Celtic chase 'treble treble' as Neil Lennon and Craig Levein renew acquaintances

Together, Neil Lennon and Craig Levein have been employed in professional football for a total of 71 years, yet the pair – who will face each across the Celtic and Hearts dugouts in Saturday's William Hill Scottish Cup final at Hampden Park – could scarcely present a greater contrast between the haves and have-nots of the sport. Lennon, who first played for Glenavon in 1986 and who is now in his second spell in charge of Celtic, can boast two League Cup winners’ medals with Leicester City and 17 honours with the Parkhead club, including four Scottish Cup successes as a player and two as manager.

Not only would victory give the 47-year-old a fifth tournament win, it would see Celtic confirm an unprecedented third successive clean sweep of domestic honours – the fabled treble treble. For Levein, it will be the latest chapter of a 38-year career that began in 1981 with Cowdenbeath and saw him play for 14 years at Tynecastle, before managerial stints in charge of the same two teams, as well as Leicester City, Raith Rovers, Dundee United and Scotland, prior to his return to Hearts as director of football and then manager once more.

Remarkably, a Hearts triumph against the odds would represent the 54-year-old’s first ever honour, a barren fact which, when raised inevitably during his pre-final press conference at Hampden, evoked a laconic and self-deprecating response.

“Well,” he said, “we’ve got a single single to go for…”

It is sobering to reflect that there was concern last September that Levein’s time in football might have come to an end, when he was admitted to the coronary care unit of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary after a suspected heart attack. “At the time it was a big thing but I feel good and it doesn’t really come into my mind at all now,” he said.

“This is more about the football and I have had enough years of striving to get to this position to actually enjoy the build-up and everything about it. You become involved in the game in order to have moments like this.

“I’ve come close a few times in the past but this is another great opportunity. It’s kept the season going for us. I’m excited and I can sense that the players are as well.

“However, I don’t feel under pressure. I have felt pressure before at Hampden but this is different. It’s big for me but also for most of the players who haven’t won silverware and who are coming up against a team which is used to collecting trophies.”

Despite steering Hearts to a top-six league finish, plus a Scottish League Cup semi-final and the Scottish Cup final, some persistent critics among the Tynecastle support have used their manager for online target practice. Meanwhile, although the arc of Lennon’s accomplishment entirely exceeds that of Levein, the Northern Irishman has also been subject to social media criticism which, in the way of the unrestrained tenor of such forums, has verged on vituperation.

“I quit Twitter years ago and all the other stuff because it’s just not important anymore,” Lennon said. “It’s not real. There are things on there that can be interesting and there are things on there that are personal and really not appropriate.”

Like Levein, Lennon has savoured the build-up to Hampden. “I’m enjoying it. All the pressure for me was on winning the league - that was really important,” he said.

“Now we have the huge bonus of being in the final. I’m calm. I’ve learned a lot in the four years I’ve been away. I’ve also learned not to engage in false news, noise, rumours - all that stuff. There is a lot of that in this day and age.”

During Lennon’s two and a half years with Hibs, Levein was installed on the other side of Edinburgh and the pair crossed swords verbally, most notably when the Hearts manager said that a derby victory for his team in the Scottish Cup had helped ‘restore the natural order’. Lennon, though, expressed admiration for his opposite number when he said: “Craig was so good he became his country’s national manager.

“He has had longevity. It is amazing he hasn’t won a trophy. He won’t mind me saying it, but I hope that continues this weekend.

“I like him a lot as a guy. He is spiky in the media, which is good and he has a sense of humour.

“He brought some really good players into Hearts at the start of the season. You could see that from the start that they made but they have had desperate injuries - look at Olly Lee last week. It has been really bad luck. To lose Souttar, Berra, Ikpeazu, Naismith - you can’t recover from that really.”

Hearts’ casualty list and failure to win a game since the Scottish Cup semi-final has tipped the bookies’ odds markedly against them. “And that’s dangerous,” said Lennon. Recollecting Celtic’s 1-0 loss at Tynecastle under Brendan Rodgers last August, Lennon added: “It’s a one-off game. You have to get things right on the day.’

“They are a big strong team, they press you quite high, they make it very difficult to play football. Hampden is different because it’s a big wide-open pitch and I hope it will suit our game more than Tynecastle would.”

Levein also took a pragmatic view of the imbalance in strength. “I don’t have any problem saying things will need to go our way in this game to give us the best chance of winning,” he said. “We have to make few mistakes or no mistakes but you can’t control everything. As much as we need to play really well, we will need other things to go in our favour.”

The suggestion that Hearts’ best hope would be to get the first goal prompted another Levein drollery.

“I’m confident that if we score more than them, we’ll be okay…”