‘He’s one of the greatest I’ve worked with’ says Ledley

ALL the Celtic squad are behind manager Neil Lennon and want him to stay at the club, according to Joe Ledley.

The Welsh international was one of the few players absolved of criticism by Lennon after the 0-0 draw with Hibernian, but said that he, in common with his team-mates, had to ask himself searching questions about Saturday’s performance.

“We want him to stay,” the midfielder said in response to speculation linking Lennon with the vacancy at Leicester City. “He’s a great manager, and we all want to try and win things for him and ourselves.

“It’s hard when he’s getting criticism, when he’s brought all us players in. We just have to keep working hard and try to get back on track.

“He is one of the greatest managers I have worked with, and we want to keep him here. I think he still believes in us as players. We want to keep him here because he is a great manager and everyone believes in him.

“You look at your own performance and try and work on improvements. We can all do that today and see what we did wrong.

“We’ll have a meeting about it, but I think we all know what happened. We didn’t create enough chances, not even a corner, so we need to get more shots off and work on that.”

With Celtic having beaten Hibs 4-1 in the League Cup just three days earlier, Ledley added that inconsistency was one obvious problem for his club. “I don’t know how we can go from playing so well on Wednesday to not playing well today. We’ve missed out on two points,” he added.

“Obviously, you have to give credit to Hibs for shutting up shop and making it hard for us to break them down. Maybe, on another day, we could have got through, but they counter-attacked well on us, too.

“We’re all hurting. Things aren’t going our way just now, so we need to try and work things out and get back on track. There is a big distance to Rangers, and we need to sort it out. There are a lot of games to go, so we need to keep working and fighting hard.”

A dozen points adrift of Rangers and three points behind Motherwell, Celtic go to Fir Park on Sunday in need of a win, according to Ledley, who thinks his team cannot afford to draw any more games, never mind lose them.

“We need to go [to Motherwell] and get three points. A draw is not good enough,” he said.

“It’s the same from now until the end of the season. We need to go and battle and get three points every game.

“We know it’s going to be difficult, but we need to work harder as a team and go out there and perform better. We still have to play Rangers a few times, so we have to win every game and get our form back to what it was.”