike Sheron.
“We got to the final of the FA Youth Cup in 1989. Paul Lake’s group had won it a couple of years before and then we got to the final and, unfortunately, we lost to Watford in extra time.
“But we had a great group of players – and importantly we had an unbelievable football education behind us.
“It was about how to pass properly, when to pass it, important game decisions and it’s stood the test of time.
“Tony Book would get me in the gym and batter balls at me all afternoon to work on my touch and passing. It was hours on end.
“He didn’t have to do it, but he saw something in me that maybe some other people didn’t. I had a brilliant time, an absolutely brilliant time.”
Lennon was enjoying it on the pitch but he loved life off it, too, in Manchester.
As a young apprentice, he was put up ‘in digs’ with the Duckett family from Heaton Chapel when he arrived in England and he reminisces fondly about the love they showed him, calling them ‘great people’.
“Yes, it was a culture shock coming to Manchester. But it opened my eyes to the world,” said Lennon.
“I was a wee boy from Lurgan. The day I arrived, I remember I travelled overnight. I got the ferry from Belfast to Liverpool. It was 10 hours back in the day. Then a coach to Manchester at 4am in the morning. By the time, I got to the bed and breakfast it was pitch black.
“Then I woke up and had to ask the landlady where Maine Road was. She told me. I thanked her.
“Then I had the shock of my life. It was a bright explosion of sights and sounds – and I loved it.
“I was in digs with a lovely, lovely family called the Ducketts. They were brilliant with me.
“Do you remember the programme called ‘Bread’? It was like that. You had Len who was the landlord, then you had Jackie his wife and then the two grown-up daughters.
“Everyone put the money in the kitty at the end of the week for the shopping.
“I was very lucky to have great people looking after me there – and then at the club on the football side of things, I settled into life as an apprentice.
“It was a brilliant adventure. You’d meet so many amazing characters, whether it was big Bernard [Halford] who was the secretary, Ken Barnes or the first team players who you’d seen on the TV. It was just incredible.
Lennon went on to have an incredible career in the game.
As a player, after a solid spell at Alex, he joined Leicester City in February 1996 and won promotion to the Premier League three months later in the Play-off Final at Wembley.
He enjoyed more success at Filbert Street, winning two League Cups in 1997 and 2000 under boss Martin O’Neill who went on to sign Lennon for Celtic in December 2000.
That season saw Lennon pick-up three winner's medals as Celtic swept to a domestic treble, winning the Scottish Premier League, Scottish Cup and Scottish League Cup.
In total as a player at Parkhead, he won five Scottish Premier League titles, four Scottish Cups, two Scottish League Cups as well as being an integral part of the Celtic side that reached the UEFA Cup final in 2003.
As you can see, he enjoyed great success as a combative midfielder – but he started his career at City as a full-back.
Did the likeable Irishman see his future career in the centre ground even in those early years at Maine Road?
“I always thought I could be a midfield player,” he reflects.
“When I was at City I played right back and left back.
“The coaching you got made the game easy for you, wherever you played. Obviously at full-back you can see the whole pitch which is great. When I went to Crewe, they saw that I could play in the centre, probably because of the education I got at City.
“I was really good on the ball, could manipulate the ball in tight areas and I was a strong passer of the ball too and a good tackler.
“So, I developed into a good midfield player. But there were some really good midfield players at City so playing full-back was no problem at that moment in time.”
Despite the sadness of saying goodbye to City those 33 years ago, Lennon’s chief emotion when looking back is happiness for the time he spent learning his trade at such a welcoming club.
“I look back so fondly at my time at City. I am so grateful. They gave me a platform to go and have the career that I had,” he says.
“The ability to consistently pass the ball well came from those formative years at City. It was all about passing at the club, two-touch, I rarely would have taken more than two or three touches if I could avoid it.
“That was drummed into me at City with Tony [Book] and Glyn [Pardoe]. Then under Howard [Kendall] it was all about pass appreciation - the weight of the pass, your decision making in certain areas.
“He used to say: ‘It’s not about a short ball or a long ball, it’s about the right ball at the right time’.
“It’s little things like that which stick with you throughout your whole career. My time at City was the making of me.
“Off the pitch, I grew up at a time when the Manchester scene was exploding. The city was buzzing.
“It was the place to be for music. And then, with football, you had City v United.
“You’d have Noel Gallagher and Liam Gallagher drinking in the local pub and I became friends with the likes of Craig Cash and Sally Lindsay. They were happy times.
“The Mancunian humour is very, very special. My formative years and teenage years were in a special city at a special time.”
After his spell on the pitch where he won multiple honours, Lennon moved into coaching where he, again, enjoyed enormous success, especially back at Celtic Park.
During two spells as boss of his beloved Bhoys, he won five more Scottish League Championship titles, four Scottish Cups and one League Cup.
He knows how demanding and difficult the job is and has the utmost respect for current incumbent Pep Guardiola.
Lennon, who still follows the fortunes of his former club, insists that Guardiola is a ‘trendsetter’ on the pitch.
“Pep is one of the greatest managers of all-time – if not the greatest!” he declares.
“Whenever his Barcelona team were on the TV, you just couldn’t help but watch them. They were mesmerising.
“I got to manage against them the year after Pep left when his assistant Tito Vilanova was in charge. Everything that Pep had put in place was still there.
“That 2010/11 team was the best club side I’ve ever seen. However, when you look at what he did at Bayern Munich and what he’s doing now at City, the bar has been raised so high over the last few years.
“There have been challenges from Liverpool and now Arsenal domestically, but Pep just seems to find a way. There’s a method to what he’s doing and how he’s doing it, and the players are on board.
“He's tough as teak, too. People don’t realise that about him. He’s a huge character and he has to manage huge personalities, but you never hear any stories of unrest. He can be tough when he wants to be, and I love that about him.
“And the way he plays the game, he brings in innovative ideas. Look at the inverted full-back, for example, where John Stones goes and plays in midfield.
“He’s reinventing a way of playing which I’m sure a lot of other teams will plagiarise in the next few years.
“That’s what he does – he’s a trendsetter.
“But, not only that, he also wins. That’s the bottom line – he wins. He wins with a style that everyone can’t help but be complimentary about.”
By Paul Brown
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