WHEN Neil Lennon voluntarily offers up the view that “people will say it’s a backwards step” then you can be sure it is something he has thought long and hard about himself. Four years on from defeating Barcelona in the Champions League and just two years after leading Celtic to a third successive Scottish title, Lennon finds himself now in charge of a team whose commitments over the coming season will include trips to such esteemed venues as Somerset Park in Ayr and Dumbarton’s Cheaper Insurance Direct Stadium. When those fixtures come around it will seem an awful long way from the Camp Nou.

After leading Celtic into the knock-out phase of the Champions League, Lennon must have thought he had ensured he would one day have his pick of prime managerial vacancies down south. If English chief executives and chairmen saw winning the Scottish title on a par with lifting the Vanarama Conference, then they would surely be more impressed with progression in Europe. And yet, when the time came to leave Celtic, Lennon’s best offer was Bolton Wanderers, an English Championship club. And, as he would later find out, a Championship club with major financial problems. A new challenge soon became a fire-fighting exercise and after two seasons of it, Lennon had had enough.

The setback damaged his reputation, fairly or otherwise, and now he finds himself having to establish his credentials once again. The initial surprise upon hearing he was being linked with Hibernian was quickly countered with the obvious question: where else was he going to go? There were offers to move abroad that would have been more lucrative but lacked appeal. English clubs were always going to be wary given what had transpired at Bolton, while in Scotland there were only a handful of suitable opportunities. He was linked with a return to Celtic before Brendan Rodgers emerged as a candidate, Rangers was an obvious non-starter, and Hearts and Aberdeen had no vacancies to fill. Hibs, although heading into a third season outside of the top division, remain a large, well-structured club, and a good cultural fit for the Northern Irishman. There will be an element of slumming it at some of the less appealing destinations in Scottish football – as there was for Ally McCoist and his successors at Rangers over the past four years – but for Lennon it seems the ideal environment in which to restore his reputation.

“I don’t want to use this as a stepping stone,” he said. “I want to build this club up and see where it takes my career. People will say it’s a backwards step but I was looking at Brian Clough’s career. He had 44 days at Leeds, the champions of England. He left to go to the [second tier] with Nottingham Forest and did okay there.

“Eddie Howe left Burnley to go to Bournemouth and he hasn’t done too badly. Rafa Benitez was managing the European Cup winners at the start of the season, now he is in the Championship. You just don’t know where your career will take you next.

“There were options [abroad] and the money was very good but I didn't fancy going. Before Bolton I had an offer from Saudi Arabia but you just don't know what you are walking into sometimes and you don't know how stable it will be, you don't know the culture and it takes a bit of time adapting. It did appeal if there had been nothing else on the horizon but I wanted to wait and see if anything else came up. When this opportunity came up I thought: “yeah, this feels right” and I wanted to do it.”

Lennon soon realised that the lack of opportunities that came his way when he chose to move on from Celtic after four years was perhaps more to do with the reputation of Scottish football, rather than any slight on his own abilities.

“I still think that is a problem,” he added. “My stock was quite high, not many managers in Scotland had been in the Champions League last 16. Even Gordon [Strachan], when he left, got the Middlesbrough job. You do all you can with Celtic, which is what I felt I had done after four years at Celtic, and Bolton came along. I thought the infrastructure was there [to do well] - but the owners stopped putting money in after two months and nobody told me!”

He is enthused by the challenge of leading Hibs into the Premiership after the problems latterly at Bolton. “People might say I kept them up one year but couldn’t maintain it [in the second]. Others might look at results and say “what’s happened there?” But there were other factors to it and I still believe I am a very good manager. I hope to prove that at Hibs.

“I like the fact that they are a big-city club, a capital one actually. I know the history and culture of the club. We’re not going from A to B, we’re trying to take them from B to A. It’s going to be tough and it won’t be pretty at times. There will be games we’ll have to scratch and we’ll have to do it a bit better than they did at times last year.

“I consider them one of the top five clubs in Scotland. I wouldn’t have gone below that. There are Premiership clubs who aren’t as big as Hibs and that wouldn’t have appealed to me.”